No one hardly even knew about him: How Daniel Jones rose from overlooked recruit to potential

No one knows how Becca and Steve Jones did it.

Four kids, four elite athletes. Countless games and even more practices, often overlapping. Their oldest, also named Becca, played field hockey at Davidson. Daniel played football at Duke. Bates is a sophomore forward for the Davidson basketball team. And Ruthie, the youngest, will start her collegiate soccer career at Duke this fall.

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They all played multiple sports growing up, which meant weekends were more than a little busy. ESPN’s Jay Bilas, whose son Anthony grew up alongside Daniel, believes he’s never seen a more dedicated set of parents, insistent on being there for as many moments in their children’s lives as possible. And their kids were almost always there for each other, too.

Daniel Jones says that it was a family rule: Everybody went to everything. Showing up mattered more than wins or losses. They weren’t allowed to watch much TV or play a bunch of video games, so it was only natural that they gravitated toward sports.

“It was always fun,” says Becca Jones, Daniel’s mother. “We never felt like it was something we had to do or that it was a burden. Saturdays were the best because everything was all packed into one day, before school sports started. Everybody went to each other’s games and cheered and then got back in the car and went to the next thing. It was just something we did. We felt like there was a lot of joy in doing it. So it just kept going year after year. I don’t think we’ve stopped.

“We still go from game to game, and those are our best days, when we’re still doing that.”

Daniel Jones was once a lanky kid whose only Division I football offer was from Princeton. He didn’t have a Rivals.com recruiting profile and needed a Hail Mary phone call from his high school coach to David Cutcliffe to get him noticed. He is now 6 feet 5, 220 pounds, and projected to be one of the first quarterbacks selected in April’s NFL Draft.

For the Jones family, Sundays are about to get unexpectedly busier.

“Now they’re going to have to fit the NFL in with Daniel,” Bilas says. “They’re not going to have any time.”

The term “late-bloomer” feels custom-made for Daniel Jones. He describes himself that way. His parents describe him that way, as do his former coaches. Look at any photos from his freshman or sophomore years of high school, and it’s easy to see why.

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Steve Jones remembers his son — at this point, 5 feet 10, 148 pounds — telling him he knew he could play quarterback in college. His father wasn’t sure and questioned him. What makes you feel like you can do that? Daniel answered calmly and rationally. He’d always been on the smaller side, and he’d proven he could compete. Daniel also said something that sticks with his father now: “I watch what quarterbacks do and the decisions they make. A lot of them could make better decisions, and I think I would. And I think I could win that way.”

Steve told Daniel that sounded like a good idea, mostly because his son’s main athletic advantage surely wouldn’t be his size. Daniel had an athletic build, but it was more suited for basketball than football at the time. He was a point guard and looked like it.

“I couldn’t see that he was going to be 6-5, 220 at that point,” Steve says.

This put Daniel Jones behind the curve. He needed to grow and figure out a way to get on coaches’ radars. He grew up in Charlotte, an ACC hotbed, about 30 miles away from one of the most sought-after quarterbacks in the country, Will Grier. The two played against each other twice in high school.

But so much of recruiting relies on potential. It focuses on frames that players will fill out and prospects who seem more likely to boom than bust.

“We used to tease Daniel and say, ‘You’re so skinny, you’ve got to run around the shower to get wet. You need to start eating, boy,’ ” says former Charlotte Latin School head coach Larry McNulty.

Jones became a starter for McNulty as a sophomore. Grier’s father, Chad, recently recalled Jones as a 5-11 kid “just getting obliterated,” but he said he told his coach, “I know he’s not a big kid, but he’s got the heart of a lion. You’re gonna be all right with that kid.”

That didn’t automatically translate into offers, not like the ones Grier attracted. Jones received FCS interest, including from some Ivy League schools. To make things more difficult, Jones broke his right wrist while playing basketball during his junior year. He didn’t realize it was actually broken until May, and he had surgery to fix it then.

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The problem with this, outside of obvious discomfort, was that it meant his summer was pretty much shot. He had hoped to attend camps and garner high-major interest. He couldn’t do that with his throwing wrist in a cast.

“It’s the middle of July, and I’m worried that he’s not even going to be ready to play his senior year,” McNulty says. “We had a nice team coming back.”

Three days after Jones got his cast off, he and his father went on a northeastern college tour, visiting a few Ivy League camps, including Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth. McNulty warned him to be careful and not do too much with his wrist, but Jones, who had grown to 6-4, 175 pounds, worked out for coaches anyway.

