Sitting at No. 2 in the draft order, the New York Giants are finally in a perfect situation to find 37-year-old Eli Manning's successor. But on Thursday, exactly one week before the draft, Giants general manager Dave Gettleman was talking like a man who doesn't plan on taking advantage of the Giants' rare high draft position by taking a quarterback.

For one, he called it "hogwash" to say that the Giants should draft a quarterback this year because there's no guarantee they'll be picking this early in the drafts to come. And then he said that missing on a quarterback is a "five-year mistake." He did not say how many years passing on a franchise quarterback could set a team back, but if you're wondering what the answer is, just look at the Cleveland Browns.

And yes, it sounds like running back Saquon Barkley is in play.

Obviously, none of his comments necessarily mean that the Giants won't take a quarterback. It is smokescreen season after all. But nobody should be surprised if Gettleman passes on the quarterbacks, though in that scenario, it'd probably make more sense to find a way to get extra draft ammunition by trading out of the second pick with a quarterback-needy team. Gettleman has been complimentary of Manning since getting the Giants' GM job in late December and Thursday wasn't the first time he's talked about the dangers of drafting a quarterback so high.

"With the second pick, we're going to take the best player available," Gettleman said in January. "If you take a guy just to take a guy especially at the quarterback position -- and he fails -- you set yourself back five years. There are teams in what I call quarterback hell. They got a quality defense, good special teams and they're going 7-9, 8-8, 9-7. ... Now if there is a legitimate [quarterback in the draft], they got to trade up [and] give away the farm to get the guy."

Again, this doesn't mean the Giants won't take a quarterback at No. 2. There's just no way to know for sure, even if Gettleman has spent the entire offseason talking like a general manager who has no interest in drafting a quarterback in the first round. What we do know is that the Giants hold the key to this year's draft. As our Will Brinson wrote last month, what they decide to do with the second pick will "create a domino effect regardless of which direction the Giants go."

If the Giants do pass on a quarterback and stay put at No. 2, three likely candidates come to mind in Barkley, pass rusher Bradley Chubb, and guard Quenton Nelson.