Of course he watched football.
A week off for Jaxson Dart did not include taking much time away.
There were games on the tube, and Dart tuned in.
It was telling but hardly surprising which matchup he mentioned as one he “loved to watch” with the Giants on their bye.
It was the Bengals-Bills, and not because the screen revealed there was a snowstorm in Buffalo.
It was Joe Burrow vs. Josh Allen.
Enough said.
“There are a lot of quarterbacks around the league who do a lot of really good things and who have been balling this year,” Dart said. “It feels good to watch those guys, kind of see the things that they’re exceptional at, elite at, and try to correlate some of their traits in your own game.”
Are there any similarities there?
It is not a stretch that some of Dart’s innate charisma — swagger, if you will — has a certain Burrow flair to it.
And it is a fact that when the Giants were scouting and studying Dart, former head coach Brian Daboll was taken with Dart in much the same way he was taken with Allen when Daboll was the offensive coordinator and the Bills were evaluating Allen.
Dart, at 6-foot-2 and 223 pounds, is big enough, for sure, but he is not a physical specimen in the mold of the 6-foot-5, 237-pound Allen.
There are no issues with Dart’s arm strength, but few can fling it further and with more velocity than the cannon-armed Allen.
As a rookie, Allen in 2018 at times had difficulty harnessing his aggressive tendencies, running and failing to protect himself too often.
He missed four games with an elbow injury.
Likewise, Dart has found it difficult to balance the risk-reward involved with when to take a hit and when to live for another play.
He missed two games with a concussion.
“Josh Allen kind of had to be that because he wasn’t as far along as a passer,” a former NFL head coach told The Post. “This kid [Dart] is a better passer than Josh was early, so he doesn’t need to do that.”
It sure felt as if Dart needed the break that the late bye week provided.
The last time he took the field, returning from a two-game absence, he was not at his best in a 33-15 loss to the Patriots in a “Monday Night Football” mismatch in Foxborough, Mass.
He looked increasingly frustrated, got knocked around and afterward said, “Definitely an embarrassing loss to lose like that.”
Dart gets another crack at it Sunday when the Giants face the Commanders at what is sure to be a cold, quite likely snowy and unquestionably a less-than-packed MetLife Stadium.
It seems like a year ago that the Giants opened their season at Washington, and their new quarterback, Russell Wilson, looked alarmingly bad in a lackluster 21-6 loss.
The season has been a massive downer for both teams.
The Giants are 2-11 and riding a seven-game losing streak.
The Commanders have failed to build on their 12-5 breakout 2024 season, falling to 3-10 and currently on an eight-game losing skid.
Though several of his older teammates who have been around this block before might have one eye on the end of the season, Dart is adamant there is a need to finish things out by finding some success.
“Yeah, absolutely, I think it’s extremely important and it’s really required for us to make sure that these last four games we really put our best foot down,” Dart said. “You preach around that your résumé is your tape, and so making sure that everybody has the right mindset, the right attention to detail to everything when it comes to their process.
“You definitely just have that message, to echo across the locker room and in the meetings and everything, just making sure that we are approaching it the right way. It’s definitely new to a lot of us, kind of just the season that we’ve kind of had up to this point. It’s definitely not fun and you just try to not be discouraged.”
