New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart is bullish about Big Blue’s future under new head coach John Harbaugh.
“I want to be a Super Bowl-winning quarterback and have that relationship with my head coach,” Dart told Steve Serby of the New York Post in a phone interview. “I’m excited to go after it and make things happen with Coach Harbaugh.”
Dart was one reason Harbaugh chose the Giants as his next destination after 18 seasons with the Baltimore Ravens, seeing the second-year quarterback as the key to helping turn around a New York team that hasn’t advanced past the playoffs since Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning won the Super Bowl together in 2011.
Dart spoke extensively with Harbaugh during the recruiting process and was part of the sessions with the coach during his Jan. 14 sit-down interview.
“He loves it. … He loves the way I compete,” Dart said. “There’s a time and a place for things, and I think if you just look at my film, I’ve gotten better at it all season. As a freshman, I’m not going to be perfect all the time in my decision-making, there are times where I have to learn. But he’s bought into how I play the game, he’s bought into my ability, and we can see our team to face our first team and we can see our first team to face. to really start to take our steps to develop as a team, get back to winning ways and win a lot of games.”
In 18 seasons in Baltimore, Harbaugh went 180-133 in the regular season and 13-11 in the playoffs, reaching the postseason in 12 of 18 seasons, including a Super Bowl run in 2012. The coach helped develop Joe Flacco and Lamar Jackson while with the Ravens. These facts bode well for Dart, who went through a roller-coaster rookie campaign.
“Every single season, year after year, his teams compete at the highest level and then chase the Bigs,” Dart said, “and they have a chance to do that, and so from a winning culture standpoint, I think that’s one thing that I knew before, that he instilled in his guys, in the organization, in the team that he coaches. And when you hear every single player that’s thinking about him and he’s thinking about him and I’m thinking about him. were the things that stood out before I had the chance to meet him.”
Dart believes the Giants, who finished fourth in the NFC East the past two seasons, can turn things around quickly under Harbaugh.
“I like the message [to fans] is that we have our guy, we have our coach, we have a leader who has done it, who has competed, who has won at the highest level, and from a player’s standpoint, he will get the buy-in from us because we are hungry to win,” Dart said. “We are hungry to succeed, and we have the pieces, and we were very close to games this year. I know Coach Harbaugh will be the man to lead us and put us in the best position to win every game we play.
“We’re going to play fearless, we’re going to play physical and we’re going to do our best to set a new standard.”