Giants should give Jake Fromm the start this week vs. Eagles

Mike Glennon was the right man for the job. When the Giants were waiting for Daniel Jones to be cleared for contact and needed a backup quarterback to get them through a few games, playing the veteran who had been with the team all season made sense.

But the job has changed. And so ,too should the Giants’ quarterback.

Jones has been shelved for the remaining three games of the season and even with doctors proclaiming their belief in no long-term effects from his sprained neck, there are questions about his durability and availability next year. This is no longer about keeping his seat warm and keeping the lights on for a month. If the Giants are intent on bringing Jones back as their starter in 2022 – Joe Judge said as much, though he and the team clearly have the right to change their minds depending on what options appear to them this offseason – then they need to find a backup they can count on. They need to find someone whose play will not scuttle their next season if, say, Jones takes a hit in Week 1 and suffers another neck injury that puts not only his year but his career in jeopardy.

They can start looking for that insurance policy now.

Starting Jake Fromm on Sunday against the Eagles should be one of the easiest decisions a Giants coach has had to make on a quarterback in decades. After he played the final drive against the Cowboys and led the offense down the field – albeit in the fourth quarter of a blowout loss against a team that was happy to give up yardage for time – Judge said that Fromm earned the right to be in the conversation of who would get the call in the next game.

That discussion should be brief. Had Fromm flopped on his face in his NFL debut Sunday, it would have been easier to ignore him. That he looked competent and exciting and infused some life into an otherwise anemic offense -- and perhaps most significantly that the players around him seemed to respond positively to him in a way they never did with Glennon on the field – should leave little doubt in anyone’s mind that he deserves a shot.

Even if Judge isn’t ready to make an announcement yet, it’s hard to believe he has not made a decision, or isn’t at least leaning heavily in Fromm’s direction.

Perhaps he wants to see how the kid practices before making his call. Fine. Maybe he’d like to be assured that Fromm can have some mastery over a larger chunk of the playbook now that he’s been with the team for a fourth week. Great. There could also be gamesmanship involved. The Giants are facing an Eagles team that played its Week 15 game on Tuesday night and won’t have started thinking about the Giants until Wednesday morning. Why tip them off to the quarterback they’ll be facing instead of making them cram extra layers of preparation into their absurdly truncated week?

Keeping the public and the Eagles guessing as much as possible is fine, as long as Judge and the Giants eventually land on the right decision.

They know what they have in Glennon. They need to find out what they have in Fromm before their offseason of quarterback hunting commences.

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

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.