Culture
If Giants don’t land Aaron Rodgers, then what? Exploring pros, cons of NY’s backup plans
One eternity later …
Cue the SpongeBob SquarePants meme as the football world awaits a resolution to the Aaron Rodgers saga. (It’s been long enough that we can call it that, right?) The 41-year-old, four-time MVP is biding his time as he waits to see if the Minnesota Vikings would like to pursue a partnership. If they don’t, Rodgers could simply retire and leave the QB-desperate Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Giants with few inspiring options left to choose from.
But, it seems as long as they’re still in play for Rodgers, the Giants and Steelers are (somewhat) content to wait. Three teams all tied together with no real deadline in sight. Fun, right?
However, the Giants, with Tommy DeVito the only QB on the roster, haven’t been waiting idly. They’ve been doing their homework on what Plan C — swing-and-a-miss on Matthew Stafford, swing-and-a-miss on Rodgers — would look like should the ex-Jets QB not desire a return to New York.
To recap their work so far: The Giants have hosted veterans Joe Flacco, Russell Wilson and Jameis Winston for visits. They also were reportedly conducted a video call with Mason Rudolph, but the backup QB wound up signing with the Steelers.
The Giants, of course, are wise to explore veteran contingency plans with no end in sight to the Rodgers saga and the possibility that he could simply walk away from the game rather than suit up for any team in 2025.
So, what exactly do those contingency plans look like? That’s what we’re here to find out as we dive into the pros and cons of each of the Giants’ less-preferred options:
Russell Wilson, 36 years old
Pros
After Rodgers, Wilson is probably the best remaining option on the free-agent market and the only other QB the Giants could realistically sell as a functional full-time starter for 2025.
Wilson is a Super Bowl champion and proven winner, having guided the Seattle Seahawks to the playoffs eight times and the Steelers to the playoffs last season. He threw for 2,482 yards and 16 touchdowns in 11 appearances last year. Wilson’s five interceptions matched his career low in Seattle in 2019 (of course, that came in 16 games), but his interception rate (1.5 percent) was among the lowest rates in the NFL last year. Wilson also tallied just five fumbles, so he does a good job of protecting the football.
Wilson also still throws a gorgeous deep ball, meaning he could help add an explosive element to New York’s offense, which desperately needs to produce more big plays. With the Steelers, 14.4 percent of Wilson’s pass attempts resulted in explosive plays (16-plus yards), per TruMedia, a mark that ranked 14th in the NFL and was worlds better than what the Giants got from Daniel Jones (8.9 percent, last in the NFL) last season.
More big plays is what the Giants hope to coax out of Malik Nabers in Year 2, and it aligns well with the recently re-signed Darius Slayton’s skill set. Perhaps even the speedy Jalin Hyatt, who has done little through two years in New York, could benefit from playing with Wilson.
Before moving onto Wilson’s cons, I wanted to briefly highlight the pickle the Giants would be in if they don’t sign Rodgers or Wilson.
If they don’t end up with one of those two … yikes. The nightmare scenario is losing out on both of those quarterbacks while the Tennessee Titans prepare to take Miami quarterback Cam Ward at No. 1 in the upcoming NFL Draft — and that looks like what they’re doing, since they haven’t been significant players in the veteran QB market this offseason outside of signing backup Brandon Allen to a one-year deal. The Giants would likely be forced to draft a QB at No. 3, and if Ward isn’t there, whomever they take could be classified as a significant reach — especially if they’re passing on Penn State pass rusher Abdul Carter or Colorado WR/CB Travis Hunter.
With Wilson (or Rodgers), the Giants should still plan to draft a QB at some point early on, but there would be less desperation to make a pick with a veteran capable of starting Week 1.
OK, onto the cons:
Cons
While Wilson took the Steelers to the playoffs, the team finished on a five-game losing streak, including a relatively non-competitive 28-14 loss to the Ravens in the wild-card round. That’s hardly encouraging. While Wilson protects the ball in terms of limiting turnovers, he also holds onto the ball for way too long and takes a lot of sacks.
Wilson’s sack percentage over the past three seasons is a dreadful 9.5 percent. Among quarterbacks with at least 1,000 dropbacks in that span, that’s the third-worst rate behind only Justin Fields (11.9 percent) and … Jones (9.6 percent).
