With just under 12 minutes to play in the third quarter of Jaxson Dart’s first NFL start, an overzealous NFL officiating crew gave us the perfect juxtaposition of the Giants’ new starting quarterback and the man he replaced.
Dart took off, evaded a defensive tackle, lowered his shoulder and broke a tackle at the second level. As he got into the open field, he began to wield his left hand like a cudgel once he got within five yards of Chargers defensive back Cam Hart. Dart swung that left hand and smacked Hart on the side of the helmet, a punch reminiscent of the first one you’ve ever thrown. Behind-the-school-dumpster stuff, off-balance and without understanding. Dart was so frustrated that the play was called back for holding—it is the Giants, after all—that he rested his hands on his knees and hung his head. The officiating crew mistook the physicality of that run and the subsequent gesture as a warning sign of head trauma and sent him to the sidelines for evaluation.
When Russell Wilson came back on the field, he was, as he had been so many times in the season’s first three weeks, swallowed up by the defensive line. His familiar posture, of a man standing in front of a crashing wave, was a painful reminder of quarterbacks past.
A holding call takes away a big run by Jaxon Dart. Dart looks to be injured on this play and is replaced by Russell Wilson pic.twitter.com/vGofvatHym
— Rate the Refs (@Rate_the_Refs) September 28, 2025
It’s not that Wilson, or end-of-Giants-career Daniel Jones, or Davis Webb, or Jake Fromm, or Mike Glennon, or Tommy DeVito, or Drew Lock, or Tyrod Taylor, or Colt McCoy were necessarily bad quarterbacks. They were simply quarterbacks who had realized the totality of this franchise’s consistent failure to build a suitable offensive line—and the cascading failures that stem from a team that has been essentially fighting one-handed for a decade now—and accepted that fact.
My guess is that Brian Daboll turned to Dart not because of some three-dimensional chess maneuver to remain the coach of the Giants, but because he could tell that Dart was too young and, maybe, blissfully unaware enough to care about the past. That, in the absence of seeing anything, the instinct is not to fold up like a hedgehogs under duress, but to reintroduce a bit of recklessness. A bit of fearlessness. A bit of another run—this time in the fourth quarter with a little more than eight minutes to play, when Dart plowed into Alohi Gilman at the line on a busted run play, spun out of it and picked up the first down.
Make no mistake about it, the Giants’ 21–18 victory over the previously unbeaten Chargers on Sunday was nothing short of miraculous; a game in which Dart threw for 111 yards and a touchdown, and ran for another 54 and a score—a stat line that doesn’t accurately reflect the fact that Dart was machine-like in generating first downs where a void had previously existed. The Giants, for the first time all season, could sustain drives and manipulate the clock with some degree of confidence. The Giants took a 10–0 lead in the second quarter and played from ahead all day. Yes, I know that Jim Harbaugh’s roster is reminiscent of a middle school nurse’s office on standardized testing day but this is still the most obvious example of a team’s surrounding players coming alive at the arrival of one singular player that we’ve seen all season—and certainly far longer than that in East Rutherford.
Devin Singletary. Theo Johnson. The entirety of the Giants’ pass rush. Dexter Lawrence. Dru Phillips. The punt coverage team. Anyone. Everyone. Pick someone on the roster whom you’ve looked at with some degree of hope, some blind optimism, and they showed it Sunday. Even if it was just in moments, the Giants had moments again. Daboll himself and offensive coordinator Mike Kafka could finally call a game plan that acknowledged the team’s deficiencies without becoming defined by them. Trap runs. Screens. Allowing the rush to penetrate because, hell, it was probably going to anyway.
Most impressively, the Giants managed to survive the entirely familiar string of cataclysmic events that occur, on brand, each and every week. Another goal-to-go scenario that didn’t end in points. Another big run called back by a penalty. Another team converting an impossibly long third down for no good reason.
This felt different than many New York quarterback arrivals (for either team that shares MetLife Stadium). Be it Mark Sachez, or Geno Smith, or Russell Wilson or Daniel Jones. While some of those players had early successes, it always felt like we—and those in the stands or in the media, are all guilty—wanted to make the big moments seem bigger, knowing full well that some fatal flaw was lurking.
Dart won a game that he had absolutely no business winning, with his No. 1 receiver, Malik Nabers, exiting with what is feared to be a torn ACL. He made the Meadowlands louder than it has been since the start of the Eras Tour in 2023. And, all of a sudden, the Giants don’t seem so helpless anymore.
All of a sudden, everyone else in uniform, like the quarterback, feels like raising a hand and taking a good, hard swing at the opponent, even if it doesn’t look or feel quite right.
More NFL on Sports Illustrated:
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jaxson Dart Has Given the Giants New Life.
