With 2025 first-round draft pick and current New York Giants starting quarterback Jaxson Dart missing last Sunday’s game against Green Bay with a concussion, and the reality that it was the fourth time he had been tested for a concussion this season, a logical question to ask is: Should Dart not be running with the ball as much as he has been?
Dart had no known injury history at Ole Miss aside from a knee meniscus tear and MCL sprain that occurred in 2021. Let’s provide some context for his pro career to date by looking at his college and pro record compared to other quarterbacks.
Running college QBs
College quarterbacks run a lot more than NFL quarterbacks as a general rule. Here are the top 10 running QBs last season from the 2025 draft class:
Courtesy of Pro Football Focus
Dart ran the eighth-most frequently among his classmates, with 100 rushes in 13 games, a bit less than eight per game. 45 of those were scrambles, so Dart had 55 designed runs. He only had three rushing TDs, and three fumbles, so he wasn’t exactly a prime weapon with his legs although he did average about 50 rushing yards per game.
Given that history, you can’t blame ex-Giants head coach Brian Daboll for trying to use Dart’s legs as a weapon. The NFL is a big boy league, though, so running the ball in the pros may not be the same as running it in college against defenders who mostly may never see the NFL.
How does Dart compare to his NFL peers? Let’s first look at the tale of the tape for the 15 most frequently running NFL quarterbacks this season:
Courrtesy of Pro Football Focus
Dart is pretty close to average height and weight among his frequently running peers, and he certainly hasn’t run the ball nearly as much as (no surprise) Jalen Hurts, Justin Fields, and Josh Allen, and (big surprise, to me anyway) Drake Maye. He’s run it about as many times as Jayden Daniels, who of course did it in fewer games. That’s because Daniels has been injured three times this season, once with a knee injury that cost him two games, a hamstring injury that cost him another, and now an elbow dislocation that is expected not to be season-ending but has left him thus far with only six games played. Daniels is the slightest in physical stature among the quarterbacks on the list above, but it is his recklessness more than anything that explains his problem this season. It’s no wonder the Commanders are only a game ahead of the Giants after going to the NFC Championship Game last season.
There’s nothing you can do about QB scrambles, other than to have a great pass blocking offensive line, and to have great receivers who get open quickly. The Giants are somewhere in the middle of that equation at this stage, although having their best receiver on the shelf the rest of the year changes the calculation. A play caller does however have control over designed QB runs, and the question is whether Brian Daboll was having Mike Kafka call too many of them for Dart’s own good. Dart is clearly super-competitive. He’s also really good on designed runs:
Dart leads NFL quarterbacks on yards on designed runs (DYDS). Three of those runs were 15+ yards (“breakaway runs”), good for 57 yards. The disturbing part is on the far left: Dart’s 167 yards after contact (YCO) don’t lead the league, but then his frame isn’t that of Josh Allen, who has more. It is sturdier than that of Daniels, who also has more, but we’ve seen how Daniels’ sophomore season has gone. We know from watching him that Dart keeps fighting for extra yards after a first hit, which is why he’s on the shelf at the moment.
Here’s a chart that summarizes the situation for the leading rushing QBs:
Data from Pro Football Focus
Dart doesn’t stand out from the other quarterbacks, rather he is part of a fairly large group that rushes by design a lot and on a large fraction of their total rushes. That group includes “usual suspects” Jalen Hurts and Justin Fields, but it also includes Denver’s Bo Nix, who rushed by design four times when he faced the Giants for 27 yards. Daniel Jones as a Colt has already rushed 20 times by design, but that’s a small fraction of the 79 times Daboll had him do it in roughly twice the number of games he played as a Giant in the 2022 season. And of course, Jones was injured multiple times running the ball as a Giant, including the neck injury against the Eagles in 2021 that raised concern about his career being jeopardized.
The bottom line is that you can’t keep today’s more athletic quarterbacks from taking off with the ball. What you can do is to make sure they have a good pass-protecting OL and elite receivers to minimize the number of times they have to scramble. The Giants are part of the way there on those fronts. What they need now, whenever Dart returns, is not to put the reins on him completely, but to impress upon him the joy of sliding rather than initiating contact and leading with his head. Ideally, Dart drifts down and to the left on that chart to a spot closer to Maye, who runs with the ball quite a bit but primarily when he has to scramble.
See More:
