The one problem with the New York Giants’ remarkable resurgence

That seemed perfectly reasonable. Entering his fourth season, Jones hadn’t played particularly well and the Giants were among the NFL’s worst teams every year with him under centre. Nobody was shocked when new general manager Joe Schoen and coach Brian Daboll declined to pick up the option on Jones’s contract for 2023.

Every week of this season, that decision is looking costlier and costlier. But the Giants aren’t exactly upset about it. That’s because Jones is leading the NFL’s most shocking run of the year.

The Giants are 6-1 after yet another win, this time a 23-17 triumph over the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday. This one may have been Jones’s most impressive yet: He threw for more than 200 yards and ran for over 100 — just the 29th such performance in the Super Bowl era.

It was a taste of what once made Jones an intriguing prospect. He can throw. He can run. And now he can go and get paid.

NFL teams have the capacity to keep their first-round picks under contract for five years, with the fifth year coming on a team option. It’s an opportunity to either lock in a promising player for one more year — or cut bait if he’s not panning out. The catch is that teams need to make that call for year five after a player’s third season, and the option is fully guaranteed.

With a franchise-caliber quarterback, exercising that option is a no-brainer. Jones’s was worth about $22 million, which is relative pennies at a position where players are now striking deals worth over $40 million annually.

Jones, though, had done little to prove he should be the Giants’ quarterback of the future. The team passed on his option this off-season. In parliamentary terms, it was the football version of a vote of no confidence in their own quarterback.

“That was certainly out of my control, out of my hands, and that’s the business part of it,” Jones said about it during the off-season. “It is what it is.”

What nobody seemingly expected was for Jones to serve up a tailgate-sized serving of crow.

The Giants weren’t the only ones who lacked belief in Jones. Prognosticators expected the team to be bad enough again that they would be in position to pick early enough in next year’s NFL draft to potentially select a prized quarterback prospect. The expectation from oddsmakers was that the Giants would win about seven games.

They’re now one win away from that just seven weeks into the season.

There are plenty of reasons for the Giants’ unexpectedly hot start. The early performance of Daboll, previously the offensive co-ordinator for the Buffalo Bills, in his first stint as a head coach has earned rave reviews. Saquon Barkley, after a couple of years dashed by injury, has re-emerged as a wrecking ball at running back. Other young players have stepped up to build an increasingly solid core. (Their sceptics might also note that all of their wins have been within one score, so they’re not too far away from being 0-7.)

But perhaps the biggest development for the club has been Jones’s growth. He has made big plays when needed — the win Sunday marked the team’s fourth comeback in the fourth quarter already this season. Even more importantly, though, he has cut down on the critical mistakes that held him back during his first few years in the league.

As a rookie in 2019, Jones led the NFL in fumbles. That remained a problem for the next couple of seasons, while he completed a below average percentage of his passes and struggled to consistently move the offence down the field.

While he hasn’t produced gaudy passing totals in 2022, he has demonstrated significant improvement in key areas: He has fumbled only twice, his completion percentage (67%) is a career high, and his three-to-one touchdown-to-interception ratio would be his best yet. He’s also on track to smash his career high in rushing yards and has already rushed for more scores than in any other season.

“He just tries to play within the things we ask him to do,” Daboll said last week.

How Jones plays over the rest of this season, and whether he keeps this up, could have enormous financial implications for him and the Giants. They could still retain him with the franchise tag, a one year deal that for quarterbacks last year cost nearly $30 million and is expected to rise next season. The alternative, if they want to keep him, would be trying to lock him up with a longer deal — an increasingly expensive proposition in the modern NFL.

So it could turn out to be an expensive miscalculation by the Giants, not that they’re likely upset with the outcome. That’s because Jones has helped make them the biggest surprise in football.

– Wall Street Journal