The New York Giants were such a hot mess at the end of the 2021 season that the Mara family called the only people who had enough experience dealing with such dysfunction: the dudes who fixed the Buffalo Bills. In January 2022, the Giants poached the Buffalo brain trust and tapped Bills assistant GM Joe Schoen and offensive coordinator Brian Daboll to be their general manager and head coach, respectively. At Schoen’s introductory press conference, he laid out how they spun the Bills from bumbling embarrassment to perennial powerhouse.
“In Buffalo, it didn’t happen overnight,” Schoen said. “We went 9-7 (our first year in 2017). … Year two, we were 6-10 and it took until year three where we finally made the playoffs. Again, it’s going to take time. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
But it did feel like it happened overnight. In Daboll and Schoen’s first season, the Giants went 9-7-1, earned a playoff berth, notched a convincing postseason win over the Minnesota Vikings, and received a NFL Coach of the Year award for Daboll. That offseason, the team awarded Daniel Jones a contract extension, paying him franchise-quarterback money at $40 million per year. But now that overnight celebration has turned into a hangover.
On Sunday night, the lowly 1-4 Giants—who were just outclassed by the Miami Dolphins last week—are scheduled to play the Bills, the model on which these Giants are based. These same Bills throttled those Dolphins just two weeks ago, and are favored by more than two touchdowns over the G-Men. The Giants are a bigger underdog than the winless Carolina Panthers, who are playing the Dolphins on Sunday.
This Bills-Giants game figures to be more than just an ass-kicking. Seeing how Daboll and Schoen’s team fares against their old Buffalo brethren will be a natural time for everyone to reflect on how the Giants are doing. Barring a massive upset, this game will lead to questions that follow the Giants for years. Is Daboll a flash in the pan? Is the Giants’ rebuild already cooked? And why on earth are they paying Daniel Jones $40 million per year?
Now is probably a good point to note that I am a Giants fan. I am sorry that the Giants were scheduled to play in four primetime games in the first six weeks. (We don’t like it any more than you do.) I’d also like to serve as the real life dog in the meme drinking coffee in a burning house saying “This is fine.” For everything going wrong with the Giants this season—which is a lot—Daboll and Jones are not the problem. Jones is not the reason the Giants are failing. New York’s rebuild is still on track, even if it doesn’t feel that way or won’t look that way on Sunday night. And despite how much of a punching bag it becomes, Jones’s contract is not ideal—but it is not a huge problem either. This is fine.
I acknowledge the Giants’ 2023 season so far has been an abomination. The team is 1-4. They are last in the NFC East. The team cannot block, pass, or score. The Giants have allowed 30 sacks through five games, which not only leads the NFL but is the most for any team since the NFL began tracking sacks in 1982 except for the expansion-era Houston Texans. The Giants offense has the sixth-fewest first-half points (19) this far into a season in the last 20 years. By adjusted net yards per attempt—which includes the value of sacks, interceptions, and touchdowns as if they were passing yardage—New York’s average pass attempt is gaining the third-lowest yardage (2.2) since the NFL passing revolution began in 2012. That is worth repeating. New York’s average pass is gaining just over two yards of offensive value. Two yards is six feet. The Giants’ passing game is so bad they could barely throw to the bottom of their own grave.
For most teams, the Giants losing 24-3 to Seattle while giving up 11 sacks on Monday Night Football in Week 4 would be one of the worst losses in memory. But for the Giants, it wasn’t even their worst loss in prime time this season. In Week 1, the Giants were rocked by Dallas, 40-0, in one of the worst losses in franchise history. It was, as ESPN’s Bill Barnwell pointed out, worse than the 2020 Broncos-Saints game that featured a practice squad receiver playing quarterback:
Again, this Giants season is an abomination. But this abomination cannot be laid solely at Jones’s feet, mostly because Jones is usually the one lying at his own feet. There is only so much Jones can do with the league’s worst pass protection. If we look at offensive linemen who have played at least 200 snaps this season, here is where the Giants offensive linemen rank by Pro Football Focus grade.
LT Josh Ezeudu (59th out of 62 tackles)
LG Mark Glowinski (52nd out of 58 guards)
C Ben Bredeson (19th out of 30 centers)
RG Marcus McKethan (55th out of 58 guards)
RT Evan Neal (61st out of 62 tackles)
With this kind of blocking, New York needs pass catchers who can get open immediately. Instead, they have tight end Darren Waller, who has not been integrated well into the offense amid the chaos. At wide receiver, the Giants are led by Darius Slayton, who was expected to be released last August, former Bills practice squadder Isaiah Hodgins, and Wan’Dale Robinson, a 5-foot-8 second-year pro who just recovered from an ACL tear.
