The Giants didn’t use the second overall pick on a quarterback last year, and they may not use a quarterback on the sixth or seventeenth overall picks on a quarterback this year. Apart from the basic ability to, you know, play at an acceptable level, G.M. Dave Gettleman is looking for something else.
“Being the quarterback of a team in this kind of a market is a load, is a mental load,” Gettleman recently said, via Tom Rock of Newsday. “You’ve got to really vet out the backgrounds of these guys. . . . It’s more than just collecting data and looking at a guy’s physical talent. It’s about his makeup.”
And so Gettleman believes that he needs to look closely at how the potential candidates at quarterback have handled the bad times.
“Some of them you have to dig so deep to see where they had adversity, it’s painful,” Gettleman said. “Everybody has adversity. Everybody.”
He’s right on that. And while he’s also right on the notion that there’s a greater mental burden in the New York market, there’s a significant mental burden for any NFL starting quarterback, regardless of where he plays.
Besides, it’s easier to handle the mental burden if the player has the physical skills and abilities to thrive at the next level. It’s one thing to have a guy who’ll not even shrug at criticism (like Eli Manning); it’s quite another to have a guy like Patrick Mahomes, who plays so well that he won’t have to worry about being criticized.