The rookie plays like a linebacker at quarterback. His reckless style is costing his teammates and coaches as well as himself

Jaxson Dart wants you to know something: this is real football. It’s not soccer or flag. It’s tackle football, the kind where quarterbacks go airborne. After taking the latest in a growing compilation of bone-crushing hits, Dart brushed himself off and delivered a post-game sermon on toughness. “We’re not playing soccer,” he said. “You’re going to get hit. Things happen.”

Yet these “things” continue to happen to Dart at an alarming rate. In his eight NFL starts, he has absorbed as many unnecessary hits as any rookie quarterback in recent memory. On Monday night, Dart took another heavy hit near the sideline in the first quarter of the Giants’ 33-15 loss to the Patriots. Dart scrambled out of the pocket on second-and-13 and ran for a first down. As he approached the sideline, Dart could have stepped out and gained fewer yards while still moving the chains. Instead, he braced, lowered his shoulder and was sent soaring through the air by Patriots linebacker Christian Elliss.

The hit left Peyton Manning, covering the game alongside his brother Eli, speechless. “Obviously, he told me he would run out of bounds if he was near the sideline,” Eli Manning said. “He lied to me.”

Dart’s recklessness has become the defining tension of his young career. He plays like a linebacker in a quarterback’s body. There is an old-school charm to his style, a kind of throwback bravado that a fanbase quickly falls in love with. Coaches love it, too, until they remember their job security depends on the quarterback remaining conscious.

In another hapless Giants season, Dart has been one of the few sources of promise. His dynamism has brought a jolt to an otherwise moribund offense. And that’s what a team expects when they trade up to draft a quarterback in the first round. But the physical cost has been too steep.

It’s not just the rah-rah coaches or macho fans who love his yards-at-all-costs attitude, either. There is a segment of former players who see Dart’s recklessness as laudable, as a young quarterback on a struggling team fighting for everything. “I don’t know when it became OK for us to tell a player to be less competitive,” ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky said in the aftermath of Dart’s latest hit.

But Orlovsky is wrong. A quarterback refusing to embrace contact is not weakness. It’s about understanding the stakes, acknowledging that for his team to have a chance, he needs to stay upright.

Dart’s style is dangerous. It’s a danger to himself, his long-term health and the future of the Giants. There’s a sense that if a quarterback plays with the mindset of the other 21 players on the field, the guys in his huddle will rally around him. But, more than anything, the rest of the locker room want him on the field. They have mortgages to pay, and contracts to earn. Their own careers – the hits they take and the sacrifices they make – rest on the starting quarterback being fit.

Toughness in a quarterback is admirable, but availability is priceless. Too often this season, Dart has missed snaps and games due to taking unnecessary punishment. He hasn’t just absorbed hits, he’s dished them out.

We know more than ever about the consequences of blows to the head. The league has made significant strides in reducing the overall volume of concussions during games. Repetitive head impacts are baked into the sport, with long-term consequences like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) an endemic part of the game. In the past year alone, nine former and current NFL players under the age of 48 have died, according to The Nation. Of those nine, seven were the result of suicide or undisclosed reasons. We can never say for sure that CTE led to all seven of those deaths, but they hint at the long-term damage repetitive head impacts can cause, let alone the immediate and long-lasting effects of sustaining a single concussion or multiple concussive blows within weeks.

But Dart has continually scoffed at the idea that he should change his style. “I watch quarterbacks who play kinda like me around the league,” Dart said after the Patriots game. “I watch how Josh Allen plays, I watch how Patrick Mahomes plays. They take hits, too. I’m not an anomaly here.”

Every quarterback takes hits. But there’s a difference between taking them and chasing them.

The Elliss hit did not trigger the concussion protocol. But it’s a place Dart has found himself too frequently in his young career. Allen has sustained one documented head injury during his career. In college and the pros, Mahomes has had three documented concussions in 12 years. Dart has already been in the league’s concussion protocol four times in his rookie season, including preseason. A hit in Chicago ruled him out for two weeks with a concussion, his first documented case in the NFL.

For Dart, this is nothing new. It’s how he’s always played. During the pre-draft cycle, the quarterback sat down with Jon Gruden for his show The QB Class. Gruden, infatuated with Dart’s potential, treated him like a parent scolding a toddler. “You’re a reckless son of a bitch,” Gruden said. “You’re kind of like Evel Knievel.” Dart grinned, because of course he did. He thought it was a compliment.

