General manager Joe Schoen said that the injury guarantee for the 2025 NFL season in Daniel Jones‘ contract will not influence the Giants‘ decision to play or sit the quarterback in the team’s final seven games of the season.
“We’re gonna evaluate everything the rest of the week and the decisions we make will be football decisions,” Schoen said at a Tuesday afternoon news conference during New York’s bye week after a 2-8 start to the season.
“It will be a football decision,” he continued. “Any decision we make moving forward as we evaluate the roster and what we’re doing for the final seven games will be football decisions.”
Head coach Brian Daboll was noncommittal on Monday about Jones’ status as the team’s starter for the rest of the year.
Contract language in the four-year, $160 million extension Jones signed ahead of the 2023 season after leading the Giants to a playoff berth and first-round win, guarantees next year’s salary in case of injury. With the contract containing no guaranteed salary for the remaining two seasons, opting to sit a healthy Jones for the season’s final games – similar to what Denver did with Russell Wilson a season ago – would allow them to walk away from the deal at the end of the year with a limited cap hit going forward.
Speaking of Wilson, the former Super Bowl champion who has appeared to resurrect his career in Pittsburgh this year after signing in free agency, visited the Giants this past offseason. Is not pursuing the veteran or another veteran quarterback more aggressively something Schoen regrets?
“Hmmm,” the GM said before shrugging his shoulders, shaking his head, and answering, “No.”
Does Schoen, who said he expects to return as GM next season, believe that where the Giants are with the quarterback situation – Jones starting with Drew Lock and Tommy DeVito deputizing him – is the best place they could be this season?
“With the options that were available [in free agency]? Yes,” he said. “When people are free agents and you go through the process, you do what you do. If it’s a good fit, then sometimes they come. If they’re not, you can’t make ‘em.
“You go through the process of free agency, whether it’s any position, and that’s how free agency works. Players decide where they want to go and what they want to do. But some of that stuff’s out of your control.”
When asked about the play of the starting quarterback, Schoen said that while he understood there is an intense focus on Jones individually, he pointed to the collective.
“It’s everybody. Everybody’s got a hand in this,” the GM said. “The quarterback, offensive coordinator, head coach, a lot of people like to point to those guys in general.
“Daniel has played some good games, and there’s some games where maybe he’d like to have some throws back or do things differently. But, in general, it’s not one individual or one situation that keeps occurring, unfortunately.”
When asked about Jones’ future with the franchise, Schoen pointed to the season’s remaining games as “what we’re focused on” and how they can “get better” during that time.
“We have 19 of 22 starters are under contract for next year, I believe it’s 41 players on the 53 [man active roster],” he said. “So there is a young nucleus of players here and some veterans that are gonna be together and we’re in a position [to] have some continuity.
“As this team grows together it’s important over these final seven weeks that a lot of these guys are gonna be together again next year and we’re finally in a position where there will be some continuity year over year and it’s important we find ways to win games… when it’s close.”
For the GM that is part of “changing the culture” in the building and expecting to “win games” and not sinking into a “here we go again” mentality.
When it comes to evaluating the performance of the head coach he hired ahead of the 2022 season, Schoen said that Daboll is “coming in every day, he’s working hard, the team is staying together.”
“He’s done a really good job, the guys are competing,” he continued. “Keeping the locker room together and we’re in these games, we’ve just got to find a way to finish it.”
Schoen said the Giants had been competitive in games this season, but have failed to win them – noting they have played in six one-score games but only managed to win one of them.
“We gotta find a way to get over the hump and make plays at critical times of the game whether it’s red zone or third down or getting off the field on defense, tackling on punt coverage and not allowing a punt return for a touchdown,” he said. “There’s a lot of things that we can look at and need to improve on.”
He added later: “We’re 17th in defense and we’re 23rd in offense, we’re middle of the pack. So there’s not a large margin for error when you go into some of these games, and it’s four to five plays a game that make the difference. And that’s what we gotta figure out, how to make the plays in critical moments to get over the hump.”
When pressed on a specific issue, Schoen went with the red zone.
“I would say red zone is important and we’re last in the league in red zone,” he said. “So we’re moving the ball and getting down there and, again, critical situations, and we’re 32nd in red zone we gotta find a way to put the ball in the end zone.”
At 2-8 on the season as the Giants hit their bye after falling in overtime to the lowly Carolina Panthers in Germany, Schoen said the team was “not where we want to be,” a phrase he repeated several times during his 26-minute news conference.
After holding a rare practice during the week off earlier in the day, the third-year GM said they are going to spend the remaining time off doing “self-evaluation on the roster, personnel and try to find solutions as we move forward.”
With the team heading for a second-straight losing season, does Schoen feel that he didn’t give the coaching staff enough to work with his roster construction? “No, I don’t think so,” the GM said.
So does that mean if it isn’t the players, it is the coaches?
“It’s not players, it’s not one individual that’d be an easy fix if we could say, ‘Hey, it’s this,’” Schoen said. “Everybody’s got their hand in this. Myself included, it starts with me.”
