A defining draft for the New York Giants

Joe Schoen & Brian Daboll face a do-or-die 2025. They've got a chance to draft the best player in the draft and hunt down their quarterback of the future tonight. We analyze in full.

Apr 24, 2025

ORCHARD PARK, NY — Josh Allen made his ceremonious return to base camp this week. Another long trudge back to January Football begins in earnest. The Buffalo Bills quarterback admits this team’s latest playoff heartbreak — a 32-29 loss in the AFC Championship — is still on his mind. All the “shoulda, coulda, wouldas.”

His Bills came within inches (centimeters?) of reaching the Super Bowl in New Orleans.

Now, they must start all… over… again. Now, they’ve got no choice but to repurpose this crushing loss to the Kansas City Chiefs into fuel.

And yet? Allen is also the reigning MVP. Allen also signed a six-year, $330 million contract extension.

On Tuesday, he looked like a quarterback sitting on the quarterback throne.

He’s engaged to a Hollywood superstar. The NFL Honors’ contrived red-carpet event is amateur hour. Two weeks ago, Allen joined Hailee Steinfeld on the red carpet. (“It's a fantastic movie,” he said, “so go watch it.”) He’s got access to the decision-makers. With players arriving a little later this spring for voluntary workouts, Allen hasn’t had a chance to sit down with scouts quite as much but his voice will be heard. (“In Beane we trust.”) He’s wearing a hat that reads, “Everybody Eats.” Two words that he brings to life in this offense. Allen is the triggerman who finds the open receiver. Everyone should get used to the captain repeating these words again. Often. (“That’s not just a one-year thing. That’s what this offense is.”)

Best of all, Allen deleted all social media from his phone. It’s been liberating. Allen is loving his new “ignorance is bliss” mindset. No longer does he catch himself scrolling and scrolling… even if it comes at a cost. He had no clue the Bills signed old friend Tre’Davious White. Upon seeing the cornerback inside the locker room on Tuesday, Allen admitted he needed to ask an equipment manager: “Is that Tre White over there?”

The mood is forever hopeful at One Bills Drive as long as Josh Allen is the quarterback.

This franchise will stay in the Super Bowl mix every year he’s healthy.

And back on April 26, 2018, the most optimistic of Bills fans would’ve considered this heresy. Not reality. Few locally were in the mood for a quarterback who completed 56 percent of his passes at Wyoming because for three long months Allen became the draft industrial complex’s No. 1 villain. Ugly footage from his final season in Laramie was spliced up and ridiculed.

When I asked Allen what people missed, he smiled.

“Bills didn’t miss anything,” he said.

Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll were in this building for this seminal moment in organization history. The preference of Allen over UCLA’s Josh Rosen and the QB’s subsequent development into a superstar propelled both individuals to the New York Giants. Three seasons in… uh, yeah. They’re still searching for a quarterback to call their own. After finally giving up on Daniel Jones — analyzed here — the Giants took a run at Matthew Stafford before doubling up on a pair of vets we’ve seen plenty of the last decade-plus: Russell Wilson and Jameis Winston.

The 2025 NFL Draft kicks off tonight, and the most fascinating team is a no-brainer: the New York Giants.

There’s a very good chance they emerge with the best player, period, in Penn State’s Abdul Carter. Hey, that’s great. They also took a spectacular talent last season in LSU wide receiver Malik Nabers. But nobody in Giants is whistling while they work. Schoen. Daboll. Everybody’s got to be honest with themselves — New York needs a long-term answer at quarterback.

Scouts may not view this as a quarterback-rich draft. These Giants can still thread a needle for the man they covet. As they should.

Nothing is guaranteed for anyone beyond the 2025 season.

Schoen and Daboll owe it to themselves to draft and develop their own handpicked prospect.

So… who is that quarterback? Let’s examine.

When a quarterback takes you to the playoffs and wins a road playoff game, I get paying that quarterback. Signing up for more Daniel Jones was a reasonable bet. If he showed this much progress in Year 1 of Daboll’s complex scheme with Daboll’s intense coaching — throwing to Isaiah Hodgins as his No. 1 — it was fair to think his arrow would only peak. And peak.

The moment the Giants pulled the lever on the two-year escape hatch, all parties involved surely conducted a full postmortem.

There are many reasons Jones finally combusted: the torn ACL in ’23, Evan Neal busting out and, of course, Jones’ obvious limitations as a passer. These Giants kept waiting… and waiting… and waiting for the lights to turn on, and they never did. In the end, who was head coach, who was calling plays, who was running routes was all irrelevant. Jones is a quarterback who reads the field at a very basic level. Oh, he’d tease. He’d truck a linebacker and get some of us thinking he had another gear.

Alas, he did not.

