Tiki Barber on Jaxson Dart’s Injury and the Jameis Winston Era

Craig Carton (0:00)

You know, this is a good time to check in with our colleague, Tiki Barber. Of course, Midday's with Sean Morash and Evan Roberts from 10 to 2

The great lead in for our show. Tiki also is a part of the New York Giants radio broadcast during the pregame, the halftime show, and the postgame show right here on WFN with the great Carl Baxter, of course, Bob Papa, and John Schmelk and the gang. So Tiki joins us, I assume, from his home in New Jersey right now. Tiki, how you doing today, pal?

Tiki Barber (0:29)

I was better before I got this Jaxson Dart news, but by the way, I can't wait to tell Sean and Evan that you mentioned Sean before Evan.

Chris McMonigle (0:36)

Yeah, I did it on purpose. I knew you did. I knew you did.

Tiki Barber (0:39)

That's awesome.

Craig Carton (0:40)

So obviously, we get word, I think, from Joe Shane during the broadcast last night to Laura Rutledge, ESPN, that he's going to be fine. You're not that big a deal.

I think John fans had a big sigh of relief last night. When did you at least have your concern raised prior to the announcement or were you caught, dumbfounded like the rest of us by today's announcement?

Tiki Barber (1:05)

Well, I think a little bit dumbfounded. We got to remember how the sequence happened last night. Jaxson Dart gets hurt on the first drive. He goes down, he goes into the locker room, and then he doesn't come back out, but the trainers come back out, and you start to see the lip reading police on Instagram, and it clearly says four to six weeks, which makes you think that's an MCL injury. Maybe there's some other meniscus damage or something of that matter, but it's likely recoverable within this season in this time frame. But then you start to hear the words from the imaging that he got today, and it feels like, let's pause a second. And now we don't know what actually it is yet. It could be a partially torn ACL. It could be some other damage that's just not advisable to play with, but it's devastating because this giant's offense operated so efficiently in week one against the Cowboys. And we all know what we saw last night with Jameis Winston at the helm. Now in Jameis' defense, it's an offense that's not tailored towards his skillset.

Jaxson Dart does a lot of RPOs. That's their three-step game, basically. He's gotten better at in the pocket passing, as we saw against the Cowboys. And a lot of the decisions that Jaxson Dart does makes, Jameis Winston is gonna make them differently, right? He wants to push the ball down field. He wants to hold the ball a little bit longer. And so the offense has to get tailored to him. But he looked bad in his first action as the backup quarterback for the New York Giants. We just have to trust and assume that Matt Nagy and Brian Callahan, the quarterback coach, and Greg Roman, the run game coordinator, are going to tailor something that fits his skillset better than what we saw last night.

Craig Carton (2:39)

Well, let's get into the game part in a second, and obviously the next couple of weeks, and obviously for us this season, but I just had a question that Big Mac and I didn't have the answer to, but you obviously play and have seen guys with every variety of knee injury. Is it an issue to you as a former player that they allowed him to go back on the sideline with no brace, no crutches, no walker?

Tiki Barber (3:03)

Not at all. So look, I'm 51 years old now. If I sit down for a long time, I get up and my knees hurt.

They start swelling. That's why I get up every break and walk around. When you have a significant knee injury, especially a major joint like that, the last thing you want to do is sit and have it be stagnant. You don't want it to just rest and start to swell. And so standing and walking around is actually good for it because it keeps the blood flow as opposed to sitting and having it swell up and get even stiffer and worse. The thing I worried about, and I talked about this with John Schmelk on the post game is the flight home. They had a six hour flight home from Los Angeles and there's not much movement you can do on a 747 or whatever the heck they flew out there.

And you know that once he got off the plane after sitting down for that long, it was really swollen and he probably felt really uncomfortable this morning or whenever they got in. So I didn't mind it at all because movement when you have injury is actually not that bad of a thing unless it's something really devastating.