And their names, man. Their names! If you wrote a screenplay with a blonde quarterback named \u201cJaxson Dart\u201d and a swerving bowling ball named \u201cSkattebo,\u201d you\u2019d get it thrown back in your face for being too on-the-nose.<\/p>\n
Statistically, Dart and Skattebo are still building their foundations. Skattebo\u2019s 56.3 yards per game average ranks 19th in the league, though he is tied for fifth with 24 first-down runs, and third with five rushing touchdowns. (He doesn\u2019t get many yards, but the ones he does are important, in other words.) Dart\u2019s progress has been slower, since the quarterback position is a scalpel to the running back\u2019s sledgehammer. But they\u2019re bringing a spark that can\u2019t be measured, not even by Next Gen Stats.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThey\u2019re very competitive individuals who have a lot of pride, toughness and belief in themselves, and I think that\u2019s important for any team when you have players like that,\u201d head coach Brian Daboll said after the Giants upset the defending champion Eagles. \u201cThey care about their teammates, they prepare very diligently, and I trust them a lot out on the field.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the right thing for a head coach to say, but it\u2019s not necessarily the right way to frame it. You don\u2019t \u201ctrust\u201d players like Dart and Skattebo, you unleash them. You let them cook, as the saying goes, until the rest of the league figures them out and until you can get them some more help, whether that\u2019s two weeks or two seasons from now.<\/p>\n
The Giants were once the province of true psychos like Lawrence Taylor and Bill Parcells, men with souls of pigskin. But their 21st-century avatar remains the vanilla-milkshake-and-mayonnaise sandwich that is Eli Manning, a quarterback who won them two Super Bowls while studiously avoiding the escape of a single stray emotion.<\/p>\n
New York has toiled away under a succession of Serious Football Men \u2014 Tom Coughlin, Pat Shurmur, Joe Judge, Daboll \u2014 and what has it gotten them? Just two playoff appearances and a single win in the past 13-and-counting seasons, that\u2019s it. And those two magical Eli-led Super Bowl seasons recede farther into the distance every year.<\/p>\n
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Jaxson Dart (left) and Cam Skattebo pose for a photo after beating the Philadelphia Eagles at MetLife Stadium on October 9, 2025 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Photo by Kathryn Riley\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
(Kathryn Riley via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
So why not give weirdness a chance? Why not lean into this strange brew of lunatic charisma for as long as it lasts? These two are wheelbarrows of social media clicks, if nothing else. Whether that translates to football success remains to be seen, but hey, nothing else has worked lately, right?<\/p>\n
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In response to one of several questions about Dart and Skattebo on Friday, Daboll gave a perfect Serious Football Man answer: \u201cI have a lot of faith in those two young guys, I think that\u2019s well documented,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I want to focus more on our football team and I know that\u2019s how they would want it too. Do their job, lunch-pail mentality, improve on the things that they can improve on. But they play with an edge and they play with a style that we want our team to play with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since Dart took over as starter, the Giants are 2-1, dealing two playoff-contending teams \u2014 the Chargers and Eagles \u2014 their first loss of the season. This being the Giants, of course, those two wins sandwich an inexplicable loss to one of the worst teams in the league, the New Orleans Saints.<\/p>\n
The next seven weeks on New York\u2019s schedule feature the Broncos, an Eagles rematch, the 49ers, the Packers, the Lions and the Patriots, with only the Bears in there as a (possible) break. That\u2019s a lot for anyone to handle, much less a couple pups possibly visiting many of these stadiums for the first time.<\/p>\n
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There are, most likely, more blue tent visits than Big Blue wins in their future. But it\u2019s going to be a hell of a ride, one way or another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a clip from last week\u2019s dramatic Giants win over the Super Bowl champion Eagles that perfectly sums…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4092,4091,4086,3923,4085,4089,4084,3917,2682,9,2683,11,10,4087,4090,2685,4088,3918],"class_list":{"0":"post-3788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-49ers","9":"tag-bears","10":"tag-brian-daboll","11":"tag-cam-skattebo","12":"tag-eagles","13":"tag-eli-manning","14":"tag-giants","15":"tag-jaxson-dart","16":"tag-new-orleans-saints","17":"tag-new-york","18":"tag-new-york-giants","19":"tag-new-york-headlines","20":"tag-new-york-news","21":"tag-nfl-football","22":"tag-patriots","23":"tag-philadelphia-eagles","24":"tag-russell-wilson","25":"tag-the-giants"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}