But the No. 1 miscalculation by the Giants’ brass was Jones’ wiring.

One reason these Giants loved the steely Duke grad so much was what appealed to Dave Gettleman once upon a time: how he handled the blinding NYC spotlight. Unlike the Jets’ quarterback last season, Jones refused to paint himself the victim publicly — admirable. Still, one high-ranking team source told Go Long that the contract might’ve changed Jones. This source cited the fact that Jones dismissed his own extension as “only” a two-year deal. Baffling considering he’d make a minimum $80 million. He also was clearly pissed off seeing the team flirting with 2024 quarterback prospects on Hard Knocks. (“It ticks you off a little bit to see,” Jones told Go Long during camp. “It’s not fun.”)

All emotions he could’ve harnessed in a positive way.

Instead, a dearth of confidence dulled Jones’ game. Instead, he looked a quarterback wound too tight last season. The same scene replayed: Nabers breaks open… the quarterback’s eyes are directed at Nabers… Jones wastes a precious half-second before throwing the ball… incomplete. Cut to an exasperated Daboll on the sideline. Cut to the punt team trotting onto the field. The very best quarterbacks play free. There’s a looseness to their game and an intangible swagger to their 24/7 approach. When this brand of quarterback senses doubt in their employer — be it on Page 7 of a contract or an HBO show — it feeds motivation and confidence in the best F U I’ll Show You manner.

There’s no better example of this style than the quarterback Daboll mentored in Buffalo.

Nobody wanted anything to do with Allen out of high school. After JUCO, he emailed 1,000+ colleges and received one offer. Stiff-arming defensive ends. Leaping linebackers. Rocketing fastballs 40+ yards downfield. Fearlessness is forever central to his play style, and Daboll knew how to maximize that fearlessness. Knew which buttons to push. Their personalities matched. When the coach screamed in his face, Allen never flinched. They grew closer. They bonded. Off the field, Bills teammates en masse described this relationship as something special that would’ve produced multiple Super Bowls in Western New York.

Daboll and Jones, in contrast, were oil and water. Thinking back, you could visibly see the difference in training camp. When Jones threw touchdowns, Daboll was animated. Quarterbacks coach Shea Tierney slapped the QB on the backside. There was essentially no emotion out of Jones — every time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Stoicism can work. But here, it was a bad fit. This is a coach accustomed to a quarterback who morphs an NFL field into his personal backyard. Right down to personalized handshakes for all of his wide receivers and locker room hijinks.

Sadly, it does not appear as if Josh Allen 2.0 is available this spring. But nail the right personality for this head coach and the Giants can absolutely plant a seed of hope. Because while this year’s QB class is littered with very real concerns, there’s spunk to the group. Attitude. The Giants might’ve played their way out of Cam Ward range with a 45-33 win over Indianapolis, but they can still find their quarterback.

Let’s start with the man who’ll be the story of the night: Shedeur Sanders.

Todd McShay, who’s plugged in, suggested that the personnel side in New York (i.e. Schoen) is open to selecting Sanders at No. 3, while the coaching staff (i.e. Daboll) does not want to take the Colorado quarterback this high. No prospect’s more polarizing. One of the quarterback minds we’ve grown to respect as much as any around here believes the Giants should pounce. David Yost has sent the likes of Jordan Love and Justin Herbert to the pros and he sees hints of potential greatness in Sanders.

So many successful collegiate quarterbacks benefit from a clean set of circumstances. Five-star linemen insulate you from chaos. That was not case for Sanders. At Boulder, Yost said, he needed to escape trouble “over and over and over again” to make plays. Sanders wasn’t improvising simply to improvise, either, and this longtime college coach believes such playmaking translates to the pros.

In Sanders — similar to Patrick Mahomes at Texas Tech and Allen at Wyoming — he saw a quarterback make the spectacular play when required.

To recap, here’s Yost from the GL Pod:

“I tell the quarterbacks all the time, ‘Your job is to fix the mistakes of the guys around you.’ Because guess what? The right guard is going to get beat sometimes. It’s not a hot situation, it’s not a blitz situation. But heck, the right guard gets edged and all of a sudden you got to slide to your left to make a throw. We try to do drills for those things, but you’ve got to be able to do that. And just watching what Shedeur was able to do at Colorado at a really high level — over and over and over again, when everybody knew they were throwing the ball almost every snap. I mean, you’d watch that game and he found ways to make play after play after play to keep ‘em in games and the win games. So I’ve been way impressed by him, and I think a lot of what he does will show up in the NFL.
“So he’s the one guy that’s stood out to me because he’s had to deal with the tougher things, which if you watch Pat Mahomes, he was playing at Texas Tech and they were not a great football team at the time. Coach Kingsbury was there. They did some unbelievable things on offense, but he was a lot of times was behind or having to make plays. He wasn’t playing with a lead too often, and he was able to make them a successful team as best they could. And then a lot of that stuff carried over when he got there. Josh Allen had to be the best player on the field every game for Wyoming. And guess what, that’s what he’s used to doing. Where some of those other guys are playing, you’re playing at some of those blue-chip programs and they’ve got offensive linemen getting drafted too, or a bunch of ‘em getting drafted, and you’re like, ‘OK, their lives were a little easier, a little cleaner than some of those other guys.’”

