1/21/08: I was Wrong About Eli Manning

In the days leading up to the New England-New York game played in week 17, I openly criticized the game as meaningless and called the Giants fools for playing their boys in a game that had no playoff implications. I recognize that there were days when teams played for pride and the love of winning, but in today’s NFL, there are no moral victories. I still believe this. But I was clearly wrong when I criticized Tom Coughlin and the Giants for approaching the week 17 match-up like a playoff game. I still think that the decision was insane, but something happened to Eli Manning and the Giants that game because that night they played like a Super Bowl caliber football team and they haven’t stopped since and frankly I can’t quite adjust quickly enough to analyze the team with any sense of how good or not good they are. This will probably offend a few sensitive types, but the Giants are the girl in high school who was average looking for the first three years but suddenly one day it dawns on you that she looks pretty damn good at school one day. This observation puts you on alert and you start paying closer attention to the way she looks to see if it is a fluke or not and during this period you inevitably try to convince yourself that she really isn’t that attractive and that she isn’t worth your romantic interest (past friendship, of course). If you were moderately cool in high school, it was these buy low sell high type women that could boost you to the next level socially (whatever that means….but don’t lie you thought their were “cool kids” in high school too) because if you were smart enough to court the young lady while she was still humble and hadn’t yet acquired a grossly inflated self image you just might land one hell of an attractive girl. But if you were like me, rather than trusting what you see after a couple of days, you waffled and by the time you actually realized that you were right and hadn’t been hallucinating when you first noticed her random hotness, some stud was dating her and she had become too cool to speak to you. For me, the Giants are that girl. I should have trusted what I saw week seventeen when Eli and the Giants played phenomenally against the best team to play in the NFL in one hell of a long time. That game Eli Manning threw four touchdown passes and threw for 251 yards, and he did it without looking like the wheels might come flying off any second. In the past, Eli Manning put up what appeared to be good passing yardage and touchdown numbers but the numbers never told the whole tale because he would accumulate his touchdowns and yards in bunches. Every 3 weeks Eli would play an unreal game where he might throw for four touchdowns, but the next week he would throw five interceptions and even when he was playing well, watching him didn’t inspire confidence. Eli Manning transformed into a completely different player in that Patriots game. It isn’t that his numbers were spectacular, Eli has played statistically awing games in the past, it was how he looked. I can’t really describe it to you, but if you have watched Eli in the past and you see him now, you know exactly what I am talking about. Eli was always an interception waiting to happen and whenever something good happened all it meant was that he was due to make a catastrophic decision. Now, for whatever reason, when I see him drop back to pass I wonder which receiver he will find. He seems methodical, in touch with his surroundings. A lot of you will probably respond something along the lines of “Eli was always this way you just didn’t notice and now that he wins a few games you are jumping on the bandwagon.” But that kind of statement is simply wrong. This is not the case of an unsung, underrated player that was a star but nobody noticed until he got a chance on the national stage. When the Miami Heat won the title a few years back, Dwayne Wade fit the criteria of a guy that was really really good but people didn’t recognize it until he was in the big time. Eli Manning was not a good quarterback. He simply was not, and if you ever watched him you knew that after about three games. But now, he is and frankly I’ve never seen a team, or a player change so rapidly from just barely decent to really really good like the Giants and Eli Manning have since they played the Patriots during the final game of the regular season. And no one saw this coming. The Giants were not a really talented team waiting to explode, the Giants were an average football team and they played like one. And now something is different and they are quite good. And for me the most troubling thing is that the only reason I can think that the Giants have improved so much is that they gained confidence when they just barely lost to the Patriots and that means that in the modern world of sports, there are moral victories and they DO MATTER and this reality could make things very complicated.