EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 New York Giants head coach John Harbaugh believes the football should not hit the ground very often during unpadded, non-contact spring practices.<\/p>\n
Harbaugh, then, could not have been thrilled with the offensive performance he saw on Monday.<\/p>\n
There were a couple of highlight plays. A long, contested-catch touchdown by rookie Malachi Fields, drafted to make those kinds of plays, was encouraging. A red zone touchdown pass from Jaxson Dart to Isaiah Hodgins, who made a contested grab at the goal line, was pretty. There was a nice deep shot from Jameis Winston to Jalin Hyatt.<\/p>\n
In general, though, the passing attack might be described as uninspiring.<\/p>\n
Dart threw a bad interception. He broke the pocket to his right and launched a ball for Darnell Mooney down the middle. The ball was late, short, and easily picked off by Paulson Adebo.<\/p>\n
Dart also missed several deeper throws, resulting, of course, in the ball landing on the ground. Where Harbaugh says it shouldn\u2019t be very often in these practices.<\/p>\n
It is clear that the Giants, with a new head coach in Harbaugh and offensive coordinator in Matt Nagy, are asking Dart to do some different things.<\/p>\n
Was Jaxson Dart more lucky than good as a rookie?<\/a>NY Giants mandatory minicamp takeaways: LT, Harry Carson steal the show<\/a><\/p>\n The second-year quarterback spent a fair amount of time early in Monday\u2019s practice working on dropbacks and play-action fakes from under center.<\/p>\n When Dart broke the pocket, sometimes due to pressure and sometimes due to his own indecision, assistant special teams coach T.J. Weist \u2014 at Harbaugh\u2019s direction \u2014 was quickly blowing the whistle to end the play.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can blame T.J. for that, Coach Weist. I never want that responsibility,\u201d Harbaugh said. \u201cBut he probably does blow a pretty quick whistle out there.\u201d<\/p>\n As for what he is seeing from Dart, Harbaugh offered what could be termed a mixed review.<\/p>\n \u201cI think he\u2019s adjusting really well. He looks good. I love his competitiveness. He wants to be perfect every play,\u201d Harbaugh said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a work in progress all the time. It\u2019s still fairly early. But the clock is ticking. In the team meeting, we started with \u201cSeptember\u201d by Earth, Wind & Fire. September is right around the corner. So that\u2019s what we\u2019re preparing for.\u201c<\/p>\n Is Dart missing Malik Nabers, Darius Slayton, and even Gunner Olszewski as he gains familiarity with the new group of wide receivers he is surrounded by?<\/p>\n Tight end Isaiah Likely, another of the new targets for Dart, has liked what he has seen from the quarterback.<\/p>\n \u201cYou guys see it every day. He\u2019s swaggy. He always has a smile, and he\u2019s always being competitive. Whether he makes a play or misses a play, he\u2019s going to give the next play everything he\u2019s got and try to score every time he has the ball,\u201d Likely said. \u201cWhether he\u2019s running the ball or throwing the ball or really telling everybody where to go, he\u2019s really what you look for in a starting quarterback.\u201d<\/p>\n One good thing coming out of the practices is quality competition between the wide receivers and cornerbacks, two positions where the depth is unsettled, and the fight for roster spots is real.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest challenge for us as coaches on these kinds of days is to keep them within the framework of what we\u2019re trying to do and not get too physical, right, because these are not live contact practices,\u201d Harbaugh said. \u201cSo we try to talk to them all day, and I thought they did a good job, for the most part, of trying to avoid taking it too far. But they\u2019re competitors. They want to do well.<\/p>\n \u201cThe wideouts made some catches. The DBs made some plays on the ball. It was good to see. Everybody was flying around.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. \u2014 New York Giants head coach John Harbaugh believes the football should not hit the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":914209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2067],"tags":[7,519,1917,56,1207,2321,2469,6],"class_list":["post-914208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-giants","tag-football","tag-giants","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-giants","tag-new-york-giants-news","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkgiants","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116720043554668094","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=914208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/914209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=914208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=914208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=914208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}