Giants Hit Rock Bottom, Demote QB Daniel Jones With $23 Million Injury Guarantee

Tommy DeVito and his local Italian gusto are back under center for the Giants—and not just because of performance. 

The team said Monday it will bench starting quarterback Daniel Jones in favor of DeVito, the third-string signal-caller, after a 2–8 start. DeVito is leap-frogging backup Drew Lock, who has played just a handful of snaps this season. DeVito’s first start this season will come Sunday against the Buccaneers at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. 

By benching Jones, the team gets to see more of DeVito, who was 3–3 as a starter in 2023 after stepping in after Jones tore his ACL, but the team saves itself from Jones’s contract extension—at least partially—by pulling him now. Head coach Brian Daboll said Lock will back up DeVito instead of Jones. Daboll declined to say whether team owners John Mara or Steve Tisch had any say in the decision to bench Jones. 

“Being around Tommy last year where he created a bit of a spark with us, that’s the reason we’re going with Tommy,” Daboll told reporters Monday. The decision came after New York was on a bye this past week.

Jones signed a four-year, $160 million contract extension in March 2023 despite being an unproven quarterback. The contract came after he tore his ACL six games into the 2023 season with just a 1–5 start to show for it. 

But the contract helps the Giants to get out of it ahead of next season—if he doesn’t trigger the 2025 injury guarantee. Should Jones fail a physical in March, $23 million of his 2025 salary gets guaranteed. Injury guarantees have factored into teams’ decisions to bench their quarterbacks in recent years; both the Broncos and Raiders dealt with it with Russell Wilson and Jimmy Garoppolo, respectively. 

If the Giants wanted to waive Jones this season, it would’ve cost them $69.3 million in dead cap, which still isn’t as bad as the NFL-record $85 million that Denver ate to waive Wilson in March. Releasing Jones after this season won’t be cheap, either. New York will have to absorb $22.2 million in dead money if it does so, but that would still be a $19 million discount versus keeping him on the roster. 

By inserting DeVito under center, the Giants will fully tank a season that has been defined by poor quarterback play and seller’s remorse after the team let star running back Saquon Barkley leave in free agency to the rival Eagles. Barkley is having a career year in Philadelphia, which is 8–2 and leads the division. 

The Giants were prepared to move on from Jones ahead of this season as shown in HBO’s offseason Hard Knocks, which featured the team. In the show, GM Joe Schoen and Daboll discuss taking LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels if he fell to them in the draft, but wound up taking wideout Malik Nabers, Daniels’s college teammate, sixth overall after three quarterbacks went in the top three. Daniels is the runaway favorite for NFL Rookie of the Year and has the Commanders in the playoff hunt for the first time in years. 

The 2025 NFL quarterback draft class boasts Miami’s Cam Ward, Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders, Alabama’s Jalen Milroe, and Texas’s Quinn Ewers among the top prospects. 

By passing over Lock, the Giants avoided some performance-based incentives he had in his contract, though they would have been hard to reach and are too cheap to have been a factor. Under Lock’s contract, he’d get paid an additional $250,000 for playing 40%, 50%, 60%, and more than 70% of the total season snaps, according to Spotrac. New York is 10 games into a 17-game season that automatically took some of the higher-end incentives off the table for Lock, which also included $500,000 bonuses if he took the majority of the team’s snaps en route to a playoff berth. 

With a 2–8 record and a benched starter, a playoff berth isn’t likely to happen regardless of who the quarterback is.