Is Daniel Jones Facing Last Hurrah as Giants’ Starting Quarterback?

From a mathematical perspective, the New York Giants 2024 playoff hopes are still alive. Still, at 2-7 at the midway mark, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who is optimistic that a season-saving miracle is about to happen anytime soon. 

Although they are favored in this weekend’s game against the Carolina Panthers, the Giants will have to decide the quarterback position sooner rather than later.

Starter Daniel Jones's four-year, $160 million contract, which he signed after the 2022 season, includes a $23 million injury guarantee in Year 3, which will kick in next spring if he does not pass a physical by the start of the new league year. 

While Jones and the Giants have been lucky so far this season regarding his health–this despite his hard-nosed style of play, especially as a runner and the increasing number of hits he’s taken when dropping back to pass–the Giants continue to tempt fate with that injury guarantee.

According to Over the Cap, the Giants’ current salary cap space for next year is $48.153 million, a fluid figure. If they were to move on from Jones after this season and treat the transaction as a standard cut (pre-June 1), the remainder of Jones’s prorated signing bonus ($22.210 million) would accelerate into 2025 as dead money. 

That would reduce the Giants’ available cap space by $11.105 million (this is because Year 3 of his four-year prorated signing bonus is already accounted for in 2025’s accounting). 

And while that reduction in itself wouldn’t be crippling to the team’s cap, where it could be a problem is if the Giants intend to release Jones after this season, their savings of $19.395 million if Jones is treated as a standard (pre-June 1) transaction and is cut before the start of the 2025 league year would be sharply reduced.

Head coach Brian Daboll has insisted that Jones gives the team the best chance to win. However, it can be argued that when Jones needed to rise above the Xs and Os to push his team over the finish line, he didn’t do so enough to erase the “game manager” label from his name.

There is another factor to consider in this decision, albeit one that is unlikely but which still needs to be discussed.

If the Giants are indeed planning to move on from Jones after this year, might they try to trade him to another team? The odds of that happening aren’t high, at least as of this writing. 

Still, if that is part of their thought process, it would behoove them to keep Jones out of harm’s way so that such a trade might be made possible.

To be clear, Jones is not the sole reason the Giants’ 2024 season has been such a disappointment. But after six seasons of mediocre and inconsistent play, it is certainly fair to wonder how much longer this team can continue spinning its wheels with a quarterback who seems to have the same issues in his game now that he had in college.

Thus if the Giants are going to bench Jones, the time to do it is over the bye, which the Giants have after their game this weekend in Germany against the Panthers, especially if they lose the game. This will allow the coaches optimal time to make any tweaks for whichever of Drew Lock and Tommy DeVito they’re turning to. 

If the Giants and Jones win, that might complicate the timing of the decision, as the Giants would then have a home game against the Bucs coming out of the bye followed by a short week before they visit the Cowboys on Thanksgiving. 

While it’s certainly possible Daboll will stick with Jones until the team is officially eliminated from postseason contention, the risk involved can significantly impact the franchise’s immediate future.