The last time the New York Giants and New England Patriots were preparing to meet each other in football’s biggest game, only one team’s quarterback was already a Super Bowl MVP.
This time, there will be two.
Yes, Eli Manning has certainly come of age, and now a Super Bowl MVP himself, Manning is once again poised to keep three-time Super Bowl MVP quarterback Tom Brady and the Patriots from winning their fourth NFL title.
With the lofty position he’s in today however, it’s easy to forget Manning’s earlier struggles, prior to the point when everything changed for the Giants quarterback, four years ago.
Before then, Manning’s ex-Giant teammates and former Pro Bowlers, tight end Jeremy Shockey and running back Tiki Barber, were two of the most popular Giants of all-time.
To this day, Barber remains the Giants’ all-time leading rusher, having walked away from football early with more than a dozen Giants team records, and Shockey, picked 14th overall by New York in the 2002 NFL draft, was an all-pro in all but one of the first five years he spent as a Giant, before his sixth season in the league became his last in New York.
It could be argued though, that each player stunted Manning’s growth as both a quarterback and a team leader.
Though extremely talented and productive, Barber and Shockey were also more concerned with their own personal accolades than buying into the team-first concept preached by Giants head coach Tom Coughlin, and which Manning has exemplified ever since his rookie season in the NFL.
Barber openly criticized Coughlin and attacked Manning’s leadership skills, calling his quarterback’s motivational pre-game speeches “comical.”
Always a professional, Manning dismissed Barber’s unhelpful comments and instead let his play do his talking for him, especially once Barber and Shockey were off the team.
It may be a mere coincidence, but a definitive line can be drawn at the instant in Manning’s career when he shed the negative appraisals of many more than just Barber and Shockey for the launching of a career more befitting of a top draft selection.
That instant was a disappointing 22-10, Week 15 home loss to the Washington Redskins in 2007, during which Manning was an awful 18-for-53, for 184 yards, no touchdowns and no interceptions.
The defeat was the final game as a Giant for Shockey, who suffered a season-ending broken leg and ankle damage in the contest.
Without the demonstrative, vocal, and disgruntled Shockey, who demanded the ball too often from Manning, and sans Barber, who retired from football following the 2006 season at the age of 32, to begin a television broadcasting career (only to years later, ask the Giants to take him back and have them refuse), Manning promptly began to turn his career around.
New York’s 2007 season was on the brink after the loss to the Redskins, and after a home loss to Dallas five weeks earlier, even Giants co-owner, CEO, and team president John Mara publicly questioned whether his team could ultimately win a championship with his inconsistent quarterback.
Almost, immediately, Manning started to answer that question.
A week after the loss to Washington, Manning was only 7-for-15, for 111 yards, two interceptions and no touchdowns during heavy rain, sleet, and snow in Buffalo. Manning’s running backs picked him up though, running for 291 yards (their most in a game since 1959), to rally the Giants from a 14-0 first-quarter deficit to a 38-21 playoff-clinching victory.
The next week, Coughlin could have had his team lay down, but that wasn’t his way, nor was it Manning’s.
With the troublemaking Barber and Shockey out of the picture, Manning and the Giants played the undefeated Patriots tough. And, while they failed to deny New England from making history as the first NFL team to complete a perfect 16-0 regular season, Manning was 22 of 32 for 252 yards, while throwing four touchdowns passes and just one interception in a confidence-infusing 38-35 loss that inspired an ensuing, historic playoff run.
Manning completed 20 of 27 passes for 185 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions in a wild-card playoff upset in Tampa Bay, after which ex-Giant wide receiver Amani Toomer said, “Eli had a great game… he took what was out there and didn’t force anything. He doesn’t get real excited. There is more than one way to lead a team and he showed that.”
Continuing to silence his earlier critics, Manning threw two touchdowns, again with no picks, while engineering a game-winning drive that spanned the third and fourth quarters, to oust top-seeded Dallas the following week.
Not even frigid temperatures on the frozen tundra of legendary Lambeau Field could stop Manning from taking out icon Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers a week later, in the NFC title game, when Manning helped rally the Giants from a pair of third-quarter deficits en route to an overtime victory.
Next was the game in which Manning finally arrived as the quarterback who would dispel the denigration of his previous detractors.
Instead of winning a Super Bowl ring alongside his ex-teammates, Barber was forced to interview and congratulate them as a television reporter after Manning earned a Super Bowl XLII MVP, going 19-for-34, for 255 yards, two touchdowns, and one interception in a 17-14 win, to keep Brady and the Patriots from a perfect 19-0 season.
Sure, the Giants’ defense knocking Brady around all game was the biggest factor in the victory, and yes, Manning needed the luck of a sensational helmet catch by wide receiver David Tyree, as well as a dropped pass by cornerback Asante Samuel.
But, Tyree’s amazing play would never have happened had Manning not done his best Harry Houdini impersonation while escaping two different jersey holds to remarkably avoid a sack and find Tyree downfield before getting hit.
