Jaxson Dart says the NFL ‘isn’t soccer’. The Giants need him to start acting like a quarterback

Jaxson Dart wants you to know something: this is real football. It’s not soccer or flag. It’s tackle football, the kind where quarterbacks go airborne. After taking the latest in a growing compilation of bone-crushing hits, Dart brushed himself off and delivered a post-game sermon on toughness. “We’re not playing soccer,” he said. “You’re going to get hit. Things happen.”

Yet these “things” continue to happen to Dart at an alarming rate. In his eight NFL starts, he has absorbed as many unnecessary hits as any rookie quarterback in recent memory. On Monday night, Dart took another heavy hit near the sideline in the first quarter of the Giants’ 33-15 loss to the Patriots. Dart scrambled out of the pocket on second-and-13 and ran for a first down. As he approached the sideline, Dart could have stepped out and gained fewer yards while still moving the chains. Instead, he braced, lowered his shoulder and was sent soaring through the air by Patriots linebacker Christian Elliss.

The hit left Peyton Manning, covering the game alongside his brother Eli, speechless. “Obviously, he told me he would run out of bounds if he was near the sideline,” Eli Manning said. “He lied to me.”

Dart’s recklessness has become the defining tension of his young career. He plays like a linebacker in a quarterback’s body. There is an old-school charm to his style, a kind of throwback bravado that a fanbase quickly falls in love with. Coaches love it, too, until they remember their job security depends on the quarterback remaining conscious.

In another hapless Giants season, Dart has been one of the few sources of promise. His dynamism has brought a jolt to an otherwise moribund offense. And that’s what a team expects when they trade up to draft a quarterback in the first round. But the physical cost has been too steep.

It’s not just the rah-rah coaches or macho fans who love his yards-at-all-costs attitude, either. There is a segment of former players who see Dart’s recklessness as laudable, as a young quarterback on a struggling team fighting for everything. “I don’t know when it became OK for us to tell a player to be less competitive,” ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky said in the aftermath of Dart’s latest hit.

But Orlovsky is wrong. A quarterback refusing to embrace contact is not weakness. It’s about understanding the stakes, acknowledging that for his team to have a chance, he needs to stay upright.

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Dart’s style is dangerous. It’s a danger to himself, his long-term health and the future of the Giants. There’s a sense that if a quarterback plays with the mindset of the other 21 players on the field, the guys in his huddle will rally around him. But, more than anything, the rest of the locker room want him on the field. They have mortgages to pay, and contracts to earn. Their own careers – the hits they take and the sacrifices they make – rest on the starting quarterback being fit.

Toughness in a quarterback is admirable, but availability is priceless. Too often this season, Dart has missed snaps and games due to taking unnecessary punishment. He hasn’t just absorbed hits, he’s dished them out.

We know more than ever about the consequences of blows to the head. The league has made significant strides in reducing the overall volume of concussions during games. Repetitive head impacts are baked into the sport, with long-term consequences like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) an endemic part of the game. In the past year alone, nine former and current NFL players under the age of 48 have died, according to The Nation. Of those nine, seven were the result of suicide or undisclosed reasons. We can never say for sure that CTE led to all seven of those deaths, but they hint at the long-term damage repetitive head impacts can cause, let alone the immediate and long-lasting effects of sustaining a single concussion or multiple concussive blows within weeks.

But Dart has continually scoffed at the idea that he should change his style. “I watch quarterbacks who play kinda like me around the league,” Dart said after the Patriots game. “I watch how Josh Allen plays, I watch how Patrick Mahomes plays. They take hits, too. I’m not an anomaly here.”

Every quarterback takes hits. But there’s a difference between taking them and chasing them.

The Elliss hit did not trigger the concussion protocol. But it’s a place Dart has found himself too frequently in his young career. Allen has sustained one documented head injury during his career. In college and the pros, Mahomes has had three documented concussions in 12 years. Dart has already been in the league’s concussion protocol four times in his rookie season, including preseason. A hit in Chicago ruled him out for two weeks with a concussion, his first documented case in the NFL.

