The course of Giants history may have changed Sunday amid a fake handoff to Matt Breida. Daniel Jones attempted to survey the Raiders’ defense and only caught a glimpse of Maxx Crosby screaming toward him like a hawk at a pet store. Jones tried and failed to evade him. Unfortunately for Jones, that maneuver led to the ominous buckle of his left knee that is painfully familiar to anyone who follows the NFL.
We don’t yet know the official extent of Jones’s injury (though multiple outlets reported Sunday night that the Giants “fear” Jones has torn his ACL, which, don’t we all wake up every morning “fearing” being hit by a bus or having a heart attack?), but it’s not hard to sense when an era has met its end. Jones may be the starting quarterback for the Giants in name at various points over the next few months and, maybe we will allow ourselves to believe there will be another summer of the five-year starter running the first-team offense at training camp to come. But it is almost impossible to imagine that Jones’s injury, just after he returned from a neck issue that had kept him out for several weeks, was not one of those cataclysmic moments that will inch the Giants closer to drafting his successor.
This is a horrible, untimely version of the truth. To be clear, we are not blaming Jones for being “injury prone.” We are not calling out some lack of toughness. Indeed, toughness, according to those who have evaluated Jones, has always been the quarterback’s most endearing trait, and will be the reason he has a long career in the NFL should he so choose. But Sunday illustrated the kind of Catch-22 the Giants have found themselves in, and the reason that signing Jones to a longer-term extension was always a complicated matter.
