From Saquon Barkley to Daniel Jones, the Giants keep giving Eagles fans reasons to be thankful

The trouble with covering and writing about the Eagles, vis-à-vis the rest of the NFC East, is that it doesn’t take much to sound like an unabashed homer. Context is everything, and the under-the-dome nature of the Philadelphia region can strip away some or all of that context when it comes to criticizing Jeffrey Lurie, Howie Roseman, Nick Sirianni, or any of the Eagles’ players.

Did Roseman waste as much as $51 million by signing Bryce Huff? Sure looks that way. Does Jalen Hurts often fail to notice wide-open receivers? Yeah, he does. Should Sirianni tone down his midgame and postgame behavior? Most definitely. It’s more than fair, even necessary, to point out these flaws and errors and admonish the guilty parties. But then you take a look at the Dallas Cowboys, at the Washington Commanders, and — most recently and egregiously — at the New York Giants, and you remember that a coach who tends to puff his chest week after week because his team keeps winning is a problem that the Eagles’ closest rivals would love to have.

Take the Giants. (Insert cringy Henny Youngman joke here.) They’re 2-8, and they announced Monday, through ESPN’s Adam Schefter and various other league-approved information brokers, that they were benching quarterback Daniel Jones. More than benching him, actually. He will be their third-string QB, behind Tommy DeVito and Drew Lock and presumably behind Eli Manning, Phil Simms, and Jeff Hostetler, should any of those three choose to come out of retirement.

The reason for the depth of Jones’ demotion becomes apparent once you become familiar with one of the provisions in the four-year contract, worth as much as $160 million, that he signed in 2023: Should Jones suffer a significant injury sometime over this season’s final seven weeks, he would be guaranteed $23 million of the $30 million that the Giants were scheduled to pay him next season. By keeping him on the sideline — or, if they really want to be careful, bundling him in Icelandic wool and locking him in a walk-in freezer — they can get out from under his contract this offseason at a cost of $22.2 million in dead salary-cap space. That sounds like a lot, but when you consider that it’s six times the cap space that Saquon Barkley is taking up for the Eagles this season, you recognize that MY GOD HOW BADLY DID THE GIANTS FOUL THIS UP?

Pretty badly. If you’re looking for reasons that the Giants are on their way to their 10th losing season in the last 12 years and the Eagles are 8-2 and chasing supremacy in the NFC East again, take these thoughts and factors under advisement.

The Giants drafted Barkley and Jones in back-to-back years: Barkley in 2018 with the No. 2 overall pick, Jones in 2019 with the No. 6 overall pick. Each selection was risky in its own way.

No one questioned Barkley’s talent or character, but he played a position, running back, that at the time was not considered as intrinsically valuable as some others. You probably know them by now: quarterback, offensive tackle, edge rusher. The Giants still had to fortify those spots, too, and using such a high pick on Barkley prevented them from adding a terrific player or players (if they had elected to trade the pick) in one or more of them.

» READ MORE: Jake Elliott’s bad night was a kick in the pants to Eagles fans. They shouldn’t worry.

Drafting Jones was an equally fraught decision — not because the Giants didn’t need a quarterback, but because they were pretty much alone in thinking Jones was worth the No. 6 pick. Essentially, they were banking that Jones would be the Bizarro Tom Brady, that instead of stumbling into a franchise quarterback (like the New England Patriots had in the sixth round of the 2000 draft), they would prove themselves smarter than every other team in the league. Betting on your own brilliance is an awfully arrogant way to do business, and the Giants paid the price for it.

It’s instructive to compare how the Giants approached the core question that any franchise must ask and answer — Should we sign our young quarterback to a long-term, big-money contract? — and how the Eagles approached it with Hurts’ predecessor, Carson Wentz.

The Giants gave Jones four years to provide any indication that he would develop into an “elite quarterback.” However one defines the term, Jones was never close to it. Yet they went all-in on him anyway, placing the franchise tag on Barkley for the 2023 season, effectively choosing a below-average QB over the team’s best and most popular player.

The Eagles signed Wentz to a four-year deal after his third season — and after he had been the NFL MVP front-runner in 2017. He had at least offered everyone a glimpse of greatness. But once the Eagles drafted Hurts, once Wentz and the team went through that disastrous 2020 season, once he made it clear he didn’t want to be here anymore, the Eagles treated him like what he was — a sunk cost — and acted accordingly, trading him to the Indianapolis Colts.

The point is, a team has to see a player for who he is, not who they want him to be. The Eagles were late, but eventually they saw Wentz clearly, moved on, and gave Hurts a shot. When it came to Jones, the Giants never took off their rose-colored glasses.

» READ MORE: The Eagles meet a standard that the Cowboys and the rest of the NFC East can’t reach

Even if the Giants had moved on from Jones earlier and kept Barkley, the odds are good they’d be just as lousy as they are now.

It has been nearly five years since Manning last started a game for them. In that time, they’ve shown no sign that they can find and/or develop a franchise quarterback or create the kind of conditions that would allow any QB to thrive, the kind of conditions that Hurts enjoys. Barkley’s career would be wasting away if he were still in New York, and a million John Mara memes wouldn’t have changed that truth.