Daniel Racz @Danny___Dimes 

Introduction

The 2019 draft brings up confusing memories for most Giants fans. The expectation was that the Giants were going to put together one final attempt to win with Eli Manning. The perceived weak QB class made pass rushers like Josh Allen and Brian Burns the top targets in most mock drafts. However, the Giants’ front office shocked the world when they took Duke quarterback Daniel Jones with the sixth pick in the draft. 

Jones’ first two years in the NFL have been a series of ups and downs. His rookie year featured extreme volatility. Though he posted 26 total touchdowns, he also gave the ball away 27 times (not good!). With a depleted weapons group in Jones’ sophomore year, he cut back on the turnovers at the expense of the big plays. That said, there are numerous reasons to expect Jones to cement himself as the face of the New York Football Giants.

Tireless Work Ethic

Daniel Jones may be the subject of memes and mockery on the internet, but he does not let that phase me. Between the 2019 and 2020 seasons, Jones loaded up on muscle intending to eliminate his fumbling issues. While he coughed up the ball eight times in 2020, that is much better than the fifteen lost fumbles from 2019. 

Multiple Giants have preached about Jones’ commitment to the game. The phrase “First guy in, last guy out” is frequently repeated when those in the know within the Giants’ organization are asked about Jones. Does this work ethic mean that Jones will take a leap and assert himself as a premier quarterback? Of course not. Nonetheless, it is a positive sign for a young quarterback like Daniel Jones.

Year Over Year Improvement

Fumbling is not the only area where Jones has progressed. While Daniel Jones posted better counting statistics during his rookie season, he had a better handle of the position his sophomore year. In the pocket, Jones was less susceptible to pressure, leading to fewer turnovers. This comfort also aided Jones as a passer. Despite a putrid offensive line, Jones managed to rank as NextGenStats’ number one graded deep passer in 2020. 

Daniel Jones also established himself as a force on the ground during his sophomore season. Jones went from 279 rushing yards his rookie year to 423 in 2020 despite playing the final few games on a bum leg. Jones should be expected to take another jump in 2021 with the return of Saquon Barkley too. 

Respectable Supporting Cast

For the first time in Daniel Jones’ short career, he has a dynamic group of weapons around him. Jones’ partner in crime in the backfield, all-pro running back Saquon Barkley, returns from his ACL injury. For better or for worse, most of the 2020 offensive line is coming back. At the wide receiver position, the Giants are as stacked as they have been in nearly a decade. Possession wide receiver Kenny Golladay signed with the Giants in free agency. The Giants also added tight end Kyle Rudolph and gadget wide receiver Kadarius Toney. The Giants now have big-bodied red-zone threats in Golladay and Rudolph. Though Toney is raw as a route runner, he is a solid athlete and phenomenal in the open field. Daniel Jones played with a 1990 Toyota for his first few years, and he has just been handed a Ferrari. 

The Giants also improved their defense via the additions of pass rusher Azeez Ojulari and cornerback Adoree’ Jackson. Jones will have the chance to lead a top offense, and Big Blue’s defense will ensure that the team will be competitive in every game. 

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By: Jake Rajala

Daniel Jones, who is now entering his third year in the league, has been through his fair share of ups and downs. Jones has proven to be an excellent deep passer, but he has had his moments of struggling to secure the football (36 career turnovers).

Heading into the 2021 season, Jones has been given his highest expectations thus far. Jones will be accompanied by wide receiver Kadarius Toney who was taken in the first round and prominent running back Saquon Barkley, who is coming off a season-ending injury. Undeniably, the Giants signal-caller is expected to take the next step.

There is a grand question that’s worth asking with regards to the first-round QB: Is 2021 a make-or-break season for him? I believe the answer is a clear NO. There are a few reasons why Jones is safe to be the Giants signal-caller for at least this season.

• There are other glaring holes on the roster

Joe Judge embodies not just an old school personality, but a fundamental approach to building a football squad. Judge has made it clear that he wants to build his team the right way from day one. He’s not a fan of splash signings or draft picks, but rather building a team around a QB, vs throwing a QB in the fire (that’s the other former NY coach).

With that said, the Giants are still a couple seasons away from building a competitive roster around any talented QB. The defense still needs to improve on the DL, they could use a couple more playmaking LBs, and there aren’t any young studs in the secondary outside of Jabril Peppers.

