The Giants traded a fifth-round pick for J.J. McCarthy a few weeks ago and, in his first extended action for New York, he threw for 243 yards in 11 minutes as a dead-in-the-water offense nearly capped a stunning 24-point comeback in the final quarter of a game against the Saints. So, yes, I’ll venture to answer a question that John Harbaugh declined to on Sunday: McCarthy will almost certainly be the Giants’ quarterback moving forward.
The more interesting question is: Should he? Allow me to make the argument in dissent.
Harbaugh is right about one thing: It should not be about getting caught up in the moment. Certainly, McCarthy looked good and made throws that were unquestionably elite on Sunday. He also threw a pick on his fourth attempt of the game and another near pick that was overturned. He looked relatively in command during a hectic series of drives—which, after watching the Commanders last week, deserves commendation—though he logged a sack that was almost untakeable on the second-to-last drive and, depending on how you look at it, abandoned his station a bit too quickly on the team’s final play, which may have caused him to miss a (kind of) open Malik Nabers.
All that said, McCarthy played above the level of what would have been the Giants’ third-string quarterback. He maintained a presence amid the rigors of it all and flashed arm talent commensurate with a first-round pick. And here’s where Giants fans will reason that McCarthy is also nearly a decade younger than Jameis Winston, and if the team—which has already been sprinkling in McCarthy to add a flash of mobility to the position juxtaposed with the statuesque Winston—has any serious hopes of staying afloat in the NFC East, it’ll need to explore upside instead of gripping tightly to a veteran’s final flailings.
McCarthy did all of this despite having very few reps during the week, or practice time with Malik Nabers and Isaiah Likely (though I will add that there are more tools at a backup’s disposal to generate starter reps than ever, through virtual reality).
Here’s where I’ll pause and make note of the fact that Winston was put in an awful situation on Sunday against New Orleans. Cam Skattebo didn’t play, amid Harbaugh’s search for “the guy” within his running back room. Skattebo called it what Harbaugh wouldn’t—a benching related to his ball security issues last week—and the Giants were left with the stylings of Tyrone Tracy Jr. and Devin Singletary, who combined for 10 carries and 32 yards. Teams put in that relative position (running backs averaging around three yards per carry) have a winning percentage of .344 on the season. McCarthy, as you might have guessed, led the team in rushing, in addition to throwing for more yards in an 11-minute period than any player in NFL history. Skattebo may be overrated and more of a fan creation, generally, and Harbaugh may be trying to tell us that, but the optics in the moment were that the Giants were dealing with less than a full deck.
Here’s where I’ll also note that Harbaugh is clearly attempting to play both a mid-range game and a long one. Shattering McCarthy’s confidence next week against the talented and surging Texans, after carefully building it up over the course of a month, would be foolish. The mid-range game is staying afloat in the NFC East. The long-range game is not immediately lighting a fifth-round pick on fire by subjecting McCarthy to the same kind of quarterback roulette that he entered into with the Vikings.
I normally abhor the idea that you must follow the NFL standard in pivoting to a younger quarterback; that this is a move of no return. We’ve seen in Carolina that a brief pause and period of reflection can change the trajectory of a quarterback’s career, as it has with Bryce Young. But in the case of McCarthy, who left Minnesota to play for the brother of his collegiate head coach, this is absolutely the case. The Giants are McCarthy’s last chance at an immediate career revival before the prospect of becoming an everyday starter becomes a little more bleak. He realizes this.
McCarthy has never faced a defense the caliber of the Texans’, even in the currently broken state that Houston’s unit is in. The Texans are sneakily still one of the better teams against the run and have the third-lowest dropback success rate allowed in the NFL, behind the Vikings and Seahawks. In 2025, McCarthy’s first significant game action took place against a Bears team that ended the season in the bottom third in net passing yards per attempt allowed, as well as broader metrics like yards, passing touchdowns, rushing yards and rushing yards per attempt. McCarthy was poor against a well-coordinated Jeff Ulbrich unit in Atlanta, and the Vikings scored six points. He completed fewer than 50% of his passes against an underwhelming Ravens team, logged six points against the Packers with Micah Parsons and padded his season stats with successive games against the Cowboys, Commanders and Giants—three of the NFL’s worst defenses of 2025, one of which (Dallas) was among the worst in recent league history. All three of those teams have different coordinators this season.
For now, the kind of game-specific package role has clearly allowed McCarthy to develop some modicum of confidence and master a small portion of the game plan at a time. Asking him to now shoulder the weight of the Giants in a Week 7 game that isn’t totally necessary, given how much disarray the division is in, feels premature. If the Giants lose to Houston on Sunday with Jameis Winston at quarterback, the team will be 3-3-1 and still at or near the top of the division, with promise at the quarterback position. If the team loses to the Texans on Sunday with J.J. McCarthy at quarterback and he plays the way that quarterbacks tend to play when Houston is at its best, the Giants would be 3-3-1 and attempting to patch the confidence of a quarterback heading into a slate with two consecutive division opponents, a game against the Super Bowl–hopeful Jaguars, the Colts and the 49ers, arguably the best team in the NFL right now.
I think playing this out as long as possible is the best option for Harbaugh. It may make him look indecisive, but in reality, having McCarthy play a resilient and surprising fourth quarter at least forces opponents to prepare for something that doesn’t have a robust library of film on it. Keeping that option in Harbaugh’s back pocket is necessary for a Giants team that has been winning on the fringes since Week 3.
Whether or not the Giants feel they can wait is another matter. Obviously, what McCarthy showed in the fourth quarter of that game has been missing for weeks and, in the brains of some recency-biased Giants fans, much longer than that.
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