Former Giants quarterback Daniel Jones is still getting his feet week on the Vikings’ practice squad. He has the best of both worlds, staying in the game as a member of a team while available to sign with another team’s 53-man roster, should the need arise.
The goal for now is to get him up to speed.
“He’s a talented guy,” coach Kevin O’Connell told reporters on Friday, via Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com, “big, strong, and throws it really well. . . . We’ve just challenged him to absorb all the information and using that as a barometer of where we want to take our teaching moving forward as we systematically build him up, and he’s very smart.”
O’Connell added that it’s helpful to have Jones’s perspective, after so many weeks of the current structure.
“He looks like a guy, when he throws a football, that’s played a lot of football and in the pocket, his feel,” O’Connell said. “So, it’s been fun to have him here. I think he’s doing a good job. Little by little, getting more comfortable with what we do around here.”
One thing they need to do is have a veteran ready to go in 2025, if/when Sam Darnold parlays an unexpectedly strong 2024 season into a starting job elsewhere. Daniel Jones could be next year’s Darnold, ready to go if/when J.J. McCarthy isn’t.
