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Tommy Devito made the Giants fun again, but what does that mean for the future?
The most vivid memories of my paternal grandmother are remembered through a veneer of steam. A stout Italian woman, cloth draped over her neck, stirring a pot of sauce in a swelteringly-hot kitchen. Her wooden spoon was so old it had lost any concavity, now worn down into a flat paddle after decades of use.
“Stir the gravy for grandma, sweetie,” she’d say in her thick New York accent, as she lit another cigarette, dangling it alarmingly close to the pot of water she was boiling for pasta. We’d sit down for the family meal and that giant pot of sauce, enough to feed 16 people was plonked on the table with a potholder underneath before she tottered into the kitchen once more to retrieve her legendary meatballs.
I never got the recipe for those meatballs before her death. I’ve tried over the years to replicate them, and still can’t get it right. They’re memorable for a lot of reasons, but I’ve never been able to get past their enormous size. She’d craft these colossal meat spheres — easily as large as a softball each, and they had to clock in at almost a pound. Grandma would drop one on your plate, likely splashing you with sauce in the process — and then you’d eat.
An hour later, gripped by a deadly food coma, you’d regret it.
That was the feeling I got watching Tommy Devito on Monday Night Football. Joy and awe, while also being unable to shake the feeling that someone was going to regret all this later.
To say that the Giants are in the throes of “Tommy Cutlet Fever” is a huge understatement. Devito has taken a disastrously ugly season and turned the team into can’t-miss television. It’s an incredible New Jersey Cinderella story, if Cinderella’s godmother looked like he helped pull off the Lufthansa heist in Goodfellas.
Devito isn’t simply a quarterback, or a hero, he’s become an icon. The purest expression of everything the Giants want in a player. On the field he’s moving chains and not making mistakes, while off it his family is in the parking lot of the Meadowlands servicing up baked ziti and cutlets.
It’s impossible to know where Tommy Devito ends and the brand begins. So much of this seems like he’s earnestly just an Italian, Jersey-born bro who happens to know how throw a football — but it also feels so manufactured that it’s impossible to know whether this is real or not. What we do know, however, is that Devito has done such a stellar job as the Giants’ quarterback these last three weeks that it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where Daniel Jones gets this job back.
There’s nothing that incredible that leaps off the page when it comes to Devito’s three week stats other than the fact he’s ruthlessly efficient.
Three wins, 52-for-72 (72%), 595 yards, 5 TD, 0 INT
Sure Devito is throwing for less than 200 yards-per-game, and he’s faced three pretty underwhelming teams in Washington, New England and Green Bay — but this run isn’t about diving into the stats and breaking it down. It’s about the vibes, and the vibes are off the charts right now.
This is a fanbase that had nothing to be happy about a few weeks ago. They were one of the worst teams in the NFL, their quarterback was hurt, but before that he was playing horrific football. Whatever highs of Brian Daboll’s inaugural season washed away with mediocrity — before Tommy Devito flew in on a winged chicken cutlet like an Italian stallion to seize everyone’s hearts and make an entire city fall in love in the process.
It doesn’t matter than the Giants are barely winning. It also doesn’t matter that the entire stadium is doing the “Che vuoi?” gesture, which REALLY makes no sense in a football context outside of “hey, I saw this on The Sopranos.” Tommy Devito has done something priceless for the Giants, and that’s make football fun again.
It’s also a bit of a problem …
As uplifting as this three-win span has been, it’s also pushed the Giants way down draft boards. They’re currently in No. 8 for 2024, and with their upcoming slate they could conceivably win one more game (vs. New Orleans), with beating the Rams being a possibility as well. This could result in the Giants picking outside the Top 10, but more importantly it will likely impact their thinking entering the draft.
This was a team who seemed like an easy lock for either Drake Maye or Caleb Williams, depending on which of the top two passers fell to them. Outside the Top 10 there are still good quarterbacks too, with Jayden Daniels likely being taken anywhere from No. 10 to No. 20. Either way, with Devito playing like this it’s impossible to imagine the team pulling the trigger on a QB now over at least seeing what Tommy Cutlets can do for them in the future.
It brings us back to one core element: Is Tommy Devito a great quarterback? Is he the player you want to hang your future on, independent of the viral marketing? Is having fun right now worth regretting not taking a major step forward as a franchise?
Devito has become bigger than an undrafted free agent closing out the season. The man is a folk legend. He’s a Jersey-born football love story. The problem with love is that it can often make you get swept up in the moment and think illogically — feeling like the honeymoon phase will never end. But it always does.
What does that look like for the Giants if this ends? If Devito can’t become a franchise quarterback then where does this team end up and what have they sacrificed to see what might happen? Sure, it could all be great — but more likely they’ll end up like I did, splayed out on grandma’s couch regretting why I finished one of her gargantuan meatballs out fear of offending her.
Right now Giants fans are still feasting. They’ll need to wait until later to see if the regret comes.