The poise and execution under pressure, right down to Manning’s Super Bowl-winning touchdown pass to wide receiver Plaxico Burress with 35 seconds left in the game, were expected of Brady. Yet, it was Manning who came through in that way on the grandest of all stages.
That was Manning’s typical humble way of saying, “Take that, Barber and Shockey,” and everyone else who didn’t believe Manning would ever be capable of pulling it off.
As Barber continued to report on the Giants’ championship instead of reveling in it as a player, Shockey opted to receive his Super Bowl ring in quietude while declining to participate in New York’s post-Super Bowl team celebrations, including the Giants’ White House visit and their blue carpet ring ceremony before Shockey was traded to New Orleans a few months later.
Ever since his first Super Bowl win, Manning has continued to grow and lead his team well, regardless of the circumstances – a sharp departure from the standard learning curve Manning endured as a young quarterback in the league.
As a rookie, Manning completed a career-low 48.2 percent of his passes, and threw only six touchdown passes and nine interceptions, while starting the Giants’ final seven games -winning just one – in 2004.
He improved in an up-and-down season the following year, but concluded that year with an awful performance (10-for-18, for 113 yards, no touchdowns, and three interceptions) in a 23-0 wild-card playoff loss at home to Carolina.
Over the next two seasons, Manning remained erratic at best, prior to the Giants’ playoff run to end the 2007 season, while never completing more than 57.7 percent of his passes in any of his first four seasons.
Since then however, Manning hasn’t had a season completion percentage of less than 60.3 percent.
In 2008, he guided the Giants to the top seed in the NFC playoffs, throwing 21 touchdowns passes and just ten interceptions, even though a fierce Giants Stadium wind contributed to a poor game from Manning in a divisional playoff loss to sixth-seeded Philadelphia.
Raising his game further over the past three seasons, Manning has averaged 29 touchdowns and 18 interceptions while throwing for over 4,000 yards in each of those years, including a franchise record 4,933 yards this season.
During this year’s playoffs, Manning has been nearly unstoppable.
Complementing the Giants’ season-high 172 rushing yards in a wild-card win over Atlanta on January 8th, Manning was 23-for-32, for 277 yards, three touchdowns and no interceptions.
The following Sunday, Manning threw for 330 yards – 274 in the first half – three more touchdowns, and just one interception en route to a 37-20 upset at 15-1, top seeded Green Bay.
While that was certainly impressive, Manning showed his mettle one week later, in the Giants’ NFC title game win at second-seeded San Francisco.
Despite getting roughed up for a season-high six sacks and taking dozens of other hard hits, Manning hung in to set team postseason records for completions (32) and attempts (58), while tossing two touchdown passes and no picks in another conference championship overtime victory.
Although it was his fifth career win in the postseason, an NFL record for quarterbacks, Manning was much more concerned that the victory meant a return trip to the Super Bowl.
Manning’s demonstration of his toughness in San Francisco was merely the latest example of his incredible durability. His next game, in Super Bowl XLVI, will be his NFL-leading 130th consecutive start, as he continues to pick up from where his older brother Peyton Manning (an NFL-record 227 straights starts before missing this entire season with a neck injury) left off as the league’s reigning ironman.
Just like his brother, the younger Manning is the ultimate competitor, something that he has shown better than any other quarterback in the league this season, with an NFL-record 15 fourth-quarter touchdown passes (eclipsing the record set by a couple of Colts legends – brother Peyton and Johnny Unitas).
Two of those scores came in the final 3:37 during a Week 4 win in Arizona to help New York erase a ten-point deficit and escape with a four-point win.
A similar comeback was led by Manning ten weeks later, when an NFC East title and the Giants’ season appeared lost, until Manning wiped out a 12-point deficit with a couple of touchdown passes over the last 3:14, to give New York a stunning three-point win in Dallas.
In between those two remarkable rallies, were two other fourth-quarter touchdown passes by Manning in Week 9, the last of which came with just fifteen seconds left in the game, to give the Giants a 24-20 win and end the Patriots’ NFL-record 20-game home winning streak.
Take any of those heroics instances away, and rather than competing for their fourth Super Bowl win in franchise history, New York would have missed the playoffs for a third straight season, and Coughlin might be out of a job.
The game-winner in the Week 9 victory was thrown to tight end Jake Ballard, who had a big season after being cut twice by the Giants as an undrafted rookie last year.
Much of Ballard’s success can be attributed to Manning’s outstanding ability to develop a great rapport with any receiver and improve that receiver’s game.
Ballard more than adequately filled in for the offseason departure of tight end Kevin Boss, who left the Giants for a richer contract in Oakland after he caught a key fourth-quarter, 45-yard pass from Manning in Super Bowl XLII (filling in for Shockey) prior to having three solid seasons for New York.
Giants general manager Jerry Reese drew the ire of fans and the media alike when he not only let Boss leave, but also for allowing wide receiver Steve Smith to go to division rival Philadelphia two years after Smith caught a team-record 107 passes.
No problem for Manning, though.
Whereas Boss and Smith each had injury-plagued seasons that were less productive than what they enjoyed in New York, Manning not only put Ballard on the NFL map, but he helped Victor Cruz go from an undrafted wide receiver out of an FCS school (Massachusetts), without an NFL reception, to one of the league’s most explosive playmakers.
