It’s hard not to be impressed by New York Giants quarterback Tommy DeVito. Not just in how he seems to be the living embodiment of a 1980s New Jersey stereotype — the fully-formed love child of a background Scorcese character and a star of Jersey Shore — but by the way he’s stepped into a starting role in the NFL.
Through four starts, DeVito is 3-1 with the Giants. He’s grown from the player who was badly overmatched after stepping onto the field in place of Tyrod Taylor in Week 8 (seven pass attempts, -1 passing yard) to someone capable of leading his team to game-winning drive in primetime against the Green Bay Packers. He’s stepped into the low-risk, take-off-running offense head coach Brian Daboll built to revive Daniel Jones’ career and executed that game plan better than anyone outside the DeVito family could have hoped.
But here’s the thing. It probably won’t last.
DeVito isn’t the first unexpected star to emerge from the ether and look like a legit quarterback after being pressed into the starting lineup. There are several examples from the past that fit this bill, from Trevor Siemian to Nick Mullen to Gardner Minshew. Heck, he isn’t even the first guy to do it this year; Joshua Dobbs pulled this off with two different teams in 2023, the Arizona Cardinals and, then, the Minnesota Vikings.
The problem is, none of those guys could quite sustain the hype they built with those ravishing starts. So let’s talk about what comes next for Tommy Cutlets, how unlikely stars have performed in the past and what his best case scenario probably is.
The honeymoon stage wears off quickly
NFL coordinators are gathering tape on DeVito, combing it for flaws. The good news for the Giants is they’re built to weather this storm, in so much as an already leaky ship can. DeVito’s passing game is very similar to Daniel Jones, the injured starter who guided this team to a Wild Card victory last winter.
Like Jones, DeVito’s passing diet consists mostly of short, high-percentage passes. Jones’ average throw distance in his resurgent 2022 was 6.4 yards downfield. DeVito clocks in at 7.1
New York is also happy to let its quarterbacks ditch plays that aren’t unfolding as planned and take off with the ball. Jones scrambled 53 times for 382 yards in last year’s unexpected winning campaign. DeVito hasn’t been quite as effective overall, but just gashed the Green Bay Packers for 71 vital yards. Those two elements are extremely useful when you’ve got poor blocking and underwhelming receivers — two resources the Giants have in spades. Those short routes and a useful run game create space for wideouts downfield, and when you pick your shots correctly you get a nice little passing chart that looks like this:
The question is whether DeVito can continue executing this simple, low-risk game plan. History is not kind to similar players in his situation.
Here’s a sampling of some guys who’ve emerged from their spot as overlooked draft prospects — picked in the fourth round or later — who went on to exceed expectations after being thrust into starting roles early in their careers (sorry, Josh Dobbs). It’s not exhaustive, but it covers quarterbacks since 2013 who were briefly beacons of light in a hopeless situation. We’ll take a brief look at how they started through their first four games with significant action (roughly where DeVito was before Week 14) and how they performed.
This list includes former hopeful starters like Case Keenum, Zach Mettenberger, Trevor Siemian and Mike White. There’s regression across the board for pretty much everyone but Brock Purdy. Let’s exclude him for now, since we’ll be talking about his special situation later.
Otherwise, only Minshew recorded a higher expected points added (EPA, which measures the value a player brings vs. what an average player would be expected to produce) per play after he’d logged a month’s worth of game tape. Only White had a higher passer rating, and his was pretty low to begin with.
The good news is DeVito is in line to buck this trend. His turnover-averse play was on full display Monday night and should make him more viable than the most forgettable names on this list. The bad news is he isn’t exactly starting from a place of statistical confidence. Even without his awful debut, the rookie’s -0.229 EPA/play was the second-worst in the NFL in Weeks 10-13, better than only New York Jets disaster Tim Boyle.
So a regression is coming. It may be a gentle slope. It may be a cliff. Can his college performance help tell us how steep that dropoff will be?