• Jones will be above the QBs available on the draft board

The Giants will likely unveil 6-10 wins in the 2021 season. So, the QB options in the draft will not be daunting, nor would it be worth for the team to cough up draft picks to move up the draft board. Let’s face it – Spencer Rattler and Sam Howell will be off the board when the Giants are on the clock.

Jones is surely above the QBs after the first two. More importantly, the experience of Jones will give him a huge advantage over the less sexy rookie signal callers.

• Jones will grow in year three with the Giants offense

I confidently see Jones taking steps of growth in 2021. The rookie Toney will be a quality piece for Jones, Evan Engram remains in the offense, and Saquon Barkley will return healthy. As Pro Football Focus well stated, Jones remains an underrated QB. 

Jones should record around 32+ passing TDs and 3,500+ passing yards next season. His rookie season was impressive with an abysmal offense (24 TDs in 13 games). Expect to witness a career season out of the third-year QB with the best cast he has had. If and when Jones puts up quality numbers, it will be enough to maintain his starting position in the Big Apple for beyond 2021.

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Daniel Jones has had an up-and-down career thus far as a quarterback. He started his career off with a promising rookie year where he threw 24 passing touchdowns in just 13 games and many people expected him to take the next step in year two. It didn’t happen, with Jones throwing for just 2943 passing yards and 11 passing touchdowns in 14 games. After such an up-and-down start to his career, a big question remains: what can we expect from Jones in year 3? Let’s dive into his profile in order to have a better idea of what Jones should bring to the table in his junior season.

Flashes Of Passing Upside

In Daniel Jones’ rookie year he threw 24 passing touchdowns in just 13 games. His 24 touchdown passes led all rookie quarterbacks during the 2019 NFL season and at the time it was the 4th-most passing touchdowns by a rookie in a single season in NFL history – with only Baker Mayfield (27 in 2018), Peyton Manning (26 in 1998) and Russell Wilson (26 in 2012) having more.

Then he took a step back in his sophomore year, throwing just 11 touchdowns in 14 games. But it wasn’t all bad. Jones flashed some serious potential with his deep ball during the 2020 NFL season.

Jones may not end up being the next Peyton Manning or Tom Brady as a passer, but he’s shown enough to prove that he can be a franchise quarterback – if he gets put in the right situation.

Rushing Ability

When you look at Daniel Jones, you will probably don’t think of him as being a strong runner…but he surprisingly is. Over the first 27 games of his career, Daniel Jones has carried the ball 110 times for 702 rushing yards and three rushing touchdowns. In fact, last year he ranked 7th among quarterbacks in rushing yards, finishing with 423 – more than players like Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, Ryan Tannehill, and Justin Herbert.

Jones having the ability to make plays with his legs makes the Giants offense much more difficult to defend and raises his ceiling as a quarterback.

Weapons Upgrade

The New York Giants clearly got sick of having Evan Engram as their number one receiving option in 2020, and decided to address it this offseason. They made a huge splash in free agency and signed former Detroit Lions wide receiver Kenny Golladay to a four-year, $72 million deal. Golladay has a couple of 1000+ receiving yard seasons under his belt and has been one of the best deep-threats in the league the past few seasons.

Golladay’s knack for being a deep-threat should mesh well with Daniel Jones, who completed 46.2% of his deep balls last year – 7th best in the NFL according to PlayerProfiler.

Just adding Kenny Golladay would be a substantial improvement on the Giants pass-catchers. But besides Golladay, the Giants drafted wide receiver Kadarius Toney in the 1st round of the 2021 NFL Draft. Toney flashed major yards after the catch skills during his college career and will make some big plays for the Giants in 2021. Having improved weapons will make Daniel Jones’ job much easier in 2021 and allow for him to put up much better numbers.

Another Year In The System

It is important to note that Daniel Jones had to learn an entirely new system last year after the New York Giants fired Pat Shurmur and brought in Joe Judge to be the team’s new head coach, who appointed former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett to be the team’s new offensive coordinator and play-caller.

It can take a while to learn a brand-new system in a normal offseason, but when you also factor in that the 2020 NFL offseason was not normal with the COVID-19 pandemic, it makes it even more difficult. Overall, we should expect Daniel Jones to feel more comfortable in Jason Garrett’s offense for the 2021 season and to improve in the passing yards and passing touchdowns department for next season.

