Pass Me a Bottle, Mister Jones.

2019 wasn't a great QB vintage

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The New York Giants took a $20 million header on Friday, but, you know, that’s how it goes. It’s a salary-cap hit — “dead money” in the chilling football parlance, meaning a team is taking a sizable charge against its salary cap for a player who no longer works for it.

They’re on the hook for the charge. They fired the guy.

Officially, the Giants released quarterback Daniel Jones, nearly six full seasons after drafting him with the 6th overall pick in 2019. With Jones as the primary QB, the football team amassed, let’s see here, hang tight while I do the math…one winning season out of the six. Jones’ record as a starter was 24-44-1 at the time of his release, which he requested and which the team granted. He’d been demoted to fourth string a few days earlier so that the team wouldn’t risk an injury-insurance payout for 2025.

Jones is being placed on waivers, but he won’t be claimed by another team because nobody wants to take on the contract. Once he has cleared waivers and can be signed for the league minimum salary (with the Giants picking up the rest), the QB will get snapped up by some organization that feels certain the Giants did the whole thing wrong.

Hoo boy — steep fall. In fairness to Jones, the Giants stink. In fairness to the Giants, picking quarterbacks is hard.

And in fairness to everybody, 2019 blew just about completely.

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If anything, the Daniel Jones story illustrates how much more heavily fate weighs in pro sports than we’d like to believe. For the most part, fans don’t care about the prevailing headwinds or who turned a profit the year before or how deep the talent pool is. (I’m one of them.) They want action.

Fair enough. But the reality is that, in the NFL, if you happen to go bust with a truly important draft pick, it can set you back years.

On balance, there is no more important pick than starting quarterback. And the year in which your franchise happens to have a really high pick — that is, the year it can grab one of the highest-rated college QBs coming into the NFL — can swing everything.

But that depends on the available stock, now, doesn’t it?

This is a long way around to one point: It’s not Jones’ fault that he was over-drafted. The New York Giants had the 6-pick in 2019; the Eli Manning era needed to end; and New York’s brain trust, almost all of which has since been fired, grabbed Jones out of Duke with that fateful draft slot.

Kyler Murray, from Oklahoma, went to the Arizona Cardinals with the first overall pick in the draft. After that, it was four straight defensive players, then Jones. After Jones, precisely three more quarterbacks went in the top 100 picks: Dwayne Haskins, Drew Lock and Will Grier.

Haskins was out of the league by 2021. Lock, now the Giants’ backup QB, is 9-14 as a starter in his NFL career. Grier is on his seventh team (counting the Cowboys twice), a practice squad player who has appeared in zero regular-season games since 2019.

You know what? Daniel Jones may have outperformed his own draft class.

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You can always argue that the Giants should’ve recognized the risk involved in that 2019 draft and steered clear, but we are all in hindsight now. Jones was a quality pick. Sixth was certainly a bit too high, but that’s where New York was drafting. Was there a QB farther down who would’ve been a superior choice? Gardner Minshew, maybe? (Jacksonville, pick No. 178.)

No, fate will play its hand. That’s real. The 2018 NFL draft included Baker Mayfield, Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Sam Darnold. The 2020 draft: Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Herbert, Jordan Love, Jalen Hurts.

The Giants picked sixth in 2019. It happens. Friday, they officially overrode that transaction. Their new starting quarterback, Tommy DeVito, aka Tommy Cutlets, is going to get the chance to prove he should be the guy.

Tommy Cutlets. Undrafted free agent, class of ‘23. So it goes.

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