For Dart, this is nothing new. It’s how he’s always played. During the pre-draft cycle, the quarterback sat down with Jon Gruden for his show The QB Class. Gruden, infatuated with Dart’s potential, treated him like a parent scolding a toddler. “You’re a reckless son of a bitch,” Gruden said. “You’re kind of like Evel Knievel.” Dart grinned, because of course he did. He thought it was a compliment.

But Gruden kept hammering the point. You won’t go out of bounds, he said. You won’t slide. Prophetically, Gruden told Dart: “You’re going to be in that concussion protocol tent, and I’m gonna be holding the gameplan like, ‘Where the hell is Dart at?’” Dart was finally pushed to admit the truth: It’s not smart. Then came the tell: “Any time I get hit, I want to fall two yards forward,” he said.

That’s great in college, where a quarterback may start for one or two years before they advance to the NFL. But in the pros, that mindset for a quarterback is selfish. Their career is supposed to be long. The future of the franchise – from ownership, to players, to coaches and everyone in the building – rests on the arm of the quarterback. The players are also bigger, faster and stronger. Gaps close quicker. Players hit harder. And defenders’ careers are staked on blasting the opposing quarterback, no matter the short or long-term consequences. It is a merciless profession.

But Dart hasn’t shown any willingness to change. Even in his own teammates’ comments, there is a degree of resignation. “That’s just how he is. We’re just going to have to keep talking to him,” Giants guard Jon Runyan said. “Maybe he’ll listen to us one of these days.”

It’s time for the Giants to protect Dart from himself. If that’s sitting him until he’s ready to take care of himself, then so be it.

So far, they have lived with the consequences. The organization drafted Dart as a lifeline for head coach Brian Daboll, a so-called quarterback whisperer who was running out of time and quarterbacks. For a time, the bet looked shrewd. Once installed as the starter, Dart brought renewed verve to the offense. Daboll leaned into the quarterback’s reckless ways, unable or unwilling to separate what Dart could do from what he should do. Daboll’s job was on the line, and so he featured Dart’s athleticism as a runner, offering up more opportunities for him to take hits in the open field. Designed quarterback runs became the building block of the offense. In just seven starts under Daboll, Dart logged 25 designed carries, more than any quarterback in the league. Along with fellow rookie Cam Skattebo, putting their bodies on the line for an extra yard became part of the team’s lunch pail mantra.

But the approach faltered. Daboll was fired after the Giants started the season 2-8. He was relieved in part because he failed to protect the young quarterback. Both because he didn’t have his best quarterback on the field in key spots, and because the Giants recognize the future of the franchise rests on the health and development of their rookie. If he’s hurt, he cannot develop. And his injury record will already raise questions about his viability as a long-term starter.

Daboll was already on thin ice. Earlier in the season, he wandered into the blue tent during one of Dart’s concussion evaluations, before getting into an animated discussion with the team’s doctor on the sideline. It was coaching desperation masquerading as concern, which earned him a $100,000 fine and the franchise an additional $200,000 penalty. In Daboll’s final game in charge, the bill for the season came due: Dart hit his head against the turf and was removed from the game after his fourth concussion evaluation of the season. Sprinkle in ankle and hamstring injuries, and you have a young quarterback taking punishment at a scary rate.

In his first start under interim coach Mike Kafka, Dart had zero designed rushing attempts. It’s a clear effort from the team to force Dart to try to alter his style in the final weeks of the season. Yet on a rushing attempt out of the coach’s control, Dart refused to give up on a play when the going was good.

Dart may insist that this is who he’s always been. Fine. But the NFL is not high school or college football. The stakes are too high, the punishment too severe. It’s not a place where quarterbacks can out-tough linebackers or run through a safety’s face during a meaningless blowout.

The best quarterbacks develop a sixth sense for when the extra yard is worth the bruise and when it’s not. But right now, Dart’s impulse is off. He plays as if pain is the point. At times, it’s thrilling. It’s also unsustainable.

“We’re not playing soccer out here,” he said. No, he’s not. But this is the NFL, where the bravest thing a quarterback can sometimes do is step out of bounds and live to play another down.