The New York Giants made a change under center during their bye week, announcing they would be benching incumbent starter Daniel Jones in favor of Tommy DeVito. New York’s season is going nowhere fast, and the team would be on the hook for many additional millions of dollars if Jones got hurt down the stretch due to the injury guarantees in his contract, so the move makes sense.
Based on his play last year, it’s almost certain that DeVito is not the team’s long-term answer under center, either. We don’t yet know who that player will be. We do know, though, that the next quarterback will have a bona fide No. 1 receiver on hand in Malik Nabers.
Nabers was asked Thursday what, exactly, he would be looking for in the team’s next quarterback. “I don’t want anything. I want the ball,” Nabers said, via SNY. “As long as you can get me the ball, we’re good.”
If all Nabers wants is the damn ball, well, he’s getting it.
To date, Nabers has been targeted on 31.6% of his routes and 28.9% of the Giants’ team pass attempts. Those figures rank third and fourth, respectively, among all players who have run at least 100 routes this season, via Tru Media. Additionally, his 94 targets through his first nine career games are the third most since 1992, which was the first season that targets were tracked as an official stat. Only Terry Glenn (100) and Puka Nacua (96) had more.
In other words, it would be pretty difficult for Nabers to be seeing any more of the ball than he already is. And it’s not like he’s getting an unusual amount of uncatchable balls. The off-target throw rate on passes in his direction is 10.9%, via Tru Media, which is actually 2% lower than the league average of 12.9% on passes intended for wide receivers.
We’ll see if those trends stick throughout the rest of the season with DeVito under center. And we’ll see if they continue next season and beyond, with whomever the Giants identify as their quarterback of the future. But it’s hard to deny that so far this year, Nabers has been getting what he wants — even if Jones’ play was generally lacking.
