Can Daniel Jones Pull Off An Encore?
The Giants paid their QB after a breakout year, but history says a regression is coming.
Tuesday afternoon’s deadline for franchise and transition tags made for a flurry of NFL roster moves, and none might have been more fascinating than the four-year, $160 million contract extension (with $82 million guaranteed) that the New York Giants agreed to with quarterback Daniel Jones. While that deal didn’t elevate Jones to the absolute top of the QB contract list, it now ties Jones with Dak Prescott and Matthew Stafford for the sixth-richest active contract at the position. It also means the Giants and Jones will rise or fall together for at least the next three seasons, for better or worse.
Jones had his long-awaited breakout season last year, timing things perfectly to get paid with this new extension. He set new career highs in passing yards (3,205), completions (317), passer rating (92.5), adjusted net YPA (5.89), rushing yards (708) and rushing TDs (7), and a new low in interceptions (5). He led New York to a 9-6-1 record as starter, and his Approximate Value (AV) of 15 shattered his previous career best of 9. With Jones at the helm, the G-Men returned to the playoffs and even won a game for the first time since 2011. By all standards, it was a banner year for Jones, the type of season New York was expecting when it drafted him No. 6 overall in 2019.
But little in Jones’s previous three seasons suggested he would be worth keeping around as the team’s long-term starter, much less giving the sixth-biggest active QB contract to. Nearly 40% of Jones’s total career AV came just last season, which can be read as either a big breakout by an improving passer, or a fluke year that will be followed by a hard fall back to earth.
Which will it be? Let’s look at other historical QBs with similar arcs over the course of their first four NFL seasons. Specifically, we’ll look at AV for every QB season going back to the start of the Super Bowl era in 1966, and find the players who had the smallest squared errors against Jones’s AV in each of their first four years. Then we’ll look at how the 10 most similar QBs to Jones through four years did in Years 5-6, to get a sense for what we can expect from Jones going forward.
Jones was far from the first historical QB to have a middling first three years and find a new level of play in Year 4. But as we can see from the chart above, many of those fourth-year wonders tended to quickly regress back where they started from. Of the 10 QBs most similar to Jones, only two (Warren Moon and Doug Williams) were as good or better in Year 5 than in Year 4. And only three (Moon, Drew Bledsoe and Ben Roethlisberger) continued to be double-digit AV performers in both of the following seasons. (With the caveat that Williams sat out all of what would have been his sixth season over a contract dispute, then moved to the USFL.)
Overall, the average Jones-like QB rose from 9.5 AV in Year 3 to 13.6 AV in Year 4, only to produce 8.9 AV and 9.0 AV in Years 5-6, respectively. Jones, of course, was slightly better than the average QB on this list during his breakout, which might suggest he has greater potential to sustain his performance going forward — or at least, more room to fall before it becomes a true problem for the NYG. But by the same token, Jones was worse than the list’s average (25 total AV versus an average of 26.8) during Years 1-3 of his career, so he could also have a lower baseline to regress back to.
Either way, the history of similar quarterbacks suggests that the Giants locked themselves in with a guy whose career path is due for a dip. Does that mean the contract was a plainly horrible idea? Given how hard it is to reliably find competent quarterbacking, not necessarily. (As a comparison point, Kyler Murray just delivered a paltry 8 AV the year after signing a contract much larger than Jones did. Figuring out who to hitch your franchise wagon to is hard!) Jones played well last season, and is still young enough — he’ll be 26 next year — that he could potentially keep improving. But don’t be shocked if he looks more like the QB he was before the breakout, and if the Giants come back down to earth with him.
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