2019 NFL Draft: Daniel Jones an all-time mistake by Giants

An offseason of mistakes continued for the New York Giants as they selected Duke quarterback Daniel Jones with the No. 6 overall pick of the NFL Draft.

The Giants had long been linked to Duke quarterback Daniel Jones, but most didn’t expect that they would pull the trigger with the No. 6 overall pick. A front office that has made questionable move after questionable move this offseason continued that trend by selecting the Blue Devils quarterback over Ohio State’s Dwayne Haskins.

The allure of Jones seems to stem around him playing for noted quarterback whisperer David Cutcliffe, who groomed both Peyton and long-time Giants starter Eli Manning in college. Jones doesn’t enter the NFL with the college pedigree or the upside of either of the Manning brothers, though.

Jones completed under 60 percent of his passes in three years as the starter in Durham, and while he has the size at 6-foot-5, he doesn’t have the ideal arm strength that you would expect from a quarterback that tall.

The advanced stats are even worse. SB Nation’s Bill Connelly wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago outlining what the ceiling is for NFL quarterbacks based off of their college stats. He argues, with plenty of compelling evidence, that quarterbacks won’t outperform their college numbers at the next level.

To be among the top-tier of quarterbacks, Connelly argues that you want a quarterback with a career success rate of 49 percent. Success rate is measured by gaining 50 percent of required yardage on first down, 70 percent on second, and 100 percent on third. Jones’s career success rate at Duke was 39 percent.

It’s been a strange year for the Giants. New York passed on a quarterback in last season’s draft to instead take Saquon Barkley with the No. 2 overall pick. They handed Odell Beckham Jr. a massive contract extension only to turn around and trade him this offseason to the Browns.

Now they passed on the consensus top quarterback available in Haskins to reach on Jones. I don’t think that pick would have made sense at No. 17 either, but it would have been a lot more defensible to take him there rather than massively reach at No. 6.

Jones is unlikely to be asked to play much right away for the Giants as Eli Manning still figures to be the team’s starting quarterback next season. Even with the benefit of getting to learn from a quarterback with a similar background, it’s hard to come up with much of a rationale for this selection.

This could be looked back on in a few years as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of the NFL Draft.

Grade: F