The concept of the “reach pick” in draft value assessment is a fascinating one. When we speak of a reach pick, we’re generally saying that a team selected a player far higher than his talent indicates. This of course doesn’t factor scheme and personnel into the equation; it’s more about player traits in a vacuum and how they might transfer from the NCAA to the NFL.
What NFL personnel executives will tell you is that when they believe in a player, it’s never a reach—they simply did what they had to do to get the player they wanted. It’s an inside/outside conundrum that is only resolved over the years, as the player in question is able to take his traits as far as they can possibly go.
In the case of the New York Giants and former Duke quarterback Daniel Jones, the universal reach pick of the 2019 draft, it may indeed be years before we have any indication of Jones’ true value. Selected sixth overall, Jones looks to be the very definition of the league-average “game-manager” quarterback smarter teams generally pick in the middle rounds at the very highest. Over three full seasons as the Blue Devils’ starting quarterback, Jones completed 59.9% of his passes for 8,201 yards, 52 touchdowns, and 29 interceptions. Not exactly world-beating stuff when two other first-round quarterbacks (Kyler Murray and Dwayne Haskins) threw 50 touchdown passes in their only seasons as full-time starters.
The advanced metrics do Jones no further favors. Per Sports Info Solutions, his passer rating under pressure didn’t just drop—it plummeted like Monty Python’s proverbial dead parrot, falling from 120.4 in a clean pocket to 52.0 under pressure. Pro Football Focus had Jones as one of the least inspiring deep throwers in this class, with 11 completions in 45 attempts for 425 yards, six touchdowns, and four interceptions on passes traveling 20 or more yards in the air.
Now, there are legitimate counter-arguments to Jones’ statistical malaise. Analysts have pointed to Duke’s offensive line as problematic at best, and portrayed his receivers as drop machines, and both theories are proven true on tape. But there are enough instances when you watch Jones miss receivers from a clean pocket, and create pressure with his hesitancy, to conclude that he’s not an innocent bystander.
Nonetheless, Giants general manager Dave Gettleman made it clear that he was all-in on Jones, and had no issue with making Jones the sixth overall pick. Whether it’s true or not, as Gettleman claimed, that two other teams would have taken Jones before Big Blue’s 17th overall pick—the first-round selection they picked up from the Browns in the Odell Beckham, Jr. trade—is relatively irrelevant. Based on the takes of many talent evaluators, the Giants overswung massively on this pick, and they’ve saddled themselves with an average quarterback at a very high cost.
Faced with these questions, Gettleman was unperturbed, as is his wont.
“I just thought his pocket presence and his poise were really important to me,” Gettleman said in the April 25th press conference after Jones was drafted. “I’ve been saying it for a long time: if you can’t consistently make plays from the pocket, you’re not going to make it in the NFL. You’ll be just another guy. You look at Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, they consistently make plays from the pocket. That’s what this kid can do, and he is not by any stretch of the imagination an average athlete. He’s a really good athlete. This kid can extend, make plays with his feet, buy time in the pocket. He’s got feel. He really has all the things you’re looking for.”
Well… there are times when this is true, and times when it really isn’t.
I’d watched several of Jones’ 2018 games before ranking him the 49th-best player in the 2019 draft class, and I wanted to focus on his performance against a tight, aggressive pass defense for this film study. Against Temple in the Independence Bowl, Jones completed 30 of 41 passes for 423 yards, five touchdowns, and two interceptions against a defense that ranked seventh in the NCAA last year in Football Outsiders’ S+P pass defense efficiency ratings, and 27th in their “DB Havoc” metric, which takes the total number of tackles for loss, passes defensed (interceptions and breakups), and forced fumbles and dividing it by total plays, and may be the coolest-named statistic ever.
Temple was without star cornerback Abdurrahman “Rock” Ya-Sin for this game—the Colts’ second-round pick was preparing for the NFL draft—but this was still a strong defense, and the game is an excellent plus/minus review of Jones’ abilities and liabilities.