DeVito's college resume suggests he's useful and accurate but not a star
There is of course the possibility DeVito continues to shine through growing pains and develops into a reliable NFL starter. The knee-jerk reaction would be to compare him to other overlooked college quarterbacks who shined once they found an NFL opportunity.
Tony Romo was an undrafted free agent buried on the depth chart behind a shaky veteran like DeVito was and he went on to harass the Giants for a decade. Dak Prescott emerged from the fourth round to take up his mantle in Dallas. Russell Wilson transferred from an ACC program to the Big Ten, slipped through the cracks at the NFL Draft (for two rounds) then emerged as an unexpected starter as a rookie and wound up winning a Super Bowl.
But those guys brought very different track records to the NFL. Romo was named to the College Football Hall of Fame for his work at Eastern Illinois, even if he was overlooked. Prescott finished in the top 10 in Heisman Trophy voting as a junior and was even better as a senior for two of the best Mississippi State teams of the decade. Wilson was a first-team All-ACC AND All-Big Ten honoree.
DeVito, on the other hand, only had one full season as Syracuse’s starting quarterback and was replaced in 2021 by Garrett Schrader. But hey, that’s not damning; Wilson was ushered out the door at North Carolina State by a coach who wanted to hand the program over to Mike Glennon.
But DeVito was just sort of a guy at Illinois. Accurate, risk-averse and ultimately low impact. There was little in his game to suggest he could continue to be that effective against a new, more athletic class of defenders in the NFL.
His game thrived on shorter passes — in large part thanks to an average wideout corps and the presence of a future NFL running back in Chase Brown. He ranked seventh in the FBS in completion percentage (69.6 percent) but just 64th in yards per attempt (7.2).
He faced three top 15 defenses with the Illini in 2022 (Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin). He went 2-1, and didn’t throw an interception in any of those contests, which is great! He also threw for 387 total yards and failed to record a passing touchdown, which is less great (he did run for three touchdowns against the Badgers, which helped usher Paul Chryst onto greener pastures).
Who you were in college won’t define who you are as a pro, but it gives us a useful indicator of who you might be. And DeVito, to his credit, looks very much like the useful, take-what’s-given player he was at Syracuse and Illinois. But that guy had a definite ceiling, and there’s little to suggest a Giants team with a bunch of replacement level wide receivers and a cheesecloth offensive line is going to give him the room he needs to renovate.
The Giants can't follow the gold standard of "emergency-QB-turned-star," but could get great value regardless
There’s nothing more that Giants fans, players and personnel would like than for DeVito to be the New York’s Brock Purdy. But Purdy was the center of the best football in Iowa State history. DeVito was a useful cog on some pretty-OK Syracuse and Illinois teams.
Purdy landed in an offense that, like the Giants, prioritizes low-risk, short-range passes to minimize the impact of a shaky quarterback. But the San Francisco quarterback gets to throw to Deebo Samuel, Brandon Aiyuk and George Kittle while he grows into his NFL role. DeVito has Wan’Dale Robinson, Darius Slayton and Daniel Bellinger.
There’s a more viable path to Gardner Minshew’s level of not-quite-stardom. The former fifth round pick was thrust into the starting lineup by injury as a rookie and built a similar bubble of attention thanks to his better-than-expected play and magnetic personality. While he only went 2-3 in his first five games, he also recorded a 9:1 touchdown:interception in that stretch and looked like a potential steal.
That’s not how things played out. Minshew backslid, lost and regained his starting job for a bad Jacksonville Jaguars team and eventually turned into the high-value backup we know and love today. Both players are useful runners who avoided turnovers and executed well in the short game — they even each have the same average target distance as rookies at 7.1 yards downfield.
That’s likely the best case scenario for DeVito. The deck is stacked against New York’s rookie sensation. He’s gambling against a house with a huge edge.
And maybe he keeps winning! It would be great if he did, and the Giants are invested in a system to keep a flawed passer afloat despite the lack of talent around him (thanks, Daniel Jones!). History suggests regression is coming — but hell, he’s got nothing to lose. He might as well keep gambling and see if his hot streak makes him a legend.
