No one knows how this will end for Eli Manning. John Mara, who grew up as Giants owner with Eli the way his father once grew up with the Giants of the ’50s and ’60s, said the other day that the dream scenario for his team, for this regular season, is if Daniel Jones doesn’t see the field. Mara is right, of course. If Jones doesn’t play, it means Eli is playing the way he used to play. Or at least close enough.
However it ends with Eli, though, and even as a rising Sam Darnold playing in his own stadium, it is always worth remembering that there has never been a New York football Giant more important than Eli has been. Not Frank Gifford. Not Phil Simms. Not even Lawrence Taylor, the most talented player in Giants history, and probably the greatest defensive player of them all.
No. 10 is the one.
He’s the one even if he never won another playoff game around his two Super Bowl runs. He’s the one despite the way he’s looked when he’s been putting the ball on the ground the past few seasons and throwing it to the other team and wondering where all the good offensive linemen went.
Young Yankees fans grew up with Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. Rangers fans had Mark Messier, but he came here from somewhere else and ended up finishing his career somewhere else. If you’re a young Giants fan, it’s Eli, one hundred percent. If this is his last year, you just want it to be better than Jeter’s last year with the Yankees. You want him to throw the ball the way the great Rivera did in his farewell season with the Yankees. If he doesn’t, then Daniel Jones will have to take the field sooner than John Mara would like, and it will mean the Giants are acting like losers all over again.
“A franchise quarterback gives you a chance to win every week,” Mara told me once when the subject was Eli.
The Giants didn’t win as much with him as their franchise quarterback as we thought they would after they won Super Bowl 42 from the Patriots and kept the Patriots from going 19-0, the victory that John Mara said that night in Glendale, Ariz., was the greatest in the history of his grandfather’s Giants and his father’s Giants and his. It was. Then they got to Indy four years later and did it again to the Patriots. The highlight of it all was that throw Eli made to Mario Manningham from the shadow of the goalposts, between two defenders, down the left sideline, as beautiful a deep ball as any Super Bowl quarterback has ever thrown.
It was one of those throws, one of those plays, one of those moments. If you are a Giants fan, you don’t need to see it online, or in a Super Bowl DVD. It is burned into your memory, and into your imagination. Eli had just turned 31 when he made that throw to Manningham. He’s 38 now. No one thinks he is still going to be playing quarterback for the Giants, or anybody else, when he is 42 the way Tom Brady is. Unless the Giants do make a playoff run this season, no one believes Eli will be the starting quarterback in 2020.
There are an awful lot of Giants fans I know who wanted to turn the page after Jones completed his first five passes in his first preseason game. They still remember who Eli is and what he did. But the memory of 3-13 and 5-11 the past two seasons is a lot more present, and a lot more vivid. And as painful to