The New York Giants opened training camp with a narrative floating around that Eli Manning and Daniel Jones would be firmly engrossed in a quarterback battle.
That, of course, has been anything but the case.
As well as Jones has played at times, Manning has played substantially better early on and as a result, has taken every single first-team rep to date. And while that’s not likely to change in the immediate future, Giants head coach Pat Shurmur acknowledged on Tuesday they do plan to switch it up at some point.
Jones eventually seeing first-team reps is not an indictment on Manning, who has been nearly perfect this summer, but should be viewed as more of an opportunity to help speed up the rookie’s progress.
In his first training camp practice, Jones started off a little slow before catching fire. He carried that right through the team’s final practice of Week 1 before hitting a bit of a wall.
It was proof of the obvious for any rookie — the NFL just isn’t that easy. Eventually, things catch up with you and as well as Jones has performed to date, there’s much development left to take place. The next natural step in that progression is to have him work with the first-team offense and be thrown into the fire against the first-team defense.