Under Manning’s direction, Cruz hauled in 82 catches for a franchise-record 1,536 yards (easily beating Toomer’s old record) during the regular season, and he has caught another 17 passes in the postseason, including ten huge receptions (one short of a team record) for 142 yards in New York’s NFC title game win.
Now, Manning prepares for the irony of playing in the Super Bowl that in many ways, should have been his brother’s.
After all, the location of Super Bowl XLVI is Indianapolis, where the future first-ballot hall of famer Peyton Manning became famous.
No team has played a Super Bowl in its own stadium to date, but this would have been the most fitting year for that to happen, especially with the chance of pitting brother against brother, Pro Bowler against Pro Bowler, and Super Bowl MVP against Super Bowl MVP, in the Colts’ first chance at hosting a Super Bowl after Peyton led his team to 11 double-digit-win seasons in his previous 13 years, before the Colts dropped off to 2-14 without him this season.
Thus, it will strange for Eli to take the field in the “House That Peyton Built,” trying to earn his second Super Bowl ring.
However, if the pressure of making his own way in the NFL alongside his brother’s historic career didn’t get to him, neither will the weight of having to once again beat a great quarterback like Brady, in a game as big as the Super Bowl, in place like Lucas Oil Stadium.
Mostly, that’s due to being quite possibly, the most even-keeled player in the game.
Even after all of his success, Manning is no different today than the unassuming manner in which he handled himself when yours truly interviewed him in the Giants’ locker room at Giants Stadium, in December, 2006, following New York’s fifth loss in six games, at a time when Manning hadn’t yet become an accomplished NFL quarterback.
It’s why Manning, who rightfully and proudly wears a “C” on his jersey as a team captain, was able to steadily navigate the Giants through another stretch of five losses in six games to a Super Bowl berth this season.
Throughout his own career, New York Yankees’ shortstop Derek Jeter has managed to mesh being a great player and a champion, with seemingly handling himself off the field and with the tough New York media flawlessly, in a way that no other New York athlete has been given credit for doing.
Perhaps one player in New York who has been overlooked in that regard is Manning, who likewise, has appeared to always act in the right way and has said the correct things over his first eight years in the NFL’s biggest market.
If there had been one flaw, it’s that Manning had a sort of “aw, shucks” lack of fire when things went wrong on the field. It drove Giants fans crazy, causing them and the media to label Manning a non-leader in the early part of Manning’s career.
But, Manning’s success in recent years, particularly the steadfast way he’s played in the clutch this season, has obliterated that notion.
Not only his achievements, but the way they’ve been accomplished, puts Manning on the level of a player like Jeter, even when Manning is compared to other great quarterbacks in his draft class.
Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger and San Diego’s Phillip Rivers, who was swapped for Manning in the 2004 draft, were each thought to have been leaps and bounds ahead of Manning when they began their respective careers.
The late-blooming Manning has pretty much caught up though. Winning his next game would tie Manning with Roethlisberger in Super Bowl victories, while Rivers has yet to win one.
Manning has thrown more regular season career interceptions than Roethlisberger or Rivers, but he’s also passed for more yards and touchdowns than his draft-mates.
And, he’s done that in Jeter-esque fashion, avoiding any sort of controversy or off-field trouble, while growing into a true team leader on the field.
The same can’t be said for Roethlisberger, who was suspended by the NFL last season after his involvement in two separate sexual assault allegations, or for Rivers, who gained a reputation as an arrogant hothead who has been viewed trash-talking with stadium fans and his own teammates, while even giving a middle finger to fans.
Although he’s played well, Rivers hadn’t gotten over being traded by the Giants after they selected him fourth overall, for Manning, who was taken first overall by San Diego.
In contrast, Manning, who was pushed by his father, ex-New Orleans Saints’ star quarterback, Archie Manning, to go to New York over San Diego, managed that situation, and the rough start to his career, much better.
By now, Manning has proven himself in New York and in the league, including backing up the confidence he had in himself, as portrayed by a candid answer he gave to ESPN (New York) radio show host Michael Kay, who put Manning on the spot with a tough pre-season question in August.
Kay asked Manning point blank, if he was a top-five quarterback in the league, in the same class as Brady.
Unwavering, Manning said he believed he was, and he was somewhat mocked for saying so.
A career season later, Manning is the quarterback opposing Brady in the Super Bowl.
Even those who once derided Manning when he suggested he was on par with Brady’s level of play, jumped on the Manning bandwagon, noting that one can’t spell “Elite” without “Eli.”
What Manning’s teammates and coaches, and the Giants’ front office have also learned is that fittingly, the words “believe,” “resilient,” or “leading” also cannot be spelled without the letters in Manning’s first name.
Neither can the phrase “Giant leap” – something that Manning has taken from the limited quarterback he used to be, to the one who this year, was selected to his second Pro Bowl in four seasons, and who is on the verge taking a low-seeded and flawed team to a second Super Bowl victory in five seasons.
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Eli Manning season by season stats