Giants switch things up at backup QB

Carrying four quarterbacks is unheard of for the Giants and Tom Coughlin. They’ve been spoiled by the fact that Eli Manning reports for duty religiously, starting every single regular season and postseason game here since Week 11 of the 2004 season.  There has been no need to carry more than two QBs on the roster the past few years.

This year, when the Giants felt their luck with Eli might be running thin, they took a QB in the draft – Syracuse’s Ryan Nassib. They actually traded up to get him, so it was a foregone conclusion that Nassib would be on the final roster.

But with Nassib far from NFL ready, the Giants still needed to retain the services of a veteran backup. David Carr has been the backup here four of the last five seasons, collecting a Super Bowl ring along the way.

The Giants brought in Curtis Painter, Peyton Manning’s former backup in Indianapolis, to challenge Carr. Painter outplayed Carr for the most part in camp and won the job as the team’s primary backup.

Coughlin was asked today how he arrived at the decision to keep Painter over Carr this season:

“What we saw was he did make, I thought, more of the throws down the field. He did have a couple of opportunities where he brought the team down the field, with the Jet game, the field goal. They were close. They were very close, but that’s the decision we made. I thought it was a very objective one. There were a bunch of parties involved in that.

As you can imagine, pro personnel, Jerry Reese, myself, his position coach, his coordinator, so we hope we made the right call, and as I told David, ‘who knows?’ David has done a great job for us here over the years. He’s done a superb job as a scout team quarterback being able to really mimic whatever style we were going to play against and that has to be a consideration for us going forward now too between Ryan (Nassib) and Curtis.

Those two guys are going to handle all of the quarterback positions and the way in which they differ. They’ll have to handle that throughout the year and hopefully they can do it as well as David has done it in the past.”