No matter what happens from here, Daniel Jones will always be part of an ultra-exclusive club. The NFL has been conducting its annual draft of college players since 1936. A year later, Sammy Baugh became the first quarterback ever drafted in the first round, when the Redskins drafted him out of Texas Christian.
It can be argued, quite reasonably, that every club for the rest of time has tried to do precisely what Washington did that day at the Hotel Lincoln (later the Milford Plaza, now Row NYC Hotel) on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street: identify a franchise quarterback and pluck him out of the early portion of the draft. Slingin’ Sammy was the prototype, collecting almost 22,000 passing yards and 187 touchdowns on the way to the Hall of Fame.
Since then, pro football teams have expended 168 other first-round picks on quarterbacks, each of them hoping that they’ve selected another Sid Luckman (1939) or Bobby Layne (1948) or Terry Bradshaw (1970) or Peyton Manning (1998), hoping to avoid another Ernie Case (1947) or Don Allard (1959) or JaMarcus Russell (2007) or Johnny Manziel (2014).
Fourteen times New York’s teams have dipped their toe in those critical waters, starting with Paul Governali, whom the old Brooklyn Dodgers took out of Columbia in 1943 (though by the time he debuted in 1946, the Dodgers — later the Tigers — had vanished from the NFL landscape, so he never actually played a down here).
Jones is No. 14. Where will be fit in with the others? Let’s take a look at the list (ranked according to quality of career, unofficially, by a blue-ribbon panel of one, me, since that’s more fun that doing it chronologically):
1. Eli Manning (2004, 1st overall): Yes, technically, the Giants picked Philip Rivers three slots later, but the wheels were already in motion to fulfill Ernie Accorsi’s vision and plant Peyton’s kid brother in the Giants’ backfield for the next 15 years (and counting). Two Super Bowls, 55,981 passing yards and 360 touchdowns later, it is easy to anoint Eli as the greatest No. 1 quarterback in New York’s football history, and probably the best to ever play the position here (though Charley Conerly, Y.A. Tittle and a few of the next few names could certainly earn a podium at that debate).
2. Phil Simms (1979, 7th overall): Simms is the easy comparison for Jones, since he was greeted with less than open arms when George Young made him his first-ever first-round pick, and because he absorbed years of boos and the indignity of being benched behind Scott Brunner before having one of the best championship games a quarterback has ever had in Super Bowl XXI (22-for-25, 3 TDs). If he hadn’t missed Supe XXV with an ankle injury he would certainly have plenty of ammo to challenge Eli for all-time supremacy.
3. Joe Namath (1965, 1st overall AFL):
The more time passes, the more people are inclined to look merely at Namath’s career numbers (173 TDs, 220 INTs, 50.1% completions) and wonder what all the fuss was about. But if you saw Joe Willie in his prime, saw him guarantee (and then deliver) victory in Super Bowl III, saw how he owned New York and how his arm would bedazzle even as he played on some woeful teams in his twilight, you know why Broadway Joe’s bright light never dimmed, and why it shines still.
4. Ken O’Brien (1983, 24th overall): The problem, of course, is that O’Brien will forever be compared to the man picked three spots after him, Dan Marino, and he will come up lacking every time. That obscures the fact that in one of the greatest two-tear stretch the Jets have enjoyed since Super Bowl III, when they went 21-11 in 1985-86, O’Brien in that small window played the position better than any Jet ever has (7,578 yards, 61.5%, 50 touchdowns, 28 picks).
5. Richard Todd (1976, 6th overall): In memory, the only thing Jets fans tend to remember about Todd was his propensity for throwing the ball to the wrong-colored uniform. But Todd was also largely responsible for another fine two-year window in team history since 1969, in 1981 and ’82, though the trip to the AFC Championship Game will forever be sabotaged by two words: A.J. Duhe.
6. Chad Pennington (2000, 18th overall): There was a brief, shining moment in time – specifically Jan. 4-12, 2003 – when Pennington was hyped as the second coming of two Joes – Namath and Montana. He’d thrashed Peyton Manning and the Colts 41-0 in the first round of the playoffs and evoked Namath’s cool and Montana’s mastery of precision passing. Then the Raiders brought him tumbling back to earth, eight months later he hurt his arm for the first time, and one of the great “what-if” careers was hatched.
7. Mark Sanchez (2009, 5th overall): Decades from now, someone will look at Sanchez’s record, see two AFC Championship Games by the time he was 24, and decide that MUST be a typo. It wasn’t. He did that. He free-fell thereafter, but he will always have 2009 and 2010.
8. Dave Brown (1992, 1st overall in supplemental draft): He wasn’t the worst quarterback in Giants history. But he had two things working against him. First, it was his looming presence that hastened a premature end to Simms’ career. And the fact is, he was 23-30 as a starter from 1994-97, and so symbolizes, fairly or unfairly, the woebegotten bridge between eras of Big Blue prosperity.
9. Sam Darnold (2018, 3rd overall):
Well, the fact that Darnold sits here after
tells you a little about New York’s quarterback draft history. Certainly there is reason to be hopeful that he’ll rise higher on this list, perhaps rapidly. But that’s still to be determined.
10. Travis Tidwell (1950, 7th overall): The good news: he was undefeated as the Giants’ starting quarterback! The bad: that encompasses only four games (3-0-1) in 1950 and ’51. Also, you may want to wear a helmet when I tell you: the Giants used their first-round pick on him after Tidwell was MVP of the 1950 Senior Bowl, the same award Daniel Jones would claim 69 years later. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
11. Lee Grosscup (1959, 10th overall): His career consisted of eight games (no starts) with the Giants and eight games (four starts, 1-3) with the old AFL Titans before he became a noted color commentator for ABC, most notably as one of the first football partners of a young play-by-play man named Al Michaels.
12. Paul Governali (1943, 4th overall): Bronx-born and the Heisman runner-up while at Columbia, Governali eschewed the Dodgers in both football and baseball to enlist in the Marines. He ended a three-year career with the Giants in 1948.
13. Sandy Stephens (1962, 5th overall, AFL): A sad product of his times. After a brilliant career at Minnesota which included the 1960 national championship, he was picked by both the Jets and the Browns in the NFL draft. But he was also African-American, and neither team was willing to let him try out as a quarterback so he opted for the CFL instead.
