The last time Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll were part of a team that used a first round pick on a quarterback, they had a very clear and coherent plan.

That was in 2018 when they were in Buffalo and Josh Allen was their prized player. Their expectation was to let the rookie sit and learn — perhaps as long as a full season — before easing him onto the field.

“Then halftime of the opening game, we're getting smoked by Baltimore, so we put him in, and the rest was history,” Schoen said earlier this spring, recalling Allen’s impromptu debut in relief of Nathan Peterman. “So that plan didn't go as well.”

Maybe not at first, but Allen has developed into the reigning MVP of the league and the Bills are a perennial championship contender, so it wasn’t all bad.

Still, the lesson to take from that experience is that it’s great to know what you want to do… and a completely different thing to actually stick to it.

Now, it’s seven years later and Schoen and Daboll are back in the rookie quarterback nurturing business. This time it’s Jaxson Dart, the passer they traded up to select with the 25th overall pick.

And yes, once again, they have a plan.

It seems to consist of having Dart stay on the sideline while veteran Russell Wilson starts the year off and another vet, Jameis Winston, acts as the primary backup. But when the Giants report to training camp on July 22, we — and they — will begin to learn just how long they can afford to adhere to that blueprint. The clock will start ticking.

There will be a lot that goes into the algorithm, from how well Wilson performs to what the team’s record is, from potential injuries to what kind of pressure Daboll feels he is under to keep his job if things start going south.

Dart will play a role in this, too. If he excels faster than expected, he could easily usurp the two older options ahead of him. It’s not as improbable as it sounds, especially given that it’s how Wilson himself became the unlikely starter as a rookie third-round pick in Seattle. A year later, he won a Super Bowl.

Daboll clearly has more of an itch to get Dart on the field than anyone in the organization. He tipped those cards on draft night when asked about having Dart take what would essentially be a redshirt year.

“That will all play out,” Daboll said with palpable impatience.

Already this spring there have been some diversions from the preapproved schedule, including a few opportunities for Dart to practice with the first-teamers under Daboll’s instructions.

“It's good to get him in with the ones,” Daboll said. “There's usually a level of anxiety at times for young players when they get thrown into the mix. It's not exactly planned in terms of he's getting rep three. Sometimes we'll just say ‘Get in there.’ Then he's calling plays in front of veterans that have done it at a high level.

"I think that's important…. Just try to get him as many different situations as you can so when it happens, because inevitably it'll happen at some point, he's been through it at least one or two times.”

The "it" that will inevitably happen is Dart playing and then starting.

Of course Schoen and Daboll aren’t the only ones on staff with experience grooming future MVP quarterbacks. Offensive coordinator Mike Kafka was the quarterbacks coach in Kansas City when they drafted Patrick Mahomes. There they were able to let Mahomes sit while Alex Smith led the team to a playoff berth.

“Whenever you draft a quarterback early, you want to have a plan or some semblance of a plan or schedule put in place to understand that it's not really a one week thing,” Kafka said of his lessons learned. “It’s a six-month, one-year, two-year type plan.”

Two years? Can the Giants wait that long for Dart to start playing? Maybe if Wilson can recapture his Super Bowl form and the defense lives up to its price tag and everything else falls into place. That would put the Giants more in line with the way the Packers transition between quarterbacks.

“We have a plan, a detailed plan,” said Giants quarterbacks coach Shea Tierney (who was an assistant in Buffalo along with Daboll and Schoen during Allen’s rookie year as well). “You figure out the player and how they learn the best and you tweak your approach from there, but as far as what the plan is, we’re sticking to that and then how it goes you kind of adjust to what happens.”

Tierney said it is helpful to have done this previously with Daboll.

“We have a frame of reference from how we did it, how we want to take those good things that worked and implement them here,” Tierney said. “Maybe some other things, because they are different people and different players, maybe we do something a little bit different.”

He also said it is nice to have Kafka on board with his insights.

“All those things we have gotten through those different experiences, take them and mold them together,” Tierney said. “We kind of take the best of both worlds with those things and blend them together to make it Jaxson’s Plan.”

Kansas City, Green Bay and Buffalo all did it differently. And all did it successfully. The last two times the Giants went through this, they waited until the middle of the season to replace Kurt Warner with Eli Manning in 2004 and then pulled the plug on Manning in favor of Daniel Jones after just two weeks in 2019. One worked out, the other did not.

Those results may have had more to do with the quarterback than the plan, but it’s very clear that just a few years after Giants president and CEO John Mara damningly said that his team had “done everything possible to screw [Jones] up,” they seem intent on doing everything possible to help Dart live up to his high potential.

And the quarterback? How does he feel about this?

“I just trust them,” Dart said of his coaches and executives. “They've had this blueprint and they've done it with different quarterbacks and you've seen them succeed at the highest level, so I trust them. For me, I'm just trying to be the most coachable player that I can. I want to play well on the offense. I want to be able to manage it and operate it at the highest level.

"I know that they definitely do have a plan. I'm just trying to take it day by day and I'm not looking for results immediately. I'm a process driven person, so I'm just taking it day by day, rep by rep.”

Sounds like a plan. Or about as close to one as any NFL team can ask for.