Big Blue View
Dart takes the reins on first day of rookie minicamp
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Jaxson Dart was already leading his New York Giants teammates, though many of those are only temporary, before stepping on the field for Friday’s first of two rookie minicamp practices.
Dart and his teammates received the script for Friday’s abbreviated 7-on-7 session during a Thursday meeting. On the bus back to the hotel following the meeting, Dart gathered “as many guys as I could together on the offensive side of the ball and go through it and teach everybody, making sure that we’re all on the same page.”
“As a quarterback, you’re the one that runs the ship when you’re out there,” Dart said. “If you don’t know the ins and outs of everything, you’re not going to have everybody around you prepared. I think that’s super important.
“It’s very important to have that mindset coming to work each and every day. I think that also raises the bar for everybody around you. I think that if you want to be a great team and you want to compete at the highest level, that’s definitely how you have to be as a quarterback.”
Before practice, head coach Brian Daboll tried to play down what we might or not see from Dart and his teammates on the field.
“This is first practice, so there’s going to be mistakes,” Daboll said. “You learn from the mistakes. You teach off of them, come back the next day, you build off of it. There’ll be some good things. There’ll be some bad things. It’s the first day of camp. He hasn’t thrown with any of these guys. He’s calling plays in our system for the first time, but same as all the other positions. They have a lot to learn.”
There were mistakes. The first two passes Dart threw were dropped. He finished 8 of 10 in two sessions.
“I just think I’m really confident in my preparation every day. I feel like any time I step on the field, I don’t have doubts when I play,” Dart said. “I think that that comes from taking the time to really understand the scheme and what I’m doing and why is a play called to execute a certain way.
“That’s something that I take pride on. Then, as a quarterback, you’re only as good as the guys around you. You want to make sure that everybody’s on the same page and everybody has that same preparation aspect of making sure that everything’s down to a T and is done the right way.”
Dart, incidentally, was the only one of the Giants’ seven draft picks to participate in the 7-on-7 drills. The rest of the draftees only did individual drills.
Much has been made of Daboll’s ability to work with quarterbacks, and there will be pressure on the coach to develop Dart into a franchise-caliber quarterback. On Friday, he wasn’t...