Jaxson Dart wants you to know something: this is real football. It’s not soccer or flag. It’s tackle football, the kind where quarterbacks go airborne. After taking the latest in a growing compilation of bone-crushing hits, Dart brushed himself off and delivered a post-game sermon on toughness. “We’re not playing soccer,” he said. “You’re going to get hit. Things happen.”

Yet these “things” continue to happen to Dart at an alarming rate. In his eight NFL starts, he has absorbed as many unnecessary hits as any rookie quarterback in recent memory. On Monday night, Dart took another heavy hit near the sideline in the first quarter of the Giants’ 33-15 loss to the Patriots. Dart scrambled out of the pocket on second-and-13 and ran for a first down. As he approached the sideline, Dart could have stepped out and gained fewer yards while still moving the chains. Instead, he braced, lowered his shoulder and was sent soaring through the air by Patriots linebacker Christian Elliss.

The hit left Peyton Manning, covering the game alongside his brother Eli, speechless. “Obviously, he told me he would run out of bounds if he was near the sideline,” Eli Manning said. “He lied to me.”

Dart’s recklessness has become the defining tension of his young career. He plays like a linebacker in a quarterback’s body. There is an old-school charm to his style, a kind of throwback bravado that a fanbase quickly falls in love with. Coaches love it, too, until they remember their job security depends on the quarterback remaining conscious.

In another hapless Giants season, Dart has been one of the few sources of promise. His dynamism has brought a jolt to an otherwise moribund offense. And that’s what a team expects when they trade up to draft a quarterback in the first round. But the physical cost has been too steep.

It’s not just the rah-rah coaches or macho fans who love his yards-at-all-costs attitude, either. There is a segment of former players who see Dart’s recklessness as laudable, as a young quarterback on a struggling team fighting for everything. “I don’t know when it became OK for us to tell a player to be less competitive,” ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky said in the aftermath of Dart’s latest hit.

But Orlovsky is wrong. A quarterback refusing to embrace contact is not weakness. It’s about understanding the stakes, acknowledging that for his team to have a chance, he needs to stay upright.

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Dart’s style is dangerous. It’s a danger to himself, his long-term health and the future of the Giants. There’s a sense that if a quarterback plays with the mindset of the other 21 players on the field, the guys in his huddle will rally around him. But, more than anything, the rest of the locker room want him on the field. They have mortgages to pay, and contracts to earn. Their own careers – the hits they take and the sacrifices they make – rest on the starting quarterback being fit.

Toughness in a quarterback is admirable, but availability is priceless. Too often this season, Dart has missed snaps and games due to taking unnecessary punishment. He hasn’t just absorbed hits, he’s dished them out.

We know more than ever about the consequences of blows to the head. The league has made significant strides in reducing the overall volume of concussions during games. Repetitive head impacts are baked into the sport, with long-term consequences like Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) an endemic part of the game. In the past year alone, nine former and current NFL players under the age of 48 have died, according to The Nation. Of those nine, seven were the result of suicide or undisclosed reasons. We can never say for sure that CTE led to all seven of those deaths, but they hint at the long-term damage repetitive head impacts can cause, let alone the immediate and long-lasting effects of sustaining a single concussion or multiple concussive blows within weeks.

But Dart has continually scoffed at the idea that he should change his style. “I watch quarterbacks who play kinda like me around the league,” Dart said after the Patriots game. “I watch how Josh Allen plays, I watch how Patrick Mahomes plays. They take hits, too. I’m not an anomaly here.”

Every quarterback takes hits. But there’s a difference between taking them and chasing them.

The Elliss hit did not trigger the concussion protocol. But it’s a place Dart has found himself too frequently in his young career. Allen has sustained one documented head injury during his career. In college and the pros, Mahomes has had three documented concussions in 12 years. Dart has already been in the league’s concussion protocol four times in his rookie season, including preseason. A hit in Chicago ruled him out for two weeks with a concussion, his first documented case in the NFL.

For Dart, this is nothing new. It’s how he’s always played. During the pre-draft cycle, the quarterback sat down with Jon Gruden for his show The QB Class. Gruden, infatuated with Dart’s potential, treated him like a parent scolding a toddler. “You’re a reckless son of a bitch,” Gruden said. “You’re kind of like Evel Knievel.” Dart grinned, because of course he did. He thought it was a compliment.