Concerns

It wouldn’t be fair to talk about Jones without bringing up some of the major concerns surrounding his profile. The first of these major concerns is the New York Giants offensive line. The New York Giants offensive line ranked 31st in the league last year according to Pro Football Focus and Daniel Jones was sacked 45 times in just 14 games last year (3.21 per game). Inexperience played a large factor on the Giants line in 2020 with Andrew Thomas, Shane Lemieux, Nick Gates, Matt Peart, and Will Hernandez all having four seasons or less under their belts and being younger than 26 years old. Another year of experience should help these players out, as well as the Giants hiring a new offensive line coach Rob Sale to replace Marc Colombo.

The other major concern with Daniel Jones has been his turnover issues. In Daniel Jones’ first two seasons in the league, he’s thrown 22 interceptions and fumbled the ball 29 times. This is an absurd amount of turnover-worthy plays and raises some major concerns about his ability to take care of the football. But while this is a major concern, it is important to note that Jones improved in this area from his rookie to sophomore seasons – seeing his percentage of times where he was intercepted on a pass attempt drop from 2.6% to 2.2% and seeing his fumbles go down from 18 in his rookie year (13 games) to 11 in his sophomore season (14 games). He’s clearly putting the work in to improve in this year which makes his outlook a little more optimistic.

Conclusion

Daniel Jones has a lot of great tools in his skillset. He’s flashed the talent, posting a 78.4 PFF grade in 2020. He’s become more familiar with Jason Garrett’s offense with another year under his belt. He’s gotten the receiving weapons he has so desperately needed in Kenny Golladay and Kadarius Toney. Now it’s just a matter of him putting it all together and living up to his billing as the New York Giants franchise quarterback. Jones is on the cusp of a breakout season and could be a major sleeper QB in the NFC this year.

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Daniel Racz @Danny___Dimes

Introduction

When the New York Giants selected Daniel Jones with the sixth pick of the 2019 draft, they incited an uproar in the Tri-State Area. With top pass-rush prospects like Josh Allen and Brian Burns left on the board, what did the Giants’ front office see in the Duke signal-caller? For starters, they saw someone who looked like a long lost relative of franchise legend Eli Manning. While Eli does have more charisma, they both stay out of the limelight and seem to have great relationships with their teammates. On the field, Jones’s flashes of high-end play are met with equally highlight-worthy boneheaded mistakes. In his rookie season, Daniel Jones had a 4.1% big-time throw rate and a 5.9% turnover worthy throw rate, per PFF. Jones also had a 5.2% touchdown percentage on his pass attempts in his rookie year. While PFF’s advanced statistics are not released for the 2020 season, it was clear that Jason Garrett’s offense made Jones a different player. Instead of emphasizing Jones’s gunslinger style that produced highs and lows in 2019, 2020 brought a more mellow quarterback. Jones threw for a touchdown on only 2.5% of his 2020 pass attempts and 25% fewer turnovers. While Danny Dimes did not take the sophomore jump that many expected, is he worth the investment in Dynasty?

Why you should acquire Daniel Jones

The best argument for buying Daniel Jones is his Konami code upside. To those unfamiliar, the Konami code is the bonus of having quarterbacks that produce 20% or more of their fantasy points from rushing. Any quarterback can have a statistically solid passing season, but that does not translate to fantasy success in the same way that a season from a below-average but mobile quarterback posts. 26.8% of Jones’s 2020 production came on the ground, and he did that with only one rushing touchdown and a hamstring injury that limited him late in the season. At the quarterback position, Konami quarterbacks are dominating in recent years. From 2015-2018, 25% of the top 12 fantasy quarterbacks qualified as Konami code QBs. In 2019, that figure jumped to 42%, and in 2020, 58% of the top 12 passers were Konami QBs. The trend is clear: to dominate as a fantasy football quarterback utilizing your legs is becoming necessary. While Jones has not flourished as a passer, his rushing ability provides the potential for future top 12 finishes.

Another reason to acquire Daniel Jones is the likely addition of talent to the Big Blue offense in the 2020 offseason. Jones’s passing upside is undoubtedly due for an uptick with the addition of both a playmaker at either the wide receiver or tight end position and the return of Saquon Barkley. The Giants will target wide receivers that hit the open market, but I expect many to get franchise tagged, leaving few options. If Kenny Golladay, Chris Godwin, and Allen Robinson all receive the tag–which is not an unreasonable expectation–the Giants will turn to the draft to add a weapon. The key names to keep track of are Kyle Pitts, JaMarr Chase, Jaylen Waddle, Rashod Bateman, and Devonta Smith. Any of these stars will improve the Giants’ 29th ranked passing attack.

