Culture
Giants’ Daniel Jones looked like a broken QB, but benching him now would be an overreaction
Is the New York Giants’ season already on the brink after one game? That’s how it feels after a disheartening 28-6 loss to the Vikings in Sunday’s season opener.
Here’s a final look at yet another discouraging season opener:
Jones’ last stand?
Giants quarterback Daniel Jones made the first start of the second season since signing a four-year, $160 million contract on Sunday. He has only made seven starts since signing that deal and has only finished five games.
Yet, coach Brian Daboll fielded questions postgame Sunday and again during his Monday postmortem about whether he will bench Jones. Daboll affirmed that he is sticking with Jones.
It may seem wild that Daboll is fielding those questions so early in the season. But it’s wilder that the questions are completely legitimate.
It’s not just that Jones didn’t perform well in Sunday’s loss. It’s that he looked like a rattled, broken quarterback. He looked even worse than he did last season when serious concerns about his future were raised by poor performance and injuries.
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Benching Jones after one ugly showing in his return from a torn ACL would be an overreaction. But it’s fair to wonder about the length of his leash.
Daboll had a quick hook for underperforming veterans in his first two seasons. Wide receiver Kenny Golladay was benched after one game in 2022, and guard Mark Glowinski got the same treatment last season.
But changing quarterbacks is a far more consequential decision, especially with no assurances that backup Drew Lock will be a significant upgrade. It would be much different if Giants general manager Joe Schoen had successfully traded up for a quarterback in this year’s draft. The calls to play the rookie would be deafening already. Think back to Jones’ rookie season in 2019 when he took over as the starter after franchise icon Eli Manning was benched in Week 3.
Even without a quarterback of the future waiting in the wings, Daboll’s patience will grow thin if Jones doesn’t turn things around quickly. A favorable matchup against a bad Commanders defense that allowed 37 points in a Week 1 loss to the Buccaneers could signal Jones’ last stand.
If Jones flops against the Commanders, a quarterback change should become a serious consideration next week.
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Not a concern
It’s obvious that Jones’ injury guarantee — the Giants will owe him $23 million if he suffers an injury and can’t pass a physical if the team cuts him next offseason — isn’t weighing on Daboll’s mind.
Daboll called three power runs for Jones, exposing the quarterback to additional hits in his first game back from a major injury. Jones needs to use his legs to be an effective quarterback, so Daboll can’t call plays with a fear of injury.
Trailing 28-6, Daboll called timeouts to get the ball back during Minnesota’s final possession. The Vikings punted to the Giants with 1:36 remaining, and Daboll kept Jones in the game.
The only explanation for keeping the quarterback and the rest of the starters in for a garbage-time drive is that Daboll was trying to give the offense a chance to end the game with some positive feelings. Instead, Jones took two more hits on a pathetic drive that resulted in a punt back to the Vikings with 29 seconds remaining.
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Outmatched
Brian Flores was a finalist for the Giants’ head coaching job that went to Daboll in 2022. Flores infamously didn’t get that job — and he still has a pending discrimination lawsuit against the Giants, Broncos, Texans and the NFL — so the Vikings defensive coordinator had extra motivation to make a statement on Sunday.
Flores certainly got the better of Daboll in the battle of former Bill Belichick assistants.
Daboll’s game plan was based on an expectation of a pressure-heavy attack from the ultra-aggressive Flores. But Flores threw a curveball, blitzing on just 22.4 percent of the snaps on Sunday, according to Next Gen Stats. Flores led the league with a 48.8 percent blitz rate last season.
The Giants leaned on heavy personnel with two and three tight ends in an attempt to minimize the exotic looks Flores could deploy on early downs. That was understandable in theory, but it didn’t play to the Giants’ strengths, which are at wide receiver. They don’t have dynamic receiving weapons at tight end, so getting the Vikings to put bigger defensive personnel on the field didn’t yield mismatches in the passing game.
ICYMI: Catch up with @DDuggan21 and I’s live room from yesterday. AKA a very nice therapy session for #giants fans. https://t.co/S4Ku1u0ucM
— Charlotte Carroll (@charlottecrrll) September 10, 2024
The Vikings electing not to send extra rushers against the Giants’ big personnel led to multiple max protect pass plays with seven or eight defenders in coverage. That helps explain the lack of a deep passing attack because the Vikings had plenty of defensive backs to cover two receivers running routes.
Conceivably, the bigger personnel would be a boost for the run game, but the Giants couldn’t get anything going on the ground. Devin Singletary, Eric Gray and Tyrone Tracy combined for 45 yards on 14 carries (3.2 yards per carry).
The inability to run the ball or pass effectively on early downs forced the Giants into a whopping 18 third downs. The Giants went 6-for-11 on third-and-7 and shorter and 1-for-7 on third-and-8 and longer. Obviously, getting into so many third-and-longs is not a recipe for success, especially because that allowed Flores to deploy the type of looks Daboll was aiming to avoid.
