One of the more surprising picks in the NFL Draft this weekend came when the New York Giants spent a fourth round pick on Syracuse quarterback Ryan Nassib. The reason for the head scratching when it comes to this pick, is the fact that Eli Manning is nowhere near being pushed out of his job as the Giants starter, so spedning a fourth rounder on Nassib made little sense.
When you strip the pick down to it’s guts, the move was simply to provide Manning with a young backup he can coach up and New York can potentially trade for a higher draft pick in a few years. It’s just like flipping a house, if Nassib fails it’s not going to bury the Giants but the Matt Flynn’s, Alex Smith’s and Matt Schaub’s of the world have the Giants thinking about future investment.
That’s likely the reason that as soon as Nassib was drafted, Giants general manager Jerry Reese said he hopes Nassib never plays for his football team.
“If he doesn’t ever play, that would be great,” Giants general manager Jerry Reese said, via USA Today. “That’s a good problem to have. If he needs to play, we’re hoping that whatever time that is that he’ll be up and ready to go.”
New York has four quarterbacks on roster at this point between Manning, David Carr, Curtis Painter and now Nassib. If you breakdown what Reese was trying to say, he meant he hopes nothing happens to Manning or Carr. Nassib is an insurance policy that can be developed and flipped in the future.
But the question still remains, if you spend the 110th pick on a quarterback but you never intend to play him, where’s the strategy in that?