Jaxson Dart remained consistent about his place on the Giants‘ depth chart after Thursday’s first career NFL start.
He continued to defer to Russell Wilson as the team’s regular-season starter while making it clear that Dart will be ready when his time comes.
“I feel like whenever my number is called, I’m going to go out there and I am going to play my game and ball,” Dart said after the Giants closed the preseason an undefeated 3-0. “That’s my mindset any time I touch the field. Obviously, Russ is the starter, and he’s going to be amazing. He’s had such a great camp and has played at an elite level.
“So my job is just [to] be the best teammate and be ready whenever it is, but I’m excited for Russ and what he’s going to do this year,” he added. “I just want this team to win. Whatever my role is for that to happen, I’m going to do that to the best of my ability.”
The clock now starts on how long it will take for GM Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll to turn to their first-round pick at quarterback this season.
The Giants’ first game is Sept. 7 at Washington. They follow that with a Sept. 14 road trip to Dallas. Then they return home for a primetime Sept. 21 home opener against the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs and a Sept. 28 visit from the L.A. Chargers.
Wilson took most of the Giants’ first-team reps this spring and summer, but Daboll has steadily increased Dart’s responsibilities in practices and games this August. And Dart has handled all of those new challenges in stride.
Not only has he made plays. Dart made clear that the NFL game — in the preseason, anyway — isn’t too big for him. He clearly belonged.
And he emerged from his rookie training camp feeling as confident as ever that he could dominate a game, even at the highest level.
“When I step on the field, I expect to play at a high level,” he said. “To be honest, I have the confidence that I feel like I’m going to be the best on the field every time I touch it. I kind of just expect to play [well]. That’s just the standard that I have for myself. So if you don’t play to that standard, it’s really frustrating. You just try to be consistent and play to your level.”
Dart’s intensity showed itself more than ever on Thursday when he faced the most adversity he’s encountered so far as a pro.
The rookie fumbled and got removed from the game by the NFL’s concussion spotter when he chose to take on Patriots defenders in the open field rather than slide during a first quarter scramble. And Dart spent a long time on the sideline with a frustrated look on his face and a towel over his head.
There were two reasons he was upset: he hates turning the ball over, and he was ticked off that the officials took him out of the game.
“First of all, just shouldn’t have fumbled,” Dart said. “Never been taken out of a game for getting the air knocked out of me, so that was a first. But I quite honestly felt like I could split the [defenders] when I saw the open field. Honestly, in this situation, I didn’t feel like I was in too much of a threat to get a big hit on me.”
Dart was mistaken.
He told the referee he was OK, but the officials wouldn’t hear it. So Dart was videoed telling the trainers to hurry up and evaluate him as they put up the blue medical tent to check him out — while Jameis Winston got to enter the game and finish the drive with a touchdown pass to Jalin Hyatt.
“Yeah, I didn’t understand why I got [taken] off the field,” Dart said. “I was just wanting to get back out there and finish the drive. Everybody was walking over. I’m like, ‘Let’s go. I want to get back out there.’”
The rookie quarterback wouldn’t give in that he’d made the wrong decision not sliding, though. His competitive nature wouldn’t allow for him to back down.
“I think it’s situation based,” Dart said. “I felt like I could make a better play on it and thought I could split them. Feel like if I just break a tackle then I’m gone. There are situations where things are super congested and you’re going to take a big shot, obviously you want to get down. I thought it was an open field, and I could have made a play.”
So it took his closest teammate, fourth-string QB Tommy DeVito, to offer Dart some direct advice.
“Slide,” DeVito said he told Dart. “Dude, you don’t need to be taking these unnecessary hits. There are certain times in the game, situations, yes, I get it, be a ball player. Times like that, just go down.”
DeVito admitted, though, that reining Dart in is “a work in progress.”
“Trying to help him out a little bit,” DeVito said. “Seems like the type that’s going to learn from personal experience, so hopefully he will take that insight from today and get better from there. But I knew he was okay.”
Daboll also said “we’d like him to slide,” but the head coach also sounded a lot like Dart in defending the quarterback’s traits and instincts despite the play’s result.
“I would say in this particular game is probably a good time to slide, a third preseason game,” he said. “There is a time and a place. You’d like to take as few hits as you can, but I like Jaxson’s competitiveness, his toughness. You got to make the right decision. Those are split-second decisions, so I trust him… I’ll never take his competitiveness away.”
This was another example of Daboll struggling to contain his enthusiasm for his young quarterback.
The head coach also pointed his finger at several drops by Giants receivers, namely Jalin Hyatt and Beaux Collins, for hurting Dart’s statistics in the game.
“I mean, every ball should have been complete, so… or all but one maybe,” the coach said.
Daboll’s affinity for Dart and his game are undeniable. So how realistic is it that the Ole Miss product is going to sit on the Giants’ bench behind Wilson for an extended period of time?
With every day that passes, it feels less and less like Dart is going to be standing on the sideline with a clipboard — and more and more like he’ll soon be the one running the show in games that count.
GIANTS ROSTER CUTS
The Giants cut eight players on Friday as they trim down to a 53-man roster by Tuesday’s 4 p.m. deadline: wide receivers Zach Pascal, Montrell Washington and Jordan Bly; linebackers Dyontae Johnson and K.J. Cloyd; corner O’Donnell Fortune and offensive linemen Jimmy Morrissey and Jaison Williams.
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