I asked Yost about the Giants’ predicament at No. 3 overall.

“If I didn’t have a quarterback, I would draft Shedeur Sanders.”

On the macro level, Colorado had one winning season in 17 years before the Sanders family high-stepped into town. This program was an abomination. Shedeur Sanders is familiar with the pressure it takes to resurrect a bad team. Joel Klatt was the starting quarterback the last time anyone cared about Colorado football. He assures that the state of affairs at his alma mater has been wretched. And for all the hype around the coach who asks for everyone to call him “Prime,” one fact is as true in college football as it is in the NFL.

Quarterbacks are most responsible for such an extreme turnaround.

“First off, it’s just confidence,” Klatt said in our chat. “All of a sudden, he walked into the locker room and he was like, ‘Hey guys, we’re going to be good.’ And everyone’s like, ‘What do you mean? We haven’t been good for 20 years?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I don’t care. I don’t care.’ So there is an air of confidence that I think that you have to have as a quarterback. In-particular, if you’re going into that setting to turn a culture around, you’re going to have to believe when there’s not a lot of belief around you.”

As a player? Klatt called Sanders “equal parts surgeon and magician,” a combination of both “Joe Montana” and “Fran Tarkenton.” Klatt believes Sanders throws the most catchable ball in the country — adding that he did it both behind a “paper-thin” offensive line and without any semblance of a running game.

“He understands what it’s like to be back there,” Klatt said, “and be the reason that you’re either going to win or lose because he was certainly in that position last year and even more so the year before.”

Of course, there’s baggage.

Baggage that may scare off those in the Giants building.

The NFL itself shared damning reports one day before the draft. One assistant coach told NFL Media’s Tom Pelissero that Sanders supplied the worst formal interview he’s ever seen. “He’s so entitled,” the source said. “He takes unnecessary sacks. He never plays on time. He has horrible body language. He blames teammates. ... But the biggest thing is, he’s not that good.” Added one longtime exec: “It didn’t go great in our interview. He wants to dictate what he’s going to do and what’s best for him. He makes you feel small.”

Enough red flags to nudge the Giants toward Carter at No. 3.

Beefing up a position of strength has worked wonders before. In both 2006 (Mathias Kiwanuka) and 2010 (Jason Pierre-Paul), the Giants added first-round pass rushers to talented defensive lines and won a Super Bowl one year later. Of course, those editions of the Giants were also piloted by an ice-in-veins Eli Manning each postseason run.

Which immediately boomerangs us back to the quarterback position as the primary focus of this draft for Big Blue. Take Carter, and the real work begins.

Many scouts do liken this 2025 class to the lackluster 2013 and 2022 groups. Not sure I’d go to that extreme personally. But even if that’s the case, those awful drafts produced Geno Smith and Brock Purdy. Both starters are living proof that a quarterback can excel in the right situation. NFL teams themselves need to shoulder the responsibility for maximizing a 22-year-old quarterback. Even if this Russ-Jameis arrangement helps New York win a few more games in the present — even if their jobs are on the line this fall — Schoen and Daboll must sell a plan for the future. Especially in the same division as Jalen Hurts, Jayden Daniels and Dak Prescott.

They’ll need to see the best in a quarterback prospect and make it work.

Alabama’s Jalen Milroe is (exceptionally) raw as a passer and that could prove to be a fatal flaw in the pros. Far too many balls cartoonishly skipped into the ankles of Alabama receivers. One scout flat-out told Go Long that Milroe cannot play quarterback. (“No feel for the game. He can’t throw. Not accurate at all.”) But he also may possess a superpower, and we’ve seen how a singular superpower can change a franchise. It’s no exaggeration to suggest Milroe is the most dangerous rushing quarterback to go pro since Lamar Jackson. There’s immense horsepower to Milroe’s overall game — he’s a raging bull in the open field and he can chuck it deep.

If Giants covet a ball of clay, Milroe is a fascinating project.

Teammates rave about his leadership, too. Will Anderson Jr., Alabama’s star edge rusher, brought up Milroe’s leadership style unprompted when we sat down last season. He’ll never forget the freshman QB’s ability to connect with teammates 1 on 1. It’s something he’s trying to do himself in Houston.

