Of course there was pain in his eyes and in his heart.
He wanted to keep the football. He wanted to be the quarterback running into the huddle Sunday against the Rams at MetLife Stadium. He wanted to be the one rallying the Giants and lighting a raging fire inside MetLife Stadium, raising his Italian hand gesture high and everyone raising one along with him.
He’ll be on the sideline watching Tyrod Taylor instead.
Frozen Cutlets.
“It hurts,” Tommy DeVito said at his locker, “that’s part of being a competitor, but at the same time, it’s part of the position, it’s part of the business, part of my job as of right now.”
He was asked if he wats surprised when he learned Tuesday that Brian Daboll had taken the ball from him and handed it to Taylor.
“Yeah, a little bit, I was,” DeVito said. “Same time, he’s a vet, been in the league for a long time. … Kinda wasn’t sure, I was kinda 50-50 as to what was gonna happen.”
But he could stand tall knowing that what he has learned about himself was everything he saw in his biggest dreams as a 5-year-old boy.
“That I belong in the NFL, specifically,” DeVito said. “Just to go out and just prove that to myself, to the younger me, to the me that was training to be up to this point.”
What tells him that he belongs? “I won a couple of football games with some limited time or knowledge being in the league, whatever it may be,” he said.
He has learned over the years, from Don Bosco Prep to Syracuse to Illinois to here and now, that riding an emotional roller coaster is the fastest way to get your dream shattered.
“When you’re up, everybody loves you, when you’re down, everybody hates you,” DeVito said. “That’s why I’ll be mellow and good through it all.”
Everybody loves him, he need not worry about that. No one could possibly have imagined Tommy DeVito, an undrafted rookie long before he became Tommy Cutlets, starting at quarterback for the New York Football Giants and winning three games in a row before his Big Blue Balloon burst.
Brian Daboll doesn’t do sentimentality. Daboll went with his head over his heart after watching Taylor give him the spark he was looking for in the second half in Philadelphia. “He’s earned the opportunity,” Daboll said.
DeVito (8 TDs, 3 INTs) gave the Giants the best chance to win until he didn’t.
If the Giants see a future for him, and they should, they will continue to develop him next spring and summer and beyond. These last two games are not the be-all and end-all for his future prospects.
“For me to have those games under my belt was huge,” DeVito said.
Few have endured as much adversity as Taylor has in the course of his 13-year NFL career with six organizations, so DeVito got an up-close and personal view on how a professional acts when he receives bad news.
“I know he’s been in that position a couple of times before in his past,” DeVito said, “so that was kinda my first time being on the other side of it experiencing that. So to see how he handled it, obviously, weeks ago kinda prepared me for how to handle it now and how to be there, support him, and just be the best teammate I can for him.”
His teammates learned to appreciate and respect him.
“When his number was called, he wasn’t deer in headlights, he was ready to go,” linebacker Carter Coughlin said. “He’s a guy that plays with swagger, he plays with confidence, and that’s why he was able to produce the way that he does. The whole Cutlets thing, all that stuff, it just plays into who he is as a quarterback, who he is as a football player.”
Tommy Cutlets from Cedar Grove, N.J., breathed life into his team and into his town.
“There’s so many hills and valleys within a season,” Coughlin said, “and so any time that fans can come alongside a team, and help when there’s a situation where it could go one of two ways, right? You got this undrafted free-agent rookie quarterback who’s stepping in, and the fans did an unbelievable job encouraging him, encouraging our team through what could have been a really tough stretch. I really appreciated the way that the fans got involved and how much hype and excitement that brought to us as a team.”
DeVito is a resilient kid who has gotten back up against all odds, and everyone who knows him expects him to get back up again.
“I don’t know what the future holds, let alone tomorrow,” DeVito said. “I’m just gonna continue to be here, be in the moment, just try to give my all, be my best every day.”
Asked what he would want to say to Giants fans and all the people he exhilarated the way he did, he said, “Thank you for coming out, I appreciate your support as always for myself, my family … the way they treated everybody was with class and respect. I just tried to go out and give it my all, try to win games for this team, this organization, this fan base, and then, ultimately, play for them. That’s all it is.”
No one will stop rooting for him.