The Steelers also haven’t made a strong push to bring Wilson back as they pursue Rodgers and initially prioritized re-signing Fields before he signed with the Jets. That doesn’t seem like a great sign.
It’s also worth mentioning that Wilson has been in the Giants building twice the past two offseasons, and no deal has been made. Last year, the Giants told him Jones would be the starter, so he went to Pittsburgh. This time, the Giants are waiting on Rodgers, but it’s pretty clear they’re not exactly enamored with Wilson.
Jameis Winston, 31 years old
Pros
It won’t be boring.
Just look at Winston’s Super Bowl highlight reel from New Orleans as a Fox Sports correspondent. Winston would bring a fun personality to New York, and his play on the field certainly wouldn’t be dull either. He’s a human highlight reel — you just never know if it’s going to be an offensive or defensive highlight.
The last time Winston, the No. 1 overall pick of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2015, started 16 or more games, he became one of nine quarterbacks in NFL history to throw for 5,000 yards. Those yards came with 33 touchdowns. (OK, I know we’re in the “pros” section, but I feel obligated to mention those 33 TDs also came with a breathtaking 30 interceptions, as the Bucs went 7-9 and missed the playoffs.)
After leaving Tampa, Winston spent four seasons in New Orleans before playing 2024 in Cleveland. With the Browns, Winston started seven games — his most since 2021 — and threw for 2,121 yards and 13 touchdowns. (Again, I must mention that he also threw 12 interceptions and went 2-5 as a starter.)
Winston, like Wilson, will happily heave it downfield. His rate of explosive pass plays (13.8 percent) was in line with Wilson and slightly ahead of the next guy on this list (Flacco, 13.5 percent). So, again, the Giants would be injecting some big-play ability into their offense.
Winston is also the youngest of these visitors, which has to count for something when thinking about the future. Could he enjoy a late-career breakout? Probably not, but you never know. The last item in Winston’s favor is the price tag. He likely won’t cost nearly as much as Rodgers or even Wilson. Winston’s deal with Cleveland last season was worth a maximum of $8.7 million.
Cons
It wouldn’t be boring.
So, yeah, about those interceptions. Before 2019, no QB had thrown 30 interceptions in one season in more than 30 years (Vinny Testaverde threw 35 with the Bucs in 1988), and no QB has come close since.
With 111 career interceptions in 105 games, Winston has a career INT rate of 3.5 percent, including a 4.1 percent mark last year, which was second-worst in the league in 2024 behind only the Colts’ Anthony Richardson. Winston also was sacked 24 times in 12 games, so his negative plays rate is off the charts. If Giants coach Brian Daboll was throwing tablets out of frustration with Jones, Winston might just break Daboll’s brain.
Finally, if the Giants are trying to trade up for a QB — either up to No. 1 or perhaps back into the end of Round 1 — rivals teams might be able to exploit their desperation, as they’ll know the Giants aren’t committed to Winston and are still hunting for a long-term answer at QB.
Joe Flacco, 40 years old
Pros
This isn’t going to be a long list, but what were you expecting for a 40-year-old QB about to play for his sixth career team?
At the least, Daboll could trust Flacco to pick up his offense quickly and steer the ship as a veteran with 17 seasons of NFL experience. A former Super Bowl MVP, Flacco can still chuck it deep and looks to create big plays where he can. He also completed 65.3 percent of his passes last season, so he’s still pretty accurate.
Overall, he’s capable of brief spurts of quality play. He helped lead the Browns to the playoffs in 2023 with a solid five-game stretch that resulted in him winning the 2023 NFL Comeback Player of the Year award. Last season in Indy, he played well for a few weeks early on while filling in for an injured Richardson.
Finally, he shouldn’t be too pricey. With the Colts last season, Flacco signed a one-year deal worth up to $8.7 million with just $4.5 million guaranteed.
Cons
Father Time hasn’t been friendly to Flacco. He was never very mobile, but he doesn’t move much at all now, so if the Giants offensive line isn’t playing up to par — when has that ever happened, though? — good luck.
He also didn’t look great toward the end of the last season. When the Colts benched Richardson ahead of Week 9 and gave the job to Flacco, coach Shane Steichen said Flacco was the starter “going forward.” That lasted two weeks. He played so poorly in his two games as Indy’s starter — two losses that included a prime-time flop against Minnesota and three interceptions against Buffalo — that the Colts reversed course and turned back to Richardson.
