Sports

There’s a clip from last week’s dramatic Giants win over the Super Bowl champion Eagles that perfectly sums up the new mentality taking root in New York’s locker room. Rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart, fresh off throwing for one touchdown and rushing for another, spots rookie running back Cam Skattebo, and bellows like a delirious grizzly bear. Skattebo bellows back, and the two butt heads live on camera. It’s ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s glorious.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2025 New York Giants:

Dart is a longhaired SEC-by-way-of-Utah first-round slinger who leaped into the starting job when it became clear in September that Russell Wilson wasn’t a fit. He’s treating NFL football like it’s a Friday night and he’s the God of the Gridiron, right up to and including high-fiving a ref after a touchdown (see below).

Skattebo, meanwhile, is a human Church Burp, pure id who seems to live his life by the simple mantra of “what would be the most kick-ass thing to do right this moment?” The Giants’ own scouting report called Skattebo a “carnage creator," which is pretty much the best assessment you could hope for. He’s become a meme too; search for “Skattebo runs like” on your favorite social media, or just watch him throw himself into defensive lines like they owe him money:

And their names, man. Their names! If you wrote a screenplay with a blonde quarterback named “Jaxson Dart” and a swerving bowling ball named “Skattebo,” you’d get it thrown back in your face for being too on-the-nose.

Statistically, Dart and Skattebo are still building their foundations. Skattebo’s 56.3 yards per game average ranks 19th in the league, though he is tied for fifth with 24 first-down runs, and third with five rushing touchdowns. (He doesn’t get many yards, but the ones he does are important, in other words.) Dart’s progress has been slower, since the quarterback position is a scalpel to the running back’s sledgehammer. But they’re bringing a spark that can’t be measured, not even by NextGen Stats.

“They’re very competitive individuals who have a lot of pride, toughness and belief in themselves, and I think that’s important for any team when you have players like that,” head coach Brian Daboll said after the Giants upset the defending champion Eagles. “They care about their teammates, they prepare very diligently, and I trust them a lot out on the field.”

That’s the right thing for a head coach to say, but it’s not necessarily the right way to frame it. You don’t “trust” players like Dart and Skattebo, you unleash them. You let them cook, as the saying goes, until the rest of the league figures them out and until you can get them some more help, whether that’s two weeks or two seasons from now.

The Giants were once the province of true psychopaths like Lawrence Taylor and Bill Parcells, men with souls of pigskin. But their 21st-century avatar remains the vanilla-milkshake-and-mayonnaise-sandwich that is Eli Manning, a quarterback who won them two Super Bowls while studiously avoiding the escape of a single stray emotion.

New York has toiled away under a succession of Serious Football Men — Tom Coughlin, Pat Shurmur, Joe Judge, Daboll — and what has it gotten them? Just two playoff appearances and a single win in the past 13-and-counting seasons, that’s it. And those two magical Eli-led Super Bowl seasons recede farther into the distance every year.

Kathryn Riley via Getty Images

So why not give weirdness a chance? Why not lean into this strange brew of lunatic charisma for as long as it lasts? These two are wheelbarrows of social media clicks, if nothing else. Whether that translates to football success remains to be seen, but hey, nothing else has worked lately, right?

In response to one of several questions about Dart and Skattebo on Friday, Daboll gave a perfect Serious Football Man answer: “I have a lot of faith in those two young guys, I think that’s well documented,” he said. “But I want to focus more on our football team and I know that’s how they would want it too. Do their job, lunch pail mentality, improve on the things that they can improve on. But they play with an edge and they play with a style that we want our team to play with.”

Since Dart took over as starter, the Giants are 2-1, dealing two playoff-contending teams — the Chargers and Eagles — their first loss of the season. This being the Giants, of course, those two wins sandwich an inexplicable loss to one of the worst teams in the league, the New Orleans Saints.

The next seven weeks on New York’s schedule feature the Broncos, an Eagles rematch, the 49ers, the Packers, the Lions and the Patriots, with only the Bears in there as a (possible) break. That’s a lot for anyone to handle, much less a couple pups possibly visiting many of these stadiums for the first time.

There are, most likely, more blue tent visits than Big Blue wins in their future. But it’s going to be a hell of a ride, one way or another.