More than a year after the New York Giants signed quarterback Daniel Jones to a four-year, $160 million contract, people are still griping about the deal and its shortcomings.
David Kenyon of Bleacher Report is the latest to take on that opinion for his list of the top 10 worst contracts in the NFL ahead of the 2024 season.
Wrote Kenyon, who placed Jones’s contract tenth out of ten. Of the deal: “Even at the time, it seemed like an unnecessary risk for a player who’d never been anything above a league-average quarterback. Then, he struggled badly in six games before a knee injury last year.”
We’ll stop right there to make a few points. First, this argument, which Kenyon is not alone in using against the deal, doesn’t consider a few factors.
First, the free-agent quarterback market after the 2022 season wasn’t strong. And as far as the draft was concerned, because the Giants made the playoffs, they ended up with the 25th spot in the order—way too low to have a chance at a franchise quarterback and not in a position to trade up for one given all the needs they had on the roster.
Rather than start fresh, Giants general manager Joe Schoen took the lesser of the evils, as they say, and went with Jones, whose deal is really a two-year contract given the out clause that is there after this season (which right there should tell you that even the Giants had some doubts to where they felt it necessary to build in an escape hatch).
That Jones got hurt last year isn’t his fault—after seeing him make it through 2022, the Giants were likely hoping that he had gotten past the injuries. That Jones did get hurt just gives those against his contract another piece of ammunition in their argument against him.
Also worth noting is that the Giants tried to trade up in this year’s draft to get former North Carolina quarterback Drake Maye, who went third overall. Rather than reach for a pick at No. 6, the Giants pivoted to receiver Malik Nabers, who, as Kenyon notes, will hopefully help Jones and the Giants offense this year.
The point is that the Giants didn’t have much of a choice when it came to Jones. Some say they could have let him test the market and focused on signing Saquon Barkley—and who knows, maybe they would have if they had drafted higher in the order. But in the end, they felt it was too big of a risk.
As Kenyon pointed out, Jones’s 2024 cap number is $47.9 million, of which $36 million is guaranteed. I mentioned his two-year deal because all the guaranteed money is in the first two years, assuming the Giants don’t carry him on the roster past March 15, 2025, and Jones can pass a physical next spring.
What Kenyon doesn’t mention is that if they do decide to move on from Jones after this year, he can be designated as a post-June 1 transaction. In that case, the Giants stand to save $30.5 million with only $11.105 million in dead money hit in 2025 and 2026 next year.
If one considers that the 2025 cap is projected to be $260 million (and it’s probably going to be even higher than that) and the 2026 cap $284 million, we’re not talking a huge chunk of change out of those two caps if the Giants go post-June 1 with a Jones transaction.
