If you want to know why the Giants and Jets are who they are and where they are, you start with where both Sam Darnold and Daniel Jones are, at least now.
They are two of the best quarterbacks in the league, just playing somewhere else. The NFL is still a league, you’ve probably heard this, where contending teams act as if they need star quarterbacks — and young ones, if possible — the way the rest of us need oxygen.
Jones is doing what he’s doing as Indiana Jones for the Colts after being let go by the Giants. Darnold is doing for the Seahawks what he did for the Vikings before they let him go the way the Jets once did. Darnold showed what he could do for the Vikings when someone finally coached him up properly. Now he’s doing the same for the Seahawks, who have one of the biggest games of the regular season against the Rams on Sunday.
Jones? He is running — passing — hot for Shane Steichen in Indianapolis, a coach who didn’t do badly with Jalen Hurts when Steichen was offensive coordinator with the Eagles. Jones is showing what he can do behind the kind of offensive line he never had with the Giants — who still don’t have much of one — and being able to hand the ball off to someone like Jonathan Taylor, who’s in the same MVP conversation that Jones and Darnold are currently in.
I know what you’re thinking:
If only Daniel Jones could have had a running back like Taylor when he was still with the Giants.
Oh, wait. There was that Saquon Barkley guy in the same backfield with him in Jersey, wasn’t there? Barkley was the guy the Giants let walk out the door last year, before he helped run the Eagles all the way to another Lombardi Trophy. So he was one of the best players in the league on one of the best teams in the league after leaving a New York team. Perhaps you’re starting to see a pattern here.
You know what our teams still lead the league in? Decisions like this.
By the way? This isn’t about what fans thought or the media thought about Darnold and Danny Dimes when they were still here. This is about something else, now that we’re seeing the best of both Darnold and Jones: Somebody else bringing out the best in them, and surrounding them with enough talent to win.
The Giants had that one season with Jones when they made the playoffs. But even then, Jones wasn’t close to being the player then that he is now in Indianapolis, throwing just 15 touchdown passes for Brian Daboll that year. You know the rest of the story. Jones got hurt and when he came back he looked like a shot player in Daboll’s offense and then he was gone.
Incidentally? The Vikings let Jones walk out the door, same as they did Darnold after last season. No wonder they’ve spent chunks of this season looking like we should be calling them the New York Vikings.
We know by now that developing quarterbacks in the NFL isn’t a straight line. But the Jets in retrospect look like the drunkest guys at the end of the bar for giving up on Darnold as quickly as they did. That means general manager Joe Douglas and it means ownership, too, you bet. In Darnold’s first 26 starts with the Jets — first with Todd Bowles and with Jeremy Bates as offensive coordinator, then with Adam Gase as the HC of the NYJ — Darnold somehow still produced a record of 11-15, something that would have them carrying him around the room on their shoulders at Florham Park if he were still around.
In his first season under Gase, Darnold missed three games after the opener with mononucleosis. But his first game back after that, he threw for 338 yards and two touchdowns and the Jets beat the Cowboys. After that, of course, came the Monday Night Football game against Bill Belichick (who feasted on kid quarterbacks). The Jets were down 24-0 at halftime, lost 33-0, and Darnold spoke of seeing “ghosts” afterward. In so many ways, the people in charge never got over that.
But somehow that year, the kid came back and the Jets won six of their last eight games, something for which they’d get a parade up Route 3 for doing now. In that stretch, Darnold threw 13 TD passes against four picks, had two games with a QB Rating of 100 and two more where he scored a 98. The next year he got thrown out there with a lousy, stripped-down Jets team in the COVID season and before long Zach Wilson — good grief — was Joe Douglas’ heart’s desire.
Now he’s got an offensive line around him in Seattle and, if it’s not as good as the Colts’ line behind which Jones is playing, it’s still pretty damn good, and so much better than what Darnold ever had with the Jets and a whole lot better than what Jones ever had with the Giants.
