Pat Shurmur: Eli Manning’s our starter

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Another good night for Daniel Jones on Thursday led to another round of questions for Giants head coach Pat Shurmur about when the first-round pick might supplant Eli Manning as the team’s starting quarterback.

Shurmur’s answer didn’t vary too much from other times he addressed the question, but, as noted on PFT, he stopped short of unequivocally saying that Manning would be the starting quarterback for the first week of the regular season while mentioning there are still a couple of weeks before the Giants play Dallas in Week One.

Friday brought a conference call and more quarterback questions. Shurmur called Manning the starter this time while otherwise sticking to the talking point that they are working to make sure Jones is ready when it is his time to play.

“Eli’s our starter, and we’re getting Daniel ready to play,” Shurmur said, via Bob Glauber of Newsday. “[Jones] has done a good job in the preseason. He’s getting better and he’s going to do continue to do that, so that at whatever time we need him to play, he’ll be ready.”

The message from higher up the organizational food chain has been that the best-case scenario is that the job remains Manning’s for the entire season, but there’s little doubt that any bumps in the road for the offense will be met by calls to hand the reins over to the first-round pick. The bigger the bumps, the easier it will be to sell it as the time to make a change and, for now, it seems like that may be what the Giants will wait for before pulling the trigger.