The New York Giants Desperate Dart Throw: Is Jaxson Dart Him?

Photo art by Dominic Mucciacito

The clock read 8:18 remaining in the fourth quarters and the New York Giants faced a 3rd-and one from the Chargers 9-yard line. The Giants led 21-18 and could put the game out of reach in the “witching hour.”

The "witching hour" is a phrase that describes the final hour or so of the first batch of NFL games, typically between noon and 1 PM on the west coast, a time of intense and unrelenting action, popularized by Scott Hanson on the league's Redzone channel.

Hanson doesn't claim to have coined the phrase, not that it matters. What matters is that the name stuck; the best hour of entertainment in America's most popular sport when winners separate themselves from losers.

Rookie quarterback Jason Dart took the snap from the shotgun and faked a handoff to running back Cam Skattebo that no one fell for. The Chargers were waiting for him. Safety Alohi Gilman was the first to hit him two yards behind the line of scrimmage.

Perhaps Gilman, fearing a personal foul penalty, avoids throwing the rookie to the turf, expecting that the officials would blow the whistle with forward progress stopped. (The Chargers were penalized 14 times for 107 yards Sunday, a season high.)

But Dart wriggled free and spun back towards the marker. He dove outside the left end and converted a new set of downs. The Giants sideline and the crowd let loose as if they had just received a stay of execution, which, to be fair, some technically did.

The Giants did not finish the drive with a touchdown but that detail tends to get lost when you win the game. What anyone who was watching will remember is that Dart refused to die and that for three hours on a Sunday he gave his team a heartbeat.

I was thinking about Hanson's “witching hour" expression a lot this week after having seen the new movie "HIM.”

The plot, though sparce, centers on a young quarterback who is invited to train with his childhood hero, an eight-time champion at the tail end of a magisterial career. His team, the fictional San Antonio Saviors, is set on a succession plan on the eve of the draft, but the transition of power will be anything but peaceful.

Think "Any Given Sunday" (1999) meets "Rosemary's Baby" (1968). Which if you haven’t seen you should stop now and go do that. The calendar just turned to October and there are worse things to do with a free evening. (I don’t know about you, but I feel like these movies were made specifically for me.)

“HIM” is about what some are willing to do to climb to the top and others are willing to do to keep you from getting there.

In the rarest mashup of genres “HIM” is an intersection of aspirational sports stories and horror.

"This is simply a movie that shouldn't exist," explained producer Jordan Poole. "Something that you're not supposed to do. Something that you're not supposed to touch. Something that is culturally sacred."

Quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the Savior; a quarterback so good he has more rings than Tom Brady (intentional?). White has already overcome an injury more gruesome than Joe Theisman's mangled leg, which we see in a prologue set in the living room of the Cade family.

The film tends to get weighed down by its overt subtext. However, if you have ever felt uncomfortable with how casually sports analysts use the term G.O.A.T., you will understand how little value subtlety holds in the contemporary consciousness.

The boy tries to avert his eyes, but his father turns his head back towards the screen with his hands to ensure that he learns from it. Winning takes sacrifice.

It is a cliché. But if you saw New York Giants head coach Brian Daboll and his rookie Dart screaming in euphoria as they held each other while leaving the field Sunday, then you know that clichés exist because they extoll truth; Truths so obvious that they need not be spoken.

Daboll and Dart had only won a single regular season game, the Giants' first win (1-3), but the outpouring of emotion suggested two men coming up from a foxhole.

To get an inkling of the depths of the commitment that a professional quarterback makes to make that moment possible, again, I recommend seeing "HIM.”

Cut to over a decade later. Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is now one of the hottest prospects heading to the pros, but when a bizarre, and seemingly random attack leaves him unable to compete at the scouting combine his agent offers him a chance to prove himself to his childhood team.

At White's remote compound Cade spends a week training with the star's state-of-the-art staff in what seems like it is part luxury spa, part gladiator academy, and part funhouse mirror. Cade is willing to look past some of his host's eccentricities at first because, well, rich people just might be built different.

They live in ivory towers. They sit courtside. They buy homes with more bathrooms than they need (becoming ammunition for critics to compare other stats to.) They say cringey catch phrases and act, kinda weird sometimes.

No one has ever tried to argue that Russell Wilson is the G.O.A.T.. Wilson doesn't have eight Super Bowl rings (he has one), but he has made over $300 million in his fourteen year NFL career, started over 200 regular season games, won 60% of them and become one of the most recognisable athletes in America.