Jones didn’t earn an invitation to The Opening or participate in any summer showcase event. He did attend a camp at Duke, but Cutcliffe’s recounting of it shows Jones was less than memorable: “He was a late-bloomer, so, really thin and just not a guy, when you have 100, 200, quarterbacks around, not the guy that you would pick out.”

Says McNulty: “He was flying, when I say under the radar, I mean way under the radar. No one hardly even knew about him.”

A solid senior season at Charlotte Latin didn’t create any seismic shifts, either. The Hawks won a state title and Jones was a co-captain, but he seemed destined to play at the FCS level, likely for Princeton. Rivals.com did not rate him as a recruit; 247Sports listed him as a two-star prospect.

McNulty was confused. He knew fundamentally why his quarterback wasn’t getting love from bigger programs, but he didn’t really understand. So, he sent film, then picked up his phone and called Cutcliffe.

“He just wanted an evaluation of his quarterback,” Cutcliffe says. “He trusted me as a guy that had coached quarterbacks a long time. I looked at it and I immediately called him back and I said, ‘Don’t you call anybody else. You’re absolutely right, and we don’t have a scholarship, but I am going to recruit him to try to get him here.’ ”

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Jones would have to join the program as a walk-on initially. He paid his way through summer classes before a senior suffered an injury and medically retired, opening up a scholarship for Jones.

Cutcliffe, like any great coach, can watch tape and see the future. He can picture what a 16- or 17-year-old kid will look like by the time he’s spent a couple years in his system. He looks for specific skills. He’s found them in all of the great quarterbacks he’s developed, like the Manning brothers. And he saw them in Jones.

“It starts with whether he has size and accuracy,” Cutcliffe says. “He had extremely quick hands and his feet worked with his body, if that makes sense. That’s kind of my term. But when I see a guy that his feet are constantly where they should be, whether his body is turning left, right, up, back — he had great body control. This is a kid that’s 6-4 at the time.

“I loved what I saw. He had what I call middle-infielder hands. I’ve never seen a great quarterback that didn’t have great hands. Peyton always — and Eli both — but Peyton’s always had great hands, as all of our outstanding quarterbacks have. When he suffered that neck surgery, injury and recovery, one of the biggest concerns that we worked through while he was here was catching snaps. A great middle infielder, his eyes can be up, coming through a bag, he can catch a ball and throw it and never lose sight of his target at first base and the awareness of a guy trying to make a hard slide.

“A quarterback’s got to catch a snap flawlessly to get a grip while keeping his eyes downfield, very aware of what’s occurred with linebackers and safeties, to get a good post-snap read. That may sound very uncomplicated or unimportant to some. It’s probably the most important ability that you find out if a guy can play at the next level. The game will speed up on him. Daniel did all of those things naturally.”

In Jones, Cutcliffe realized everyone else had overlooked these traits.

Jay Bilas always thought Jones would make a great Division I basketball player. Jones had played the game alongside Anthony Bilas from the time they were 5  years old. They played together on AAU teams with current Tennessee star and likely SEC Player of the Year Grant Williams and at Jay Bilas’ summer camps in Charlotte.

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Jones attended that summer between his junior and senior years while he had his broken wrist, deciding to participate even though he couldn’t use his right (dominant) hand.

“He couldn’t really shoot with it, couldn’t really dribble with it,” Jay Bilas says. “After a day and a half of camp, one of the other camp directors and I were talking. I said, ‘Daniel Jones is the best player in the camp — left-handed. He’s not even using his right hand.’ And he was. He was the best player.”

By that time, Jones was committed to play football at Princeton. He’d always considered himself an athlete, and at times he thought basketball might be his future. But when he earned the starting quarterback spot at Charlotte Latin his sophomore year, that went out the window. He loved football too much, though he loved basketball enough to keep playing that, too.

“He would always do the tough stuff,” Bilas says. “He rebounded, defended, passed it, did every screen, did everything you wanted. I would always be like, ‘Daniel, shoot it. You need to score. You could score.’ I wouldn’t say he was a reluctant scorer, but he wasn’t a me-first player. Like, ‘It’s OK for you to shoot it. Your teammates want you to shoot it.’ ”

One time, Bilas told both his son and Jones that they had to get a charge before halftime or else they’d be benched for the second half. They both nodded, assuming they just had to take a charge.

“No, you have to get a charge called on you. Run somebody over,” Bilas told them.

Jones tried, admirably. He drew two and-ones and returned to the huddle proud that he had attempted to run a defender over not once but twice. Bilas told him the and-ones did not count. He needed to be whistled for an actual charge.

