Confident Jaxson Dart already showing leadership with New York Giants

Dart takes the reins on first day of rookie minicamp

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Jaxson Dart was already leading his New York Giants teammates, though many of those are only temporary, before stepping on the field for Friday’s first of two rookie minicamp practices.

Dart and his teammates received the script for Friday’s abbreviated 7-on-7 session during a Thursday meeting. On the bus back to the hotel following the meeting, Dart gathered “as many guys as I could together on the offensive side of the ball and go through it and teach everybody, making sure that we’re all on the same page.”

“As a quarterback, you’re the one that runs the ship when you’re out there,” Dart said. “If you don’t know the ins and outs of everything, you’re not going to have everybody around you prepared. I think that’s super important.

“It’s very important to have that mindset coming to work each and every day. I think that also raises the bar for everybody around you. I think that if you want to be a great team and you want to compete at the highest level, that’s definitely how you have to be as a quarterback.”

So, how did it go?

Photo by Adam Hunger/Getty Images

Before practice, head coach Brian Daboll tried to play down what we might or not see from Dart and his teammates on the field.

“This is first practice, so there’s going to be mistakes,” Daboll said. “You learn from the mistakes. You teach off of them, come back the next day, you build off of it. There’ll be some good things. There’ll be some bad things. It’s the first day of camp. He hasn’t thrown with any of these guys. He’s calling plays in our system for the first time, but same as all the other positions. They have a lot to learn.”

There were mistakes. The first two passes Dart threw were dropped. He finished 8 of 10 in two sessions.

“I just think I’m really confident in my preparation every day. I feel like any time I step on the field, I don’t have doubts when I play,” Dart said. “I think that that comes from taking the time to really understand the scheme and what I’m doing and why is a play called to execute a certain way.

“That’s something that I take pride on. Then, as a quarterback, you’re only as good as the guys around you. You want to make sure that everybody’s on the same page and everybody has that same preparation aspect of making sure that everything’s down to a T and is done the right way.”

Dart, incidentally, was the only one of the Giants’ seven draft picks to participate in the 7-on-7 drills. The rest of the draftees only did individual drills.

Daboll was a hovering presence

Much has been made of Daboll’s ability to work with quarterbacks, and there will be pressure on the coach to develop Dart into a franchise-caliber quarterback. On Friday, he wasn’t far from Dart during the 7-on-7 sessions.

“He coaches me up every second I’m around him,” Dart said. “He’s the guy that will walk in a room, say goodbye and whatnot, and then he’ll come back 30 seconds later because he has an idea. He’s constantly coaching me, and I think that’s what I want to be around.

“I want to be coached the hardest, and I feel like that’s going to help me excel at the highest level and help me reach my potential, so there’s not another coach I’d rather be playing for.”

Dart said he and Daboll “clicked” during the pre-draft process.

“I’m blessed to be able to be coached by him, and I think that we just kind of clicked personality-wise of how we handle things and kind of just our competitive nature, our toughness, and our grit about how we go about things. I think that that just helped us connect.

“He sees football the same way that I see it, and we see it as a physical and tough sport. I think that a lot of times you don’t really see that a ton with quarterbacks. For me, I kind of play like a defensive player a little bit, with just the way that I attack each and everything I do.”

Passing the Daboll test

Much has been made the past couple of offseasons about the Giants’ quarterback evaluation process. We saw clips on ‘Hard Knocks’ in 2024 of Daboll grilling Jayden Daniels, and we have seen other reports of how thorough the Giants’ interview and testing process of quarterback prospects can be.

Post-draft, you can see some of how Daboll grilled Dart on the team’s website.

‘Hard Knocks’ highlights from Tik Tok clued Dart in on what to expect from the Giants.

“I think a lot of people have seen the process a little bit on ‘Hard Knocks’, but it’s intense,” Dart said. “I kind of had an idea coming into it that I had to make sure that I was on my P’s and Q’s when I walked in.

“It was super fun. I think that at the same time, me and him were able to just form an organic relationship. They definitely tested me harder than any other team throughout this process.”

About that bling

Is the necklace Dart had on at the post-practice press conference, and during practice, real? Is it fake? Dart didn’t say, but he did tell the story of why he was wearing it and where it came from.

“My little sister had it, it was here. It was before our bowl game and as I was leaving the house over Christmas break before the bowl game just saw it in here and I was like, you know what, I kinda like it,” Dart said. “So, I put it on and it’s been good luck ever since.”

Oh, and Dart said they did get his sister a replacement necklace.

“It’s not rocket science”

Dart, like most college quarterbacks, used a clap rather than a verbal cadence to signal when the ball should be snapped to start a play.

Daboll was asked a number of questions about how difficult an adjustment that would be for Dart. He seemed to grow weary of them.

“Any of these new players, quarterbacks, free agent quarterbacks, first round like most of them haven’t done a cadence, but I mean it’s not too hard to learn a cadence,” Daboll said. “You say a couple words, voice inflection, you continue to learn from that, but I wouldn’t say it’s like rocket science to learn a cadence.”

Dart was asked about having to use a verbal cadence.

“Did you guys hear me when I was out there?,” he asked.

Dart said learning to use it has been “super fun.”

“Quite honestly, it’s been something that I’ve always wanted to do, and I’ve always kind of practiced it on my own or kind of just messing around with buddies and whatnot,” he said. “But I think it’s always a little bit of a transition.

It really goes for anybody from the college level to the NFL level. The cadence is different no matter where you’ve been at. So you’re always going to have a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s something that really excites me. I think that you have so many opportunities and advantages with the cadence, and you can do so many different things that can take advantage of a defense. So definitely something I wanted to continue to excel at each and every day.”

QB3

Dart will start the season as the Giants’ No. 3 quarterback behind Russell Wilson and Jameis Winston. He said Friday that he has never sat the bench at any level, though he did not begin his freshman season at USC as the starter.

“I haven’t really sat before,” Dart said. “I’m a competitor, so I’m going to come to work each and every day and do my best to make everybody around me better. I understand what the situation is, but for me and myself, I care about winning. There’s nothing fun about losing.

“So it doesn’t matter where you’re at on the depth chart, if you’re playing this much or not playing this much, if you’re losing, it sucks. So for me, I want to make the team better, and that’s my focus.”