Notoriety, though, is not the same as esteem. But, we have learned the spotlight's glare can nourish the ego even as it magnifies your imperfections.

There is a running thread in “HIM” where Wayans’ character says that he has to watch film. But we never see him watching it. Ominously we wonder what he’s really up to and what “watching film” is code for.

When the movie pays that off it will either give you chills, or make you chuckle. Again, subtlety is not its strongest attribute.

Our cult-like fan culture cuts both ways. “HIM”tries to explicate the dark side of ambition and the obsession with winning at any cost. But the film is also taking dead aim at one of our most sacred cows.

While it makes for a good meme to count the toilets in Wilson's mansion and chart them against his touchdown passes, it also reflects how petty and calloused fandom has become.

When he was winning games Wilson's performative-cliché-maudlin displays of leadership did not bat an eye. But start losing? You become about as unloved as a U2 album given away by Itunes.

Wilson, now on his fourth team in five seasons, is well-past the "witching hour" of his career. He is more carrion now; picking at the bones of his own legacy and mocked by former teammates for falling so far.

In another macabre parallel, the team that has paid Wilson to basically go away is still financially responsible for the contract they handed him in 2022 to the tune of $32 million against the salary cap.

The Broncos released him in March of 2024. What do they call this spectre of financial schizophrenia in the parlance of sport? Dead money.

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Just like "HIM” the team that currently employs Wilson has a succession plan in place. The Giants chose 22-year-old Jaxson Dart out of Ole Miss in the first round in the hopes that he resuscitate a once-storied franchise mired in one of the darkest stretches of ineptitude in their history.

Embattled coach Brian Daboll and general manager Joe Schoen needed a figurative savior if they want to hold onto their jobs. At 0-3 they decided to take the ball out of Wilson's hands and hand it to Dart.

In the week leading up to the game Daboll made it clear that the decision was his alone, and not the suggestion of ownership who have to have heard the boos directed at Wilson and the punchless offense.

Daboll broke the news to both players in person. According to reports, he did not make them fight to the death with a broken pool cue. Barring injury, Dart will start the remainder of the season. But if you saw the kid play last Sunday that might just be a matter of time too.

Not that high-level competition could be so cutthroat—disregarding the fictional plot of "HIM.” Players are asked to compete for jobs, but mental intimidation, hazing, and verbal beratement are the stuff of Hollywood fiction, surely, right?

You wonder.

As a 14-yearold freshman at Roy High School in Northern Utah, Dart challenged a senior who had transferred to the school for the starting quarterback spot.

"The older kid was threatening him physically," Dart's father Brandon told The Athletic. "He would push him. He would push him out of the huddle. He was always yapping and saying derogatory comments towards Jax."

But the freshman did not acquiesce. He gave every bit as good as he got.

"He was like, 'Screw you,'" said Brandon. "He was like, 'You can say and do whatever you want, but I'm here to take your job.'"

The sport demands thicker skin.

Years later in a similar situation at Ole Miss Dart played the role of the incumbent quarterback fighting off a transfer athlete hand-picked by the coaching staff to supplant him.

Given the opportunity to enter the transfer portal (not a reference to witchcraft, I think) Dart anchored down.

"I think that really irked Jaxson a little bit," said his father Brandon. "He felt disrespected. But with all the chatter of, 'If they're going to do that to you, and you can leave,' I think he said, 'Fuck that. This is my team. This is my locker room. Spencer (Sanders) is coming into my world, and I'm going to make his life a living hell.'"

A. Living. Hell.

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"I'm just going to lay everything I have on the line. That's just the way I play the game." said Dart last week on the eve his first professional start. "When I step in between those lines, nothing else in the world matters to me except doing everything that I can to win it."

If the surrealist satire of "HIM” is a little too gruesome for you, there is another film about an aging star quarterback staring down the uncertainty of his sporting mortality.

Released in 1969, "Number One" starring Charlton Heston is the story of a 40-year-old New Orleans Saints quarterback Ron "Cat" Catlan, a former champion playing poorly in the preseason as a talented rookie is breathing down his neck. Get it? He's not a savior, he's a saint.

While pondering the end of his playing career, Catlan's personal life outside the chalk lines is spiraling as well. With a marriage on increasingly shaky ground, he seeks adulation in the arms of another woman.