“At that time, it wasn’t necessarily in his nature to be as that physical on a basketball court on the offensive end,” Bilas says. “But he really is tough as nails.”

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McNulty’s favorite story involves Jones as a 5-11, 145-pound sophomore quarterback, recently thrust into the varsity lineup. Jones took some hits that year that McNulty can still feel on a visceral level. One came courtesy of Jeb Blazevich, who went on to play tight end at Georgia.

“He hit Daniel once from his blind side,” McNulty says. “I thought he was dead. His helmet was just all smashed up and everything. He comes wobbling over to the bench and he says, ‘Get me a damn helmet and get me back out there.’

“I thought, ‘You know what? I got something here.’ ”

By the time Jones left Charlotte Latin, he held school career records for total offensive yards (8,344), passing yards (6,997) and total TDs (98) and was a team captain both his junior and senior seasons.

Something was up with the Duke scout team. Cutcliffe could feel it as he watched practice from the field in the fall of 2015, and his hunch was confirmed repeatedly by film he watched later each day. His scout team quarterback looked so good that he started to get concerned about the state of his defense.

“I would get a little bit enamored with Daniel,” Cutcliffe says. “We really pride ourselves in making our practices, particularly the team period, very much game-like. So, he was competing. We don’t tell the scout team quarterback to not make plays and to not try to compete against our defense. I’d find myself with my eyes on Daniel like, ‘Oh my gosh.’

“I was very much convinced that we had an extremely special player at quarterback.”

More than once that fall, Cutcliffe told assistant coaches that Jones could become a high draft pick. He didn’t know how high, but he had coached enough NFL-caliber quarterbacks to know that his gut feeling was usually right about this sort of thing.

Cutcliffe’s experience with that type of quarterback — particularly with Peyton and Eli Manning at Tennessee and Ole Miss, respectively — will help Jones as he goes through the grueling pre-draft process. Cutcliffe is considered something of a quarterback guru. His quarterbacks get the benefit of the doubt, even if their numbers aren’t as flashy or their arms aren’t as strong as some of the other prospects. They’ve learned the position from a respected quarterbacks coach who has likened his role as a quarterback-molder to that of the head of a surgical team watching one of his surgeons perform an operation.

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“One of the keys to this whole thing is remembering the player you are coaching is a functional part,” Cutcliffe said last season. “You’re not trying to do it for him. You’re trying to teach him everything you know. That is what gives you a chance to create greatness at a position. I think Peyton and Eli both respected that approach. Their input was important.”

Jones understands how much Cutcliffe and Duke quarterbacks coach Zac Roper have helped him with fundamentals. He knows how much stronger he’s gotten in the weight room. But neither of those things are what make someone A Cutcliffe Guy.

“What Coach Cut teaches so well is the responsibility of playing the quarterback position,” Jones says. “It’s the understanding of managing a game and when we’re going to take risks, when we’re not going to take risks and how to manage the football process behind there. … What differentiates him from other coaches is his ability to prepare the quarterback mentally and from a responsibility standpoint.”

That’s why Cutcliffe’s quarterbacks are impressive, and why many people around the sport expect Jones to be the same once he gets in front of NFL team executives.

Despite missing time this past season, his third as the starter at Duke, with a broken collarbone, Jones threw for 2,674 yards with 22 touchdowns and nine interceptions, completing 60.5 percent of his passes. He led Duke to a 56-27 win against Temple in the Independence Bowl and declared for the NFL Draft a few days later, having received first-round grades from multiple teams.

Since January, Jones has been training with quarterback coach David Morris — who also played for Cutcliffe, at Ole Miss — in Mobile, Ala. In what was essentially a home game at the Senior Bowl, Jones earned MVP honors. His draft stock continues to hold steady, and he is expected to be the third or fourth quarterback off the board.

“Daniel learned a lot of his competitive nature from his brother and with his sisters,” says Becca Jones. “It was just a healthy sense of competition, and I think they egged each other on. He learned that his nature has always been one to let his actions speak louder than words and he’s always respected people and others — coaches, role models, whomever — who were able to demonstrate what they could do versus talk a big game.

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“He’s comfortable telling you something, but he’s in his element when he’s able to prove it and demonstrate it, and I think that’s where he gets the most joy.”

Between the NFL combine, workouts, Duke’s pro day and eventually the draft itself, there are myriad opportunities to do just that in the coming months.

Jones’ parents will be there, every step of the way, of course. They wouldn’t miss it.

(Top photo by Grant Halverson / Getty Images)

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