From Charlotte to New York: Giants QB Daniel Jones blossoms in the NFL playoffs
.JPG "New York Giants quarterback Daniel Jones (8) stands on the field before an NFL wildcard playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings, Sunday, Jan. 15, 2023, in Minneapolis. Jones grew up in Charlotte and played quarterback for Charlotte Latin in high school and Duke in college.")
There was a time in his life when Daniel Jones dreamed of quarterbacking the Carolina Panthers in NFL games just like the one he will play in this weekend.
Instead, the Charlotte native will lead the New York Giants Saturday night in a divisional playoff game at Philadelphia (8:15 p.m., FOX), trying to improve on a playoff debut last week in which he was absolutely spectacular.
Jones became the first quarterback in NFL postseason history with at least 300 passing yards, two passing touchdowns, and 70 rushing yards in a single game a week ago, when he directed the Giants’ 31-24 road upset at Minnesota. Now the fourth-year NFL QB who starred at Charlotte Latin in high school and Duke in college is about to play the second playoff game of his career. This time the task is even greater: Jones will face an Eagles team that led the NFL in sacks, swept the Giants in the regular season and is coming off a bye because it earned the NFC’s No. 1 seed.
“This is where you want to be,” Jones said in a news conference this week.
It’s also where the Jones family wants to be, and so they will converge in Philadelphia on Saturday to watch Daniel.
That’s not quite as easy a decision as it sounds. Philadelphia is a notoriously difficult place for fans of opposing teams, enough so that when the Panthers played the NFC championship there in the 2003 postseason a number of Carolina players told their wives to stay at home in Charlotte in front of the TV.
“We’ve gone to games in Philadelphia twice before and never had a problem,” Steve Jones, Daniel’s father, said in a phone interview. “Nobody up there knows who we are.”
Daniel Jones is the second-oldest of the four extremely athletic Jones kids. Ruthie Jones was the starting goalkeeper for Duke’s women’s soccer team. Becca Jones played field hockey at Davidson. Bates Jones played basketball for both Davidson and Duke (Bates is now a graduate assistant for the Blue Devils and is trying to work out a way to squeeze in a trip to Philadelphia in the middle of Duke’s basketball schedule).
Like Buffalo’s Josh Allen, another lightly-recruited QB in these NFL playoffs, Jones was nowhere close to being the apple of every college coach’s eye. He started at quarterback at Charlotte Latin for three years — and went to as many Panthers’ home games as he could with his family on Sundays. But he was only rated a two-star recruit by 247Sports at the time, and less than that by some other recruiting services.
It took Jones’ legendary high school head coach, Larry McNulty, asking friend and Duke head coach David Cutcliffe to take a look at Jones’ film to get him a scholarship. This stands in contrast to Will Grier, who is slightly older than Jones, also from the Charlotte area and was wanted by everyone (Grier also made it to the NFL, as a backup, but is 0-2 in the only two starts he’s had).
“Daniel was a classic late bloomer,” McNulty told me once. “He was probably 5-10 and 148 pounds as a freshman, but he just kept growing (to 6-5 and 230 pounds today). Daniel also sustained a broken bone in his throwing wrist at a critical time for recruiting, and that knocked him out of a lot of the recruiting showcases and combines. But once Cutcliffe saw his film, he said, ‘Don’t send it off to anyone else. We want him.’ ”
At Duke, one of Jones’ stellar achievements was going 3-0 in the rivalry game vs. North Carolina. In one of those, he threw for 361 yards and ran for 186, setting numerous records with 547 total yards.
Drafted No. 6 overall by the Giants and former Panthers GM Dave Gettleman in 2019, Jones suffered the slings and arrows from the New York press after he went 12-25 as a starter in his first three seasons. It didn’t help that Jones was replacing Eli Manning, a beloved two-time Super Bowl MVP.
But this season the Giants have come together. Running back Saquon Barkley is healthy and has become a difference-maker again. Head coach Brian Daboll and offensive coordinator Mike Kafka — now a candidate for the Panthers’ head-coaching job — have brought energy and invention to a team playing in football’s toughest division.
Jones has ridden the wave and made several big splashes of his own. He also has cut down on mistakes and led the NFL in interception percentage in 2022, throwing only five all season.
Monetarily, Jones picked the right time to shine. The Giants didn’t pick up his fifth-year option in the spring for $22.4 million, which turned out to be an expensive mistake.
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Jones, only 25, will now be an unrestricted free agent after this season ends, although New York has a franchise tag that it could use to ensure it doesn’t lose him. In my opinion the most likely scenario is that Jones ends up signing an extension with the Giants, and the second-most likely is a franchise tag, with the third-most likely being Jones going somewhere else. But either way, he’s about to make a lot more than $22 million per year.
Other scenarios are possible, of course, and I’ve long thought one in which Jones somehow comes home to quarterback the Panthers would be ideal. But the problem is that franchise tag, which the Giants can use to protect their interests, as any team would when its 25-year-old quarterback has started to figure the NFL out and a team has coalesced behind him.
“The Giants have a confident team — cohesive, hungry and, for the most part, healthy,” Steve Jones said. “What’s going on up there isn’t about Daniel. It’s about that group. He’s kept working at it, sure, but the team around him has also gotten stronger.”
As for Daniel Jones, he isn’t thinking about the future beyond Saturday.
“What’s ahead of us now,” the quarterback said, “is all that matters.”
This story was originally published January 20, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