Giants fans are also well acquainted with Flacco’s late-season struggles. He returned to the lineup, replacing an injured Richardson in Week 17, for a Colts team playing for its playoff life. Flacco and the Colts fell to a Giants team on a 10-game losing streak. Flacco turned the ball over three times in Indy’s 45-33 loss.
It’s pretty clear at this point Flacco is best-suited for a backup role.
And as with Winston, teams could exploit the Giants’ desperation to trade up during the draft knowing Flacco isn’t a long-term answer. It’s also worth mentioning that if the Giants do get a young QB in the building, Flacco doesn’t have the reputation as the type of QB to go out of his way to be a mentor.
Conclusion
None of these are great options for the Giants. They know it, too. That’s why they’re waiting on Rodgers, though it isn’t exactly clear how much better he’d actually be. Alas, the wait goes on.
(Photo of Russell Wilson: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS, by Yevgenia Nayberg
“You have to share many things with others … but what you remember belongs to you and you alone,” Yevgenia (Genya) Nayberg writes in the author’s note to her graphic memoir, “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters.”
The elegantly composed pages of this moving story, told largely through Nayberg’s effervescent illustrations, make clear the special place she holds in her heart for memories of her childhood in Kiev (now spelled Kyiv), Ukraine.
It is 1986, Ukraine is still part of the Soviet empire, and the entire world is anticipating Halley’s comet. Yet there are more important things in Genya’s life than the approaching comet. She is 11 years old and preparing for the entrance exam to Kiev’s National Secondary School of Art.
Inspired by her mother, who is an artist, Genya loves to draw and paint. But there is an obstacle: The family is Jewish and the art school — like many schools in the former Soviet Union — accepts only 1 percent of Jewish applicants.
When Genya was 5, her grandpa, who lived through Stalin’s Terror, told her she should “not stick out in school.” He taught her to read using Pravda, which was filled with articles about imperialism and inflation — evil spirits that haunted her dreams. (Pravda and Izvestiya — The Truth and The News — were the two major newspapers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew the joke that accurately reflected Soviet reality: There is no news in The Truth and no truth in The News.)
In first grade, Genya’s “Honorary Teacher of the Soviet Union” — as manipulative and sinister as the government she served — demanded unconditional love from the pupils in her class, going so far as to ask them to raise their hands if they were willing to give blood to her in the event she needed a transfusion.
The same year, in military training class, the children learned the pretending game: When Genya complained that the gas mask she was supposed to practice putting on, in case of an American nuclear attack, was too big for her face, the instructor replied, “Pretend that it fits.” Both teachers and students were to pretend that everything in the country was ideal, while they waited for the promised dawn of a bright Soviet future. Nobody knew then that the nuclear fallout would come not from across the ocean but from within.
Now it is spring and Genya is bored, painting Young Pioneers with red neckties (a Soviet national scout group) over and over again at the behest of the tutor who is helping her get ready for the July exam. She consoles herself with the thought that if she is accepted she can paint whatever she likes.
On April 26 there is an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, 90 kilometers from Kiev, but there is no official information about the damage or even about the accident itself. On May 1, International Workers’ Day, everyone goes outside for a parade, as usual.
On the left-hand page of a double-page spread, Kiev, in Nayberg’s exquisitely wrought, soft-hued rendering, is “blooming like a giant cream cake with white, pink and purple chestnut flowers.” On the right-hand page, as if it were part of the same scene, Nayberg has drawn a stark picture of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, stamped with the word “RADIATION” in Russian, that makes it look like a colossal tombstone. “Like every year,” young Genya wryly comments, “it is a perfect day.”
In the absence of information, Genya’s family must rely on rumors. Her mother, the driving force in the book, adds iodine to the children’s milk and takes Genya and her 3-year-old brother 1,300 kilometers away to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), in Russia, to stay with their cousins.
As Genya bikes by the city’s many World War II monuments that depict victorious soldiers, she encounters “war survivors that never quite survived,” begging for bread. In Soviet Russia, it turns out, they play the pretending game, too.
In July, to their hosts’ horror, Genya and her mother return to Kiev for the exam that cannot be missed. The three-part test — two days for composition, two days for painting and two days for drawing — is grueling.
Happily for Genya and her repeated painting of Young Pioneers cheerfully performing selfless deeds, the theme of the composition portion is “In the Morning of Our Country.” Weirdly, this could be her ticket to freedom of expression.