This 62-yard pass to T.J. Rahming on a deep sideline route out of motion is the idealized version of Daniel Jones. Watch how he runs play-action, looks off the deep safety to preserve single coverage outside, and throws a nice intermediate pass. If Jones showed this kind of poise and integrated skill set more consistently, it would be far easier to sign off on this pick.
But just as frequently, you get plays like this, where Jones telegraphs to one side, doesn’t pull the trigger, and creates his own pressure. If your new general manager is touting your pocket awareness, you don’t want to see a lot of plays like this…
…or this, where he has open receivers on a double slant and gets nothing out of it. You don’t really care that he’s looking for more than the routes present on third-and-10, you want to see him getting as much out of the play as possible.
This is a pretty abysmal interception by any standard–I assume Jones is reading only to his left because this is a quick-game concept, but he double-clutches to his intended receiver despite the off-bail coverage, misses the open stuff underneath to his front side, and throws up a helium ball that more than one Temple defender could have picked off. It’s a problematic part of Jones’ game that there’s a lot of hesitation in plays where he needs to be more decisive and definite.
Sometimes, positive results can be gleaned from negative plays. Here, Jones makes a precision throw to receiver Chris Taylor, who’s blanketed by cornerback Ty Mason. This is an NFL throw to Taylor; sadly, it’s far from an NFL catch. I’m not completely positive on Jones’ ability to create big plays in tight windows–and those windows are going to be even tighter in the NFL–but this shows potential.
One thing Jones will have to do in Pat Shurmur’s offense is throw consistently on the run in boot-action concepts, and he’s mobile and practiced enough to do that. I really liked this throw to receiver Johnathan Lloyd where Jones threw against his body and hit Lloyd with good velocity. Jones was compact and quick with his mechanics here, and that’s what he needs.
So, there are thing to like here, and things that need a ton of work. But in Gettleman’s assessment of Jones, I was taken aback a bit by the weight Gettleman put on Jones’ MVP performance in the Senior Bowl. To be fair, Gettleman said that he’d watched Jones as comprehensively as you’d expect, but this quote was… interesting.
“I loved him on film,” Gettleman said. “I absolutely loved him. I loved everything about him. And then I went to the Senior Bowl and I watched him that week and I decided to stay for the game. I made up my mind that I was staying for the game and, frankly, he walked out there and I saw a professional quarterback after the three series that I watched, I saw a professional quarterback. I was in full-bloom love.”
Now, falling in full-bloom love with a quarterback during a Senior Bowl game is a bit of a folly. The Senior Bowl game rules prevent defenses from playing anything but two-deep and three-deep zone coverage, with a permissible safety rotation underneath to the curl/flat area, and all deep safeties must be aligned between the hashmarks when the ball is snapped. Nickel packages can only be used when the offense has three receivers on the field, there are no defensive substitutions, and the safety who isn’t playing deep must have a specific man coverage assignment.
Basically, before Jones or any other Senior Bowl quarterback hit the field, he knew the coverage rules, and what would not be happening. So, the fact that Jones completed eight of 11 passes for 115 yards and a touchdown is a bit minimized in that context. In addition, the rules prohibiting any kind of pass-rush games or blitzes allowed Jones to work without his Kryptonite—the ability to remain consistent when under pressure–anywhere to be found. Makes throws like this just a bit easier.
In the end, I think Gettleman was going to convince himself that Daniel Jones was his guy to be taken with the sixth overall pick on a no-matter-what basis. Whether other teams were interested or not, and whether “better” quarterbacks were available or not. When your general manager has made up his mind, that’s where your team goes. And now it’s up to Jones to live up to that with a limited palette of top-level attributes, and a decent bunch of average skills that must be maximized at the NFL level if he’s to have any chance of success over time.
It’s hardly an ideal recipe, but Dave Gettleman is committed, and the Giants are now on the hook for that.