Please remember what Giants co-owner John Mara said after last season mercifully ended when he announced he was retaining Daboll and Joe Schoen:
“[The Giants’ offensive line play] is ridiculous, and it’s a continuing source of frustration for me. It’s time to get it fixed.”
It’s not. We see how little they’ve gotten from Schoen’s guy Evan Neal. Maybe it will all look a lot better for Jaxson Dart when he is out of concussion protocol and trying to stay in one piece. We may then find out if the Giants can do better by him than they ultimately did by Jones. Mara also once said “we’ve done everything possible to screw [Jones] up.” He was right about that. You hope his general manager — if he stays around — can do better by Dart than he did by Jones.
Whatever anybody thought about him when the Giants told him to get good and lost in the middle of last season, we can all see what he can do now that he has somebody like Steichen coaching him. Not just slinging it around the way he has so far this season, but handing the ball off to a total star like Taylor. If only Jones had somebody. … Sorry. We already did that.
There are other reasons why the Giants and Jets have fallen down again. Maybe the Giants can get up on Sunday against a struggling Packers team, even with Jameis Winston taking Dart’s place. Or maybe they stay down the rest of the way the way they always do.
What has happened to our teams hasn’t happened in a vacuum. It is still almost Biblical that two young quarterbacks the Giants and Jets basically gave away for a bag of balls are now playing like this. In other places. It’s because they were both in the wrong place — Jersey — at the wrong time. This time.
CLASE IS TOTALLY CLUELESS, BRIAN STILL HOMER HAPPY & A SALUTE TO BROOKSIE …
Emmanuel Clase, Guardians relief pitcher and allegedly the king of the prop bet, will get his chance to prove this is all one big misunderstanding.
But if the case against him is good, and he did everything with those wild pitches the feds say he did, then the real verdict on him is already in:
He is dumber than the seams on a baseball.
Mostly for thinking he’d never get caught.
It’s a tough call, but I’m rooting for LSU against Brian Kelly.
I’m probably swimming against the current on this one, but I’m sort of enjoying watching the Jets run that single-wing offense.
Brian Cashman keeps saying that most of the time in the postseason the team that hits the most home runs usually advances.
Just not always when it comes to Brian’s team.
In the 2019 American League Championship Series against the Astros, the Yankees hit 10 home runs to eight for the Astros.
Lost.
In the 2024 World Series, the Yankees hit 9 home runs to the Dodgers’ 7.
Lost.
In their 2018 division series against the Red Sox, the Yankees hit the same number of homers in a 4-game series — four apiece for the Sox and Yankees — and lost that series, three games to one.
The Yankees do hit a ton of home runs, you bet.
And only the Angels and Rockies struck out more than they did last season.
One more fun fact:
The Blue Jays struck out 24 times in this year’s division series against the Yankees.
The Yankees struck out 37 times.
David Stearns keeps talking about “run prevention,” as if that is going to fix everything with the Mets.
But if he lets Pete Alonso — who knocked in the second most runs in baseball last season — walk out the door, Stearns must have a budding Keith Hernandez ready to walk in.
Finally:
We lost a gent of this business, and a giant of his sport, when we lost the Post’s Larry Brooks much too soon this week to cancer.
Larry and I came into the newspaper business in New York around the same time, and I can tell you that I have so many wonderful memories of him from that time.
I’ve said this before, but when I did end up hanging around his sport — I always thought of it that way, as his sport — my first move was to get with Brooksie.
And before long back in the early ’80s, we were chasing around from Nassau Coliseum to Edmonton watching the Islanders win four Stanley Cups in a row.
And of all the amazing work he would do later with the Rangers, all the way to the end, was he ever made for that Islanders team, and for that locker room, where they trusted him as much as they trusted each other.
Take the body, take the body, take the body, he wrote one day, back in the day, like he was the one coaching them.
Man, he was something.