Louisville’s Tyler Shough (pronounced “Shuck”) spent seven years in college. He turns 26 years old this September. He’s so old he backed up Herbert once upon a time. Shough was in the same recruiting class as Trevor Lawrence, a pro who’s already signed a second contract. But he surely developed a mental toughness through several season-ending injuries to reach this point. He’s athletic. He’s mature. He’s got a stronger arm than Sanders. A team could see a pro-ready starter in this 6-foot-5, 219-pounder.

By now, everyone in East Rutherford, N.J., has made their voice known.

Daboll. Tierney.

Schoen. His top lieutenants.

It’d be wise for the Giants to do everything in their power to get the quarterback Daboll loves best. Yes, it was ugly with Jones. Very ugly. The offensive ineptitude bled off your screen. But the No. 1 weapon this organization has in-house is one of the greatest teachers of the position, a coach who’s been around Brett Favre, Tom Brady, Jalen Hurts and, of course, Allen. If Daboll sees a special something in a prospect, Schoen should do everything he can hunt that prospect down after drafting Carter.

And there’s smoke building around one prospect: Ole Miss quarterback Jaxson Dart.

Both McShay and Connor Hughes of SNY have cited Dart as a realistic trade-up option for the Giants, and I buy it. I can absolutely see why Daboll would be drawn to Dart — the sturdy frame, the athleticism, the strong arm and, yes, that confidence Jones lacked.

His strut is a wildly sharp contrast to Jones. He’ll trash-talk opponents, he’ll play with fire. Genuine moxie fuels his play style. On tape, Daboll must’ve loved seeing a quarterback fearlessly rip the ball deep. Last season, Dart completed 69.3 percent of his passes for 4,279 yards, averaging 10.8 yards per attempt — all SEC highs. Lane Kiffin’s offense was QB-friendly, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Dart is incapable to making 1-2-3 progressions. And why can’t Daboll create a QB-friendly environment himself? There’s a very good chance the head coach believes he can scheme up Nabers deep for Dart. You can bet these coaches tested his intelligence when they sat down.

One scout believes Dart is the most athletic quarterback in the draft. Dart can roll left and flip his hips around to make tough downfield throws. It doesn’t hurt that Dart has developed a relationship with fellow Ole Miss Rebel Eli Manning. And unlike quarterbacks past that teams talked themselves into — Mitchell Trubisky, Trey Lance, Anthony Richardson — he’s experienced. Dart went 28-10 as a starter at Ole Miss. It’s not like teams are trying to concoct an image of what Dart could become. They’ve seen it.

On The Pivot, Kiffin was asked about why Dart’s a franchise guy.

He pointed to his leadership. He might as well be describing Buffalo’s Allen, a player teammates universally love because he’s one of them.

“This guy is unique,” the Ole Miss coach said. “When I talk about how you impact people? Jaxson has that, and it’s not transactional. He takes the defensive players to dinner. He just wants to get to know you. He can tell when somebody’s down. He spends time with them. He’s a phenomenal leader. Not a bunch of rah-rah, because he’s going to get to know you and he’s going to help you when you need help. He does it for my son. Takes him to lunch and stuff like that—not because I’m the head coach. It’s just who he is. You’re going to get somebody that the team’s going to play really hard for. He’s going to invest in them. And he’s a great player on top of that. And a phenomenal competitor.”

If there’s a perfect scenario for the Giants tonight, this is may be it: Abdul Carter at No. 3, Jaxson Dart on a trade up.

They’ll have company. The New Orleans Saints and Pittsburgh Steelers need quarterbacks, and don’t discount Sean McVay selecting Dart at No. 26. Perspective matters, too. Winning a few games with Tommy DeVito cost the Giants both Jayden Daniels and Drake Maye last year, then Drew Lock just had to throw for 309 yards and four touchdowns against the Colts in Week 17. Goodbye No. 1 pick, goodbye Cam Ward.

A year ago, New York did not blow away the New England Patriots with an offer for the No. 3 pick.

Whoever they covet today — Sanders? Dart? Milroe? Shough? Someone else? — Schoen and Daboll must do everything possible to get that player. If it defies the Jimmy Johnson trade chart, who cares? Get your guy. Take it from one of the GM’s best friends in Buffalo, his old pickup basketball foe.

Brandon Beane put it perfectly at the Combine a year ago.

The Bills GM brought up the fact that he drew criticism for how much it cost to trade up for Allen.

“And I’m like, ‘Well if he doesn’t work out I’m not going to be be here anyway and if he does work out, nobody’s going give a shit.’”

The last two years have been a nightmare for the New York Giants. But tonight, hope renews. Pull this off and, hey, maybe they’ll have a quarterback walking multiple red carpets seven years from now.