Tom Rock: J.J. McCarthy, Giants starting QB. It feels as if it was destined to happen.
Giants quarterback J.J. McCarthy throws a pass against the New Orleans Saints during the fourth quarter at MetLife Stadium on Oct. 18, 2026, in East Rutherford, N.J. Credit: Brad Penner
It wasn’t too hard to picture J.J. McCarthy as a potential starting quarterback for the Giants in the spring of 2024 when he was a draft prospect fresh off a national championship at Michigan and the Giants were facemask-deep in a quarterback search. Even McCarthy believed at one point that he was destined to be selected by them.
“There was definitely a point where I wanted to be here,” McCarthy said this past week, looking back on his visit to East Rutherford 2 1⁄2 years ago. “It was the second I got in here and the second after I left.”
It didn’t work out that way, of course. The Giants did not select a quarterback in that draft. After expending every effort to move up for Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye, they wound up selecting Malik Nabers with the sixth overall pick. McCarthy went 10th overall to the Vikings.
In the 2025 draft, the Giants dipped into that quarterback-picking business and selected Jaxson Dart, a player who erased all of those 2024 could-have-been regrets and turned them into optimism for a different future (at least for a little while).
Yet here we are now, almost halfway through the 2026 season, and McCarthy is right where he and many others thought he would be — starting for the Giants.
It wasn’t a straight path to get there. It took a season-ending knee injury to Dart on the Giants’ end, a season-ending knee injury to McCarthy as a rookie on his end (the same type of meniscus tears for both, if you choose to believe in fate, by the way), and a lackluster early career in Minneapolis that made McCarthy available for the Giants to trade for him late last month.
When McCarthy finally did make it back to New Jersey, plenty had changed since his previous visit. The coach with whom he would have been linked if he had been drafted here, Brian Daboll, was gone. The locker room and half the facility he toured back then is in the middle of a massive construction rebuild. And he’s a lot different himself, too. More experienced. More worldly. More confident.
But those vibes he felt? The connection he sensed with the organization? Those were still around.
“There’s something special about this building, this state, this football program,” he said on Wednesday. “Nothing about this place really gives you the kind of [ick] feeling to it. It’s just welcomed me with open arms since the first second I got in these doors. And it’s done the same since I got here this year. I’m extremely grateful to this organization for just welcoming me.”
The 23-year-old sounds as if he’s finally at home.
“Everything about this place feels very fitting for me,” he said, noting that he is back in an offense that allows a quarterback to use his legs and help the entire running game expand, and with a team that has a gritty attitude toward improving each day.
He even noted the “makeshift locker room” the Giants have been using this season as symbolism for his own brief NFL journey, in which he has gotten torn down to the ground and stuck in a far-away parking lot.
Oh, and there is a familiar name as his coach, too. John Harbaugh was a rooting spectator when McCarthy helped brother Jim Harbaugh win a national championship at Michigan.
But it was what McCarthy has shown in the last few weeks since his return to New Jersey, not his accomplishments in college, that earned him this opportunity, John Harbaugh said. It was him in the meetings, the practice field, the end of the game last Sunday and what passes for the locker room that allowed the Giants to make the move from Jameis Winston to McCarthy.
“The players go by what they see,” Harbaugh said. “A lot of times the players know more than anybody who the good players are. They’re the ones out there playing with them. But I think the last couple weeks, they’ve had a chance to see him practice, and they’re pretty fired up about this.”
Rookie receiver Malachi Fields said McCarthy’s “competitiveness” and “confidence” stood out to him. “He never flinches in the moment,” he said.
Darnell Mooney added that it is “very fair” to say McCarthy’s skills are similar to those possessed by Dart, the quarterback around whom this team’s success originally was designed.
“But he’s not Dart at all,” Mooney said. “He’s J.J.”
And while Nabers — the player the Giants drafted instead of McCarthy — hadn’t caught a truly competitive pass from McCarthy until the fourth quarter of last week’s game, the two did play in seven-on-seven games as high school All-Americans.
“So I was with him before we went to college,” Nabers said, pointing out that McCarthy has a “strong arm” but also throws “touchy footballs.”
Harbaugh pointed out that the Giants’ scouts — many of the same ones who decided not to draft McCarthy coming out of college — listed him as their “number one” option to add once Dart was lost for the season. That included Joe Schoen.
“I have to give our scouts in the building a lot of credit,” Harbaugh said. “They were excited about that opportunity.”
Harbaugh had to sign off on it too, so he went and watched the limited film of McCarthy as a pro.
“You see good and you see the not good,” Harbaugh said. “But I saw a lot of talent, and I saw a guy that I thought could do the things that we want to do on offense for sure. “
Still, McCarthy knew he had a lot to prove when he came here last month. Probably more than he needed to show when he came here in the spring of 2024. So he went about the process of doing just that.
“Hopefully I’ve just shown them J.J. McCarthy,” he said. “Just being able to be myself every day and I’m extremely grateful for them to allow me to do that. Just being able to go out there, have fun, sling it around and work my butt off with these guys. At the end of the day, I hope they experience someone that is working really hard and wants to do whatever he can to be the best version of himself for this team.”
That version is going to be starting for the Giants on Sunday against the Texans.
It’s a situation that has felt inevitable, not only since McCarthy arrived from Minnesota but long before that as well.
Newsday’s Evan Barnes contributed to this report.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