Getting conservative
Daboll appears to have lost his nerve as an aggressive coach. After conservatively calling a pair of Jones keepers, Daboll was faced with fourth-and-3 from the Vikings’ 49-yard line with four minutes left in the second quarter. Trailing 14-3, Daboll elected to punt. The lack of confidence in the offense was palpable on the two Jones runs and the decision to punt.
Trailing 28-6 late in the third quarter, the Giants had fourth-and-3 on their own 37-yard line. Daboll kept the offense on the field, but it was just so Jones could try to draw the Vikings offside with a hard count. That didn’t work, so the Giants took a delay of game penalty and punted. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if the Giants converted in that spot, but Daboll waved the white flag with the punt.
Strange choices
There were some head-scratching personnel decisions in the opener. Cor’Dale Flott, who worked exclusively at outside corner during the offseason, was the starting slot corner in the Giants’ nickel package. Rookie Dru Phillips, who had won the starting slot corner job in camp, was relegated to a reduced role in the dime package.
“Just getting ready to go here for the first game, we thought that that was the best thing for us,” Daboll said.
Phillips made an impact in limited action, forcing a fumble on his first career snap. Phillips took over as the slot cornerback in the second half after corner Nick McCloud left with a knee injury, and Flott shifted outside.
Daboll indicated Flott will probably play outside more going forward, especially with McCloud “day-to-day, maybe week-to-week.”
Linebacker Micah McFadden didn’t play despite not being listed as questionable on the injury report. McFadden had been dealing with a groin injury that limited him in practice last week. Daboll said McFadden was on a pitch count, but wasn’t used because rookie Darius Muasau played well. Muasau tallied six tackles and an interception while playing 82 percent of the snaps in his debut.
Returner Gunner Olszewski aggravated his groin injury in pregame warmups and will be out “weeks,” according to Daboll. While a pregame re-injury was impossible to predict, the Giants paid for not having a true backup punt returner active considering Olszewski clearly wasn’t 100 percent.
The Giants only had 51 players on the active roster for the opener in a cost-cutting move. That made it indefensible to not have a backup punt returner on the roster. Wide receiver Darius Slayton, who had no punt returns in his first five seasons, was forced to replace Olszewski. That was an adventure, as Slayton failed to field his first punt cleanly and then fumbled the return.
The Giants signed Ihmir Smith-Marsette to replace Olszewski after working out returners on Monday. A fifth-round pick by the Vikings in 2021, Smith-Marsette has been on four teams in three seasons. He averaged 8.7 yards on 37 punt returns for the Panthers last season. He was released by Carolina on Aug. 28.
Second-year wide receiver Jalin Hyatt played just 23 percent of the snaps, and even that total is misleading. Hyatt played just three snaps in the first half before getting most of his playing time when the game was decided in the fourth quarter.
The Giants gave Hyatt every opportunity to win the No. 2 receiver job in camp, but Slayton proved to be a better, more reliable option. Hyatt had a bad drop on his lone target on Sunday.
Daboll called Hyatt the team’s “third/fourth” receiver, so it seems like he has ground to make up. But he could get an opportunity this week because Slayton is in the concussion protocol.
Out for the year?
Carter Coughlin is likely out for the season after Daboll said the linebacker will be out for “months” with a pec injury. Coughlin was on the active roster before getting cut last Thursday and re-signed to the practice squad Friday. He was then elevated Sunday, playing 10 snaps on special teams before the injury.
The Giants juggled the roster for financial reasons, as Coughlin’s $1.1 million salary would have been guaranteed for the season if he was on the active roster for Week 1 because he’s a vested veteran. Making him a practice squad elevation provided the team more flexibility with Coughlin, although his injury will cut into the savings from the roster gymnastics. Coughlin will make $570,000 for the season, which is the minimum salary for a player with his experience on IR.
Formation notations
The Giants mostly played a base 3-4 defense and a nickel package with two defensive linemen, four linebackers and five defensive backs on Sunday. Defensive coordinator Shane Bowen used a dime package eight times on passing downs.
Deonte Banks and Adoree’ Jackson were the perimeter cornerbacks with Phillips or Flott in the slot in the dime package. Dane Belton was the third safety in the package, playing in the box at the “money” position. With Belton filling that role, Isaiah Simmons didn’t play a defensive snap.
The Giants added outside linebacker Azeez Ojulari to Brian Burns and Kayvon Thibodeaux on three third downs in the dime package in the second half. Burns lined up off the ball across from a guard on those three snaps. Like the rest of the game, the package with the three outside linebackers didn’t produce much of a pass rush.
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(Photo of Daniel Jones: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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