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Jan 5, 2025; Foxborough, Massachusetts, USA; New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye (10) walks to the field to warm up before the start of the game against the Buffalo Bills at Gillette Stadium. David Butler II-Imagn Images

This Intriguing Matchup Named as 'Must Watch' on Giants' 2025 Schedule

Originally posted on New York Giants on SI
By Stephen Lebitsch | Last updated May 25, 2025 10:00 AM ET

The New York Giants are entering the 2025 NFL season with the most demanding schedule of opponents based on their combined win percentage from last year. While they’ve improved the roster, it will be challenging to stack those wins and avoid another brutal finish.

That’s been one of the major talking points for the Joe Scheon and Brian Daboll regime since the 3-14 disaster ended in early January. The duo needs to find a way to claim more victories this season to ensure they are held around for the future of the locker room they’ve worked hard to assume this offseason.

But what if they don’t do much better than the trio of wins they managed to scratch out last season? Their only saving grace could be to show the Giants brass what they can do with a master quarterback developer in Daboll and a novice prospect under his wings that he has been waiting to call his own since he arrived in 2022.

That was a big reason why they chased down Ole Miss product Jaxson Dart in the late first round of the NFL Draft last month to combat the pressure to secure a franchise arm who could eventually take over and hold down the biggest position on the team for years to come, a la Eli Manning who did it for 16 seasons.

Early on, the Giants have been adamant that Dart would undergo a redshirt-style rookie season behind the veteran quarterbacks in the room. They don’t want to rush his growth, but that could change if things go south and he is needed to perform to take the heat off everyone's backs.

As the football world waits to see when Jaxson Dart watch will take effect, a new NFL schedule release breakdown by The Athletic attempted to pick out one matchup that will carry a lot of intrigue for a possible debut for the young signal caller.

The outlet's interesting choice was the Giants' road trip in Week 13 to face the New England Patriots on the primetime stage of Monday Night Football.

The intrigue for this game appears to rest on the hope that by this point int he season, it will be Dart squaring off against Drake Maye, the quarterback the Giants tried to trade up for in last year’s draft only to be refused by the Patriots.

Seeing the league try to push these two teams into a standalone game in the final stretch of the regular season might leave fans scratching their heads, especially as both franchises aren’t expected to be fighting for anything significant in mid-to-late December.

New England has found something good with Drake Maye, their No. 3 overall pick in the 2024 draft, who showed early signs of promise in an introductory run that featured 2,276 yards, 15 touchdowns, and 10 interceptions in 12 starts. That wasn’t good enough to win more than four games last season, and the Patriots are still a work in progress, building their roster from rubble.

The Giants might be backing the veteran Russell Wilson as their starter this season, but it feels like their offensive identity isn’t fully wrapped around him. Wilson will be under pressure from the jump to cure his recent turnover woes and help the Giants execute a more efficient and explosive offense that only averaged 14.6 points per contest, or the noise must start getting louder for a chance in the huddle.

That creates a lot of intrigue for this matchup between two organizations whose long-term futures are still being dictated. The Giants reportedly loved Maye during the 2024 draft process but couldn’t offer enough of a king’s ransom to the Patriots to move up the board to pick him.

While Schoen took lessons from that one significant failure, he applied them to his pursuit of Dart and, this time, was willing to trade off higher-level assets for a player whom Daboll seemed to admire, even at the potential cost of the pick becoming another big first-round reach that has marred the franchise in recent years.

If the Wilson experiment runs dry and the desperation move has to be pulled out of the regime’s pockets, we could see them do so for a battle between two young gunslingers who each hold so much meaning to the recent history of New York. A missed prospect they didn’t pull all stops to ensure they made it to their city, and a successful acquisition who has to prove he can translate to the NFL level.

One would like to think that Dart has the upper hand in terms of intangibles over Maye, especially his strong arm and dual-threat abilities, which enable him to conduct a pro-style play-action offense and take off on a run to extend a play. Daboll bred all of these attributes into Josh Allen in Buffalo, hoping that the results repeat themselves with Dart.

Yet, should Maye find a way to outshine Dart in this matchup, and the Giants fall in one of the few games they should be favorites in the whole season, it could spell trouble and another difficult reset that just pushed the goalposts that are coming back to contention even further down the field.

The bigger scare would be giving Dart his second staff in the same number of seasons, which never works out well for a novice arm, as NFL history has shown. So, while the game might be meaningless in the standings and uncompetitive, it could be the most important that the Giants have in 2025. All eyes will be on a pair of young quarterbacks to see which one was a bigger hit for their team.

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