New York Giants quarterback Daniel Jones' 4-year, $160 million contract extension is not even a year old, but the way that the 2023 season has gone in New York so far has cast even more doubt than there already was on whether the Giants made a critical, franchise-altering error when they signed Jones to a deal that made him one of the ten highest-paid quarterbacks in the league.

Even before the disastrous start to the season and Jones' eventual ACL tear, there was a vocal majority in the media who looked at this extension and thought it was flat-out nuts that the G-Men would give Daniel Jones this kind of long-term money when he had one season of above-average QB play under his belt. One of the few folks who wasn't a naysayer was former Giants QB, and two-time Super Bowl MVP, Eli Manning, who offered an excited reaction to the extension in the moment. Surprisingly, even after months of struggle, so many sacks, and various injuries, Eli Manning still backs Daniel Jones and sees him as the quarterback of the future in New York.

“You still gotta trust your quarterback. He's going to come back. He's going to be healthy. He works hard. He's a great teammate. He does all the intangible things really, really well.”

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Now I'm certainly not in the position to be able to offer much of a rebuttal on the quality of a quarterback when the person I'm rebuffing is a Manning. They know just a smidge more about the position than I do. But I do know that both Peyton and Eli Manning were coached in college by David Cutcliffe, and Cutcliffe was also Daniel Jones' coach at Duke. I also know that Eli Manning tends to speak very highly not only of the team he won two Super Bowls with, but also the quarterback who replaced him in New York.

It will be hard for the Giants to move on from Jones when they've invested so much in him, but I don't get the sense that Brian Daboll is the kind of coach who is going to wait around and give Jones an extended chance to prove he can build on a career-best 2022 season when 2023 started so poorly.