Giants QB Daniel Jones doubtful for Sunday’s game at Seattle Seahawks, limited participant in Friday’s practice

Don’t expect Daniel Jones to drop back for the Giants on Sunday in Seattle.

Jones was listed as doubtful on Friday’s final injury report due to the right hamstring strain he sustained in the third quarter of last week’s win in Cincinnati.

Jones, 23, was upgraded to being a limited participant in Friday’s practice after sitting out on Wednesday and throwing on the side Thursday. But he did virtually nothing in the early portion of Friday’s practice open to the media coming off Thursday’s first work on the field.

Listing Jones as doubtful rather than questionable is meaningful in revealing just how much Jones did during the closed portion of Friday’s practice. During the open portion, Jones warmed up with trainers about as far from the media as possible, then he jogged over and watched as an idle bystander while the offense ran through its early reps.

Colt McCoy, 34, took all of the early first-team offense reps, and practice squad QB Clayton Thorson, 25, ran with the second-team offense. Jones will fly with the team, but it doesn’t appear he will play.

“We’ll make decisions really a little bit after the (practice), and we’ll also see how he feels going out there after a long flight to Seattle,” coach Joe Judge said prior to practice. “I think there’s a mix of we need to do enough with him at practice to make sure that he can go back there and operate and have the mobility to protect himself and be able to move in the pocket, get the ball thrown away, pull it down to run if we need to. Then you have to trust how he says he feels.”

“Now, to be honest with you, the dangerous thing with Daniel is he’s going to always tell you he feels great,” Judge added. “He doesn’t want to not be out there with the team. We have to really trust our eyes more so than our ears when we’re dealing with Daniel, because he’s definitely a competitor.”

So McCoy is expected to start and his backup actually could be recently re-signed veteran Alex Tanney. Tanney is not practicing with the Giants yet, but he is expected to clear the COVID-19 onboarding process by Saturday to fly to Seattle with the team.

Judge said he thought Jones “threw the ball well” on Thursday with the trainers and reiterated that gradually ramping up Jones’ workload throughout the week was by design.

“Obviously we didn’t want to go ahead and open him up too much (Thursday), really being just a couple of days into kind of moving around,” the coach said. “But he threw the ball well. I saw a lot of good velocity and very good accuracy. We talked in terms of how he felt on different things, different movements. But look, I think this guy is doing everything he can to get on the field. Again, we’re checking with the trainers, seeing how much progress he made on their end.”

Playing Jones on a bum hamstring in Seattle is unlikely, though, because of the risk of re-injury. Jones not only has to push off on his back leg when he throws; he also moves and runs a fair amount, and so it would be difficult for him to function normally.

Running is how he injured the hamstring in the first place, on a designed run up the gut against the Bengals. He came up gimpy after falling forward into a tackle by Bengals safety Vonn Bell.

If Jones sits, it will snap a 13-game start streak going back to Week 16 of last season.

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