Giants chaotic draft-day maneuvering for Jaxson Dart trade included mystery team backing out

The Texans might not have been Joe Schoen’s first choice in the Jaxson Dart trade.Behind-the-scenes footage released by the Giants from draft night shows Schoen on the phone with an unnamed general manager during the first round asking, “Are you still good to do this?”It then cuts to Schoen telling the rest of the Giants brass that the mystery GM backed out on the deal.“All week he said he would do this deal and now he’s backing out on us,” Schoen says. The ensuing series of cuts leave it deliberately unclear whether what comes next is part of the same conversation, but it’s clear Schoen was stressed about how the 2025 NFL Draft might fall from there.“Does that tip the hand, New York’s now trying to move up?” he says at one point.“Leading up to the draft, it feels like there were rumors out there that the Giants wanted to move back up into one and just all that was going on,” Schoen said in an interview for Giants Life, the team’s all-access show that released the footage.“So, I was getting calls from every GM from pick 18 all the way back just because everybody assumed that we wanted to move up.“Then once we get to draft day and you get into the 20s, now all of a sudden there’s players there that the general managers didn’t think were going to be there.

So if they go from, hey, we want to move back, there’s not going to be anything there we like, nah, we’re not going to take your deal because we’re going to take our players. “It can definitely become stressful from that standpoint because you thought you’d be able to get up and now all of a sudden these teams are staying and they’re not willing to move back.That’s when it really gets stressful, like you thought you’re going to have an opportunity to make a deal for a week or so because these teams are clamoring to get out of the first round and back into 34, and then now suddenly the phone’s getting hung up, nobody’s making a deal, and you’re on to the ne...