A final reason to target Daniel Jones comes in the likely long term security that he will see. The jury is still out on whether or not Danny deserves another contract. Still, the Giants organization is not a fan of turnover at prominent roster positions for better and for worse. Owner John Mara has already proclaimed that running back Saquon Barkley will be a Giant for a long time, and the team has committed to Daniel Jones for the 2021 season already. Historically, the Giants have kept their quarterbacks for many years, even if it was not in their best interests to do so. While some teams have frequent turnover, the Giants, with quarterbacks like Eli Manning, Phil Simms, and Kerry Collins, have preferred consistency. Unless the New York Giants regress to the point where they sever ties with Dave Gettleman and finish with a top draft pick, I have the utmost confidence that Daniel Jones will be rewarded with a second contract, even if he should not be offered that contract.  

Why You Should Be Skeptical of Daniel Jones

When a player is given the nickname “Danny Dimes,” it is reasonable to expect that they earned it making great throws in regular-season games for his team. However, Jones was dubbed Danny Dimes in his first preseason games after he lit up opposing team’s backups and led the Giants to an undefeated 2019 preseason. Jones’s first two years in the league have demonstrated a pattern of bad decisions and inaccurate passes. Jones plays almost like he has multiple personality disorder. He goes from throwing a 30-yard dime to take the lead in a close game to missing an open wideout in a game-winning scenario. Betting on Jones to stop making stupid mistakes while retaining his big-play ability seems foolish to many at this point. 

Daniel Jones’s injury history is another reason to be skeptical of his long-term prospects. Jones has not completed a full 16 game season yet. In 2019 he missed games late in the season due to a high ankle sprain. This season he missed a game (and was limited once he came back) by various leg injuries. Jones’s penchant for injuries is a cause for concern. If you are optimistic that Jones will progress as a passer and that the Garrett offense will be more effective, you should still be wary of Jones’s injury history when including him in a transaction. 

Speaking of Garrett’s offense, in 2020, it was a trainwreck. The Giants’ offense failed to modernize, as they used pre-snap motion at a bottom-five rate. Much of the offense’s failures must be put on Jones. Jones’s passer rating in 2020 was in the bottom ten in the National Football League and ranked next to Alex Smith and Cam Newton. His 2020 passer rating of 80 was a step back from his passer rating of 87 in 2019. If you are confident that Jones’s struggles in 2020 were due to Garrett and that Garrett will not be with the Giants for much longer. 

The Verdict

From the moment Daniel Jones stepped on the gridiron against Tampa Bay in week 3 of the 2019 season, he had the “it factor.” Jones drove the Giants down the field and took the lead with less than one minute left, giving every Giants fan a taste of what the future could hold. However, Daniel also has given many examples that support why he is nothing more than a career backup. Daniel Jones is as risky as they come. The best way I can summarize Daniel Jones is through an office quote from Will Ferrel’s Deangelo Vickers. “I can’t sit here and tell you [Daniel’s] gonna be a success. I can’t sit here and tell you that he’s even the best man for the job. [(Daniel) looks awkward] But I can say this: He’s got potential. Sure. You know, I always say: go big, or go home. You go with This guy, you could be making the biggest mistake of your life, OR, the biggest, Good decision of your life. It’s either gonna be the best thing you ever did, or the worst thing you ever did.” Jones is a mystery. I firmly believe that his range of outcomes includes maturing into a  perennial QB1. However, it is necessary to evaluate the chance at the high-end outcome occurring. Jones needs better weapons, a competent offensive coordinator, and to become an accurate, healthy, and consistent passer. I would suggest that Jones has a 20% chance of reaching this potential, with a solid chance at becoming a fantasy qb2 for 5-10 more years, while also having a decent chance at becoming irrelevant within three years. 

In summation, I believe that investing in Daniel Jones is a smart decision. The quarterbacks that are drafted around and ahead of him (Derek Carr, Teddy B, Kirk, and Goff) all lack the rushing upside that Jones has. I am of the personal belief that if you are drafting a qb2 and thinking in the long term, it is best to hope for the best range of outcome to occur (See Josh Allen). While Daniel Jones has a lot of work to do to reach his full potential, the path to fantasy greatness is evident. 

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