Hiring John Harbaugh changed the direction of the New York Giants’ offseason, but the bigger assignment now sits right in front of him and his staff: get Jaxson Dart on the fastest possible track to becoming the quarterback his rookie season suggested he can be.
That’s why Dart sits at No. 1 on the Giants’ list of most important players for 2026. There was never much suspense about that.
The Giants are again in familiar territory. They drafted Daniel Jones sixth overall in 2019 to be the next franchise quarterback after Eli Manning. Last year, they traded up and took Dart 25th overall, hoping he would become the kind of top-end quarterback Jones ultimately never proved to be - the sort of player who could drag the franchise out of the losing stretch it has been stuck in since the 2011 Super Bowl.
Jones flashed plenty in his first season. In 2019, he threw 24 touchdown passes, still the best mark of his career, was picked off 12 times, posted an 87.7 passer rating and showed he could make plays with his legs.
The problem, beyond the usual growing pains of learning the NFL game, was the turnover issue. He fumbled too often.
Jones later helped the Giants reach the playoffs and win a game in 2022, but the situation unraveled after that. Injuries, coaching changes, a thin supporting cast and poor play all piled up, and the Giants moved on from him midseason in 2024 before starting over with Dart last season.
Now comes the part where the organization finds out which direction this story goes.
Harbaugh has done this before. The first quarterback Baltimore drafted after he arrived in 2008 was Joe Flacco, and the Ravens won a Super Bowl with him in 2012. Lamar Jackson was met with plenty of doubt when Baltimore took him 32nd overall in 2018, and he has since won two MVPs and been a three-time All-Pro.
Harbaugh didn’t win a Super Bowl in eight seasons with Jackson, but he still gets credit for helping both quarterbacks grow into what they became.
He has always been a coach who talks about traits. And when he discussed quarterback development at the NFL Scouting Combine, he made clear there is no neat formula for turning talent into production.
“Well, to me it starts with the ability to make plays,” Harbaugh said at the NFL Scouting Combine when I asked him about developing quarterbacks. “Your quarterback, you watch all the games, you’ll see the quarterback is making a difference one way or another. So it just takes an exceptional level of talent, play-making ability, awareness, grit, all those different things.
“Sometimes it’s arm strength, sometimes it’s accuracy, sometimes it’s almost always the ability to get out of the pocket and make a play. So all those things that Jackson has that I’m excited about, it’ll be fun. It’ll be fun to get with him and do it one more time.”
Dart’s rookie year gave the Giants enough to dream on. But it also showed exactly where the work begins.
He has to get more patient in the pocket. According to Pro Football Focus, he led the league in self-inflicted pressure last season, which points to a quarterback who didn’t always trust what he saw.
He also has to keep improving his understanding of defenses, work through his second and third reads and throw with anticipation.
There’s more. He needs to get more comfortable under center and improve on play-action, where PFF data put him among the league’s worst quarterbacks in 2025. He also has to make better decisions as a runner, something Dart himself has acknowledged by talking about the need to protect himself.
His deep-ball accuracy wasn’t strong by the numbers, though four drops on 50 throws of 20 yards or more did not help.
Nick Baumgardner of The Athletic recently broke down the parts of Dart’s game that already work and the areas that still need polish. The cleanest way to frame it is this: Dart has plenty of talent, but he has to learn how to play quarterback with less dependence on his athleticism.
That’s not unusual for a young passer. It’s the job.
Brian Daboll was the one pounding the table for Dart a year ago, and there was a lot of talk about his reputation for developing quarterbacks. The Dart-Daboll pairing seemed to fit. But Daboll is gone now, and head coaching requires a lot more than just handling the quarterback room.
So the responsibility has shifted to Harbaugh and a staff built with this project in mind. Offensive coordinator Matt Nagy worked with Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City and had success with Mitchell Trubisky in Chicago.
Quarterbacks coach Brian Callahan has worked with Peyton Manning, Matthew Stafford, Joe Burrow and Derek Carr. Senior offensive assistant Greg Roman has been an NFL offensive coordinator four times.
That gives the Giants a veteran group around a young quarterback who still needs molding. If they get Dart right, everything else becomes possible. If they don’t, the future looks a lot like the recent past.
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