Vincent Carchietta-USA TODAY SportsNFL coordinators are gathering tape on DeVito, combing it for flaws. The good news for the Giants is they’re built to weather this storm, in so much as an already leaky ship can. DeVito’s passing game is very similar to Daniel Jones, the injured starter who guided this team to a Wild Card victory last winter.
Like Jones, DeVito’s passing diet consists mostly of short, high-percentage passes. Jones’ average throw distance in his resurgent 2022 was 6.4 yards downfield. DeVito clocks in at 7.1
New York is also happy to let its quarterbacks ditch plays that aren’t unfolding as planned and take off with the ball. Jones scrambled 53 times for 382 yards in last year’s unexpected winning campaign. DeVito hasn’t been quite as effective overall, but just gashed the Green Bay Packers for 71 vital yards. Those two elements are extremely useful when you’ve got poor blocking and underwhelming receivers — two resources the Giants have in spades. Those short routes and a useful run game create space for wideouts downfield, and when you pick your shots correctly you get a nice little passing chart that looks like this:
via nextgenstats.nfl.com
The question is whether DeVito can continue executing this simple, low-risk game plan. History is not kind to similar players in his situation.
Here’s a sampling of some guys who’ve emerged from their spot as overlooked draft prospects — picked in the fourth round or later — who went on to exceed expectations after being thrust into starting roles early in their careers (sorry, Josh Dobbs). It’s not exhaustive, but it covers quarterbacks since 2013 who were briefly beacons of light in a hopeless situation. We’ll take a brief look at how they started through their first four games with significant action (roughly where DeVito was before Week 14) and how they performed.
This list includes former hopeful starters like Case Keenum, Zach Mettenberger, Trevor Siemian and Mike White. There’s regression across the board for pretty much everyone but Brock Purdy. Let’s exclude him for now, since we’ll be talking about his special situation later.
Otherwise, only Minshew recorded a higher expected points added (EPA, which measures the value a player brings vs. what an average player would be expected to produce) per play after he’d logged a month’s worth of game tape. Only White had a higher passer rating, and his was pretty low to begin with.
The good news is DeVito is in line to buck this trend. His turnover-averse play was on full display Monday night and should make him more viable than the most forgettable names on this list. The bad news is he isn’t exactly starting from a place of statistical confidence. Even without his awful debut, the rookie’s -0.229 EPA/play was the second-worst in the NFL in Weeks 10-13, better than only New York Jets disaster Tim Boyle.
So a regression is coming. It may be a gentle slope. It may be a cliff. Can his college performance help tell us how steep that dropoff will be?
