Jaxson Dart Just Uttered the Words Rich Has Long Been Waiting for the Giants QB to Say!!!

Rich has spent the past year asking Jaxson Dart, through television, to learn when to slide. The new Giants quarterback finally answered him directly in a media availability this week. Rich's reaction was somewhere between a celebration and a relief sigh.

The setup, Rich explained, has been the same all year. Dart took over for Russell Wilson last season and immediately beat a previously undefeated Chargers team. He showed real moxie. He showed legs. He showed arm strength. He developed real chemistry with rookie running back Cam Skattebo, with Rich comparing them to a Tango and Cash partnership.

What he refused to do was protect himself.

"Every single time he would do it and you'd hear him say I'm going to keep doing it," Rich said. Then the Patriots blew him up on the sideline. Then the Commanders coaches got caught on Hard Knocks acknowledging Dart's tendency to put himself at risk. Then Dart kept saying it was just his style and the reason he had made it this far.

This week, talking to reporters, Dart finally said something different.

"That was one of like our first meetings with coach Callahan," Dart said. "Just pulling up my tape and going over situationally, is it worth the risk here in this situation. That's what we talk about a ton, just situationally being smart."

Rich's face lit up.

Dart added the most important sentence.

"I just hated that time of not being out there with my teammates," Dart said. "I obviously understand that the most important thing is to be out there."

Brian Callahan, the former Tennessee Titans head coach and Giants new quarterbacks coach, just earned, in Rich's framing, an early-running candidacy for assistant coach of the year. Whatever Callahan did in the meetings, it worked.

John Harbaugh's read on his new quarterback, played later in the segment, supported the change. Harbaugh called Dart "genuine," competitive, charismatic, and a hard worker who wants to be great.

"This dude works, and he works at it, and he wants to be really, he wants to be great," Harbaugh said.

Rich, halfway out of his chair, said this is exactly what every Giants fan has been waiting to hear.

The cast acknowledged the differences between the Harbaugh brothers in their compliments. Jim Harbaugh, asked the same question, would have gone considerably more poetic. Rich played both bits in his head and admitted John's restraint was the more believable version.

The deeper basketball-style read Rich landed on was this. Dart is allowed to keep his ceiling. He just has to learn the gray area, the white stripe of the sideline, when to slide, when to pull up. Maturing as a quarterback is not the same as turning down his style.

The cast pushed TJ for a Giants concern level, on a scale of one to ten, from his vantage point as the room's resident Cowboys fan. TJ, with appropriate reluctance, said eight. He immediately disavowed the answer for record-keeping purposes. The Giants, he noted, win a championship roughly once per decade, and the roster moves Joe Schoen made this offseason were real.

Dart enters Year 2 with four career wins and a 3-to-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio, which Rich pointed out is, on the math, better than Dak Prescott's. The Vegas win total for the Giants matches the Steelers at 7.5.

Rich, finally, has the Dart soundbite he wanted. Sunday Night Football versus the Cowboys in Week 1 will be the first audition.