This is another story of a quarterback on the wrong side of 35 who doesn't have the arm strength to throw the ball ten yards downfield; one who has pissed away two decades worth of goodwill overnight; a living legend fighting opponents in the other locker room, a few in his own, and the perceived ones in his own head; and one who can't yet give up the conch. A quarterback badly out of touch with the shifting sands beneath him.

Heston plays a gladiator who knows no other trade. A warrior who looks at a second career in sales, or management, or sales management as though it were analogous with dying.

Think about that famous Morris Berman photograph of Giants quarterback Y.A. Title taken in 1964.

Because that's what football is isn't it? Life and death played out in increments of ten yards. The game so violent that a player's quality of life and healthcare benefits are now litigated more fervently than any contract they ever reviewed.

This game that destroys bodies-—now proven to destroy minds as well—is difficult to quit. And still the great ones struggle with when to walk away intact.

Themes like loyalty, fidelity, guile, and camaraderie are strewn into the time capsule tale that takes place over the course of a week leading up to the season opener.

The film abridges the team's fortunes in an introductory sequence depicting sloppy play and dour body language set during a preseason finale against the Cleveland Browns. There is mention of a championship, many years prior, and some Saints even implore their teammates to play for more than their paychecks.

These faux Saints are former heroes; competing against faded embers past while bracing for the uncertainty of who will be leading them into the future. Catlan (Charlton Heston) seems washed up, battered, bruised and so bitter about it all (or is that just hypermasculinity?) he can't even talk about it. He pouts. He scowls. He hurls insults at the characters that love him the most—as if their expressions of support are another aggrandizing grievance.

I should note that "Number One" is not a horror film. No imps or demons are hiding under the Heston's bed. At this point you might be wishing that you had watched "HIM” instead.

The Giants fans in the real world had no ties to Russell Wilson. He has literally never won them a game. He was a placeholder, which means he’s the embodiment of something, or someone who is not here yet.

When the young quarterback arrives to train at the star's palatial compound in "Him" he sees an encampment of "super fans" who apparently stalk their favorite Savior, even in the off-season. The line between fandom and fanaticism is never blurred in "HIM." I'd argue the director Justin Tipping could have trusted the audience more to not fumble his symbolism, but instead he opts to have character say something like, "They're like a cult."

A woman with caked and runny face paint slams against the vehicle in a jump scare. When she sees that it is Cade inside she screams. "WE DON'T WANT YOU!"

At one point in the second half against the Chargers Dart scrambled into the secondary for 20 yards. As the safety approached to make the tackle Dart had a moment to slide and avoid the collision.

What he chose to do instead was throw an open-handed jab with his throwing arm at Tony Jefferson’s helmet. Was it reckless? Valiant? Completely insane? Depends on how much longer you are hoping to watch him play.

The stiff-arm attempt only bought him a moment before he was caught from behind and slammed into the turf; his head ricocheting so dramatically that the independent spotters removed him from the briefly game to check him for concussion symptoms. The physical toll of Dart’s Super Dave Osborne schtick would not even count in the boxscore. The run was called back by a Giants penalty.

Wilson checked into the game and was predictably sacked beneath a wave of Chargers linemen and the negative expectations of the jaded home crowd.

WE DON’T WANT YOU!

Afterwards teammates admitted that Dart’s physicality energized them up, it also scared them. A crash test dummy is not afforded the option of sliding. A starting QB is.

Is guile and anticipation no longer enough to compensate for a A.A.R.P. arm?

Can a guy piss away fifteen years of goodwill overnight?

So this is why Aaron Rodgers does those darkness retreats; Why Tom Brady had no interest in mentoring; Why Patrick Mahomes is playing in the shadow of Brady’s accomplishments; Why Justin Herbert’s unassuming beta mojo sounds like nails on a chalkboard to the people who worship at the altar of success; Why Nebraska's Dylan Riola doesn’t even try to conceal co-opting another guy's aura.

I see that “HIM” has entered the weekend with a 31% score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

They will tell you that this movie isn’t for everyone, and that is true. I think, similar to the Will Smith “CONCUSSION” film, people don’t like when someone yucks your yum.

Football really is religion now, and when you make it plain as day it makes sense that some people would be uncomfortable with their own proximity to it.

“Number One” ends with Heston deciding at the eleventh hour to suit up and play. He leads the team on a drive before a wave of defenders crush him and the denouement of the story.

It is an incredible ending. The camera pulls back from his motionless body as the sport, and possibly life itself is finished with him. Top that Morris Berman!