That might sound like a lot of excuses for a quarterback who the Giants have committed to a four-year contract for $160 million. But here’s the thing: that’s not really the commitment the Giants made. Jones’s deal is guaranteed for two years and $81 million. His contract is more of a promise ring than an engagement ring. The Giants can easily move on from Jones after the 2024 season. They’d take on a dead cap charge of just $22 million in that case—or about 8 percent of the cap. The Eagles, by comparison, spent about 16 percent of their cap on the dead money left over from the Carson Wentz deal.
It’s fair to wonder whether the Giants will keep Jones beyond 2024, considering that paying Jones clearly wasn’t the plan when Schoen and Daboll took over. In April of 2022, Schoen and Daboll had to decide whether they wanted to pick up Jones’s fifth-year option, which would have guaranteed the quarterback roughly $20 million in 2023. Given that, at that point, Jones was one of the most turnover-prone quarterbacks in NFL history and had led a Jason Garrett-designed offense that was dead last in touchdowns over the previous two seasons, it made sense to turn it down. But then Jones played well last season. He drastically cut down on his turnover issues and Daboll found ways to make Jones an effective dual-threat QB with his runs and accurate short passing. The Giants made the playoffs and Jones stuck them in QB purgatory: too good to be replaced (New York had the 24th overall pick in the draft), but probably not good enough to win a Super Bowl.
The easy analysis is to say the Giants should not have paid Jones the $40 million per year. But what was the alternative? Derek Carr is 32 years old and signed with the Saints in free agency for $150 million over four years. Whether or not it is delusional, I promise you, you won’t find 10 Giants fans in New York who would have taken Carr over Jones this offseason.
New York could have gone the cheap veteran route and just handed the offense over to Jacoby Brissett or journeyman Tyrod Taylor, Jones’s backup. But that would have been a bold move for a team coming off a playoff berth. And it is easy to say a team should do that when it is someone else’s team. But try telling your fanbase that you’re letting the QB who just won a playoff game hit free agency. Top-end quarterbacks get paid because they are elite, but average quarterbacks get paid because nobody wants to be left out of musical chairs. The market is set by scarcity as much as talent.
One of the arguments against overpaying a mediocre quarterback like Jones is that an expensive QB contract can limit a team’s ability to pay other veterans. This isn’t a problem for the Giants because they don’t have many veterans worth paying. Who else on this roster is worth big money? Last season, defensive tackle Dexter Lawrence and offensive tackle Andrew Thomas were revelations who looked like cornerstone pieces. The Giants signed both to long-term contracts this offseason. The main casualty of signing Jones may be running back Saquon Barkley, but given the state of the running back market, investing in Barkley long-term may not have been in the team’s plans anyway.
Beyond those players, the Giants are not exactly brimming with talent that is about to escape for financial reasons. Perhaps the Giants could spend more in free agency without Jones. But how many rebuilding teams turn things around by blowing tons of money in free agency? Thus far signing Jones has not come at the expense or opportunity cost of anything significant for this team.
The true mistake the Giants made was declining Jones’s fifth-year option for 2023, locking them into this problem. But few of the people saying Jones is bad now were clamoring for him to get $20 million guaranteed for the 2023 season back when that decision had to be made in April 2022. And so the Giants paid Jones the tax of taking the team four steps forward in 2022. Now in 2023 they are taking two steps back. Just as Schoen said might happen. The key is the Giants need to keep developing players as the season goes on.
The Giants are the youngest team in the NFL using snap-weighted age. Through Week 5, the Giants have the youngest offensive line, the youngest linebackers, and the youngest secondary in the league. The Giants started two rookies at cornerback in Week 1, the first time an NFL team had done that in 15 years. Suddenly, giving up 30 sacks in five games makes more sense. The Giants are making rookie mistakes because, well, this team has a lot of rookies. If the Giants play their way out of a top pick, it probably means Jones and/or the youth around him is developing and playing their way out of being a punchline.
But if the Giants suck the rest of this season and wind up with a top-10 pick, they could be in range to draft one of the plethora of quality quarterbacks in the 2024 draft. Even if they don’t get the top one or two picks and miss out on Caleb Williams or Drake Maye, the Giants could be in range for one of the plenty of other passers in one of the deepest drafts ever at quarterback. That rookie passer could sit for a year behind Jones, whose $35.5 million 2024 salary is already guaranteed, and the team could painlessly move on from Jones and hand over the reins in 2025.
It’s not ideal to be talking about 2025 in Week 5 of the 2023 season. But the Giants were locked into being unable to replace Jones until 2024 as soon as they beat Minnesota in the playoffs last season. The playoff win took them out of the running for a new QB in 2023, preventing them from targeting a QB until 2024. A new quarterback in 2024 means no more contention until 2025. By re-signing Jones as the starter, Schoen and Daboll preserved both their ability to draft a quarterback and their own butts by keeping Jones under contract in case they can’t find his replacement.
Jones may not be the guy the Giants end up with long-term. Right now, he’s just spending the night. And as Schoen said, this was never going to be an overnight fix. No matter how bad the Giants perform against the Bills, just remember: this is fine.