Nayberg’s narrator is resilient, funny and ironic, observing her surroundings with an artist’s probing eye.
Her story gracefully brings to life the Soviet world — torn down in 1991 and recently resurrected by the latest Russian dictator — provoking thorny questions about different approaches to art, the cost of trying to conform and the complexity of family ties.
“Stories let us hold on to people a little longer,” Nayberg writes at the end of this tender memoir dedicated to her artist mother. Genya’s mom, and the rest of the characters in “Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters,” will stay with me for years to come.
CHERNOBYL, LIFE, AND OTHER DISASTERS | By Yevgenia Nayberg | (Ages 10 and up) | Neal Porter Books | 200 pp. | Paperback, $15.99
CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks, by Benjamin Hale
Benjamin Hale’s “Cave Mountain” begins as many true-crime stories do: with a missing girl. In April 2001, 6-year-old Haley Zega got separated from her family in the Buffalo National River Wilderness in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.
Haley’s disappearance led to “the largest search-and-rescue mission in Arkansas history,” as authorities began to fear that she’d been abducted. But Haley was not kidnapped, or killed, or even harmed. She was found two days later, two miles away from where she’d gone missing, having simply gotten lost.
Though not itself a crime story, the incident clearly holds great significance for the author, a fiction writer who teaches at Bard and Columbia, and who is Haley’s cousin. Though he was in high school in Colorado at the time and not involved in the search, for him the memory recalls “the way things were in that brief period of time book-ended by the end of the Cold War … and the constitutional crisis of the 2000 presidential election.” Much of the book is steeped in nostalgia for this “never-such-innocence-again era.”
Haley’s disappearance serves as Hale’s personal way into the account of a horrific crime committed very near the spot where his cousin went missing. In 1978, two members of a small religious cult known as the Church of God in Christ Through the Holy Spirit, Inc. murdered one of their own, a 3-year-old girl whom Hale calls Bethany, because their teenage prophet claimed God had told him that “Bethany was ‘anathema’ and had to die.”
“Anathema” was the cult’s term for anyone who didn’t follow their highly specific interpretation of Christianity. They shot the girl eight times and buried her in a garbage bag stuffed into a bucket.
The author’s connections to this tragedy go beyond the geographical. Bethany’s mother, Lucy, who was a member of the cult and may or may not have been complicit in her killing, would later become friends with Haley’s grandmother Joyce, who’d taken Haley hiking that day in 2001 and was the last person to see her before she disappeared. Despite that case’s positive outcome, Joyce remained racked by guilt — a pain Lucy understood all too well. And Hale himself developed a friendship with Mark Harris, the teen prophet who ended up spending 40 years in prison.
Hale dives into the region’s history, including the Nixon administration’s forced displacement of residents via eminent domain in order to build a reservoir, to establish the “longstanding tensions between local residents of the area and the government, which they see as meddlesome, untrustworthy and incompetent.”
More relevantly, he provides some context about the rise of cults and religious and political extremism in America in the past century; but his version of political insight consists of bad-faith contrasts between the “extremely delicate constant censorious moral paranoia” of his classroom at Bard and the people he meets in Arkansas. “After that suffocating environment,” he writes of his mask-wearing, scarf-knitting, emotional-support-poodle-needing students, “my God was it a relief sometimes to be among the roughs, sounding their barbaric yawp.”
Repetition is inevitable, even necessary, in a work of nonfiction involving multiple story lines, but Hale reiterates some details too often, or too identically. He block-quotes his sources liberally in lengthy excerpts from personal interviews, email and text correspondences, court records, self-published memoirs and news articles, some of whose language he repeats either verbatim or with uncomfortable similarity in his own wording. For example, he reports three different times, once in a quote from a news article and twice in his own paraphrasing, that the police confiscated from Mark Harris’s cult “22 firearms” and around “2,000 rounds of ammunition.”
These repetitions, as well as Hale’s incorporation of so many threads that are irrelevant to the main one, start to feel like the author’s attempts to mask the fact that the cult crime story didn’t quite provide him enough material for a full book. The result is a mess of narratives and ideas, and as the pages turn it becomes clear they won’t gel into a satisfying whole.
CAVE MOUNTAIN: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks | By Benjamin Hale | Harper | 287 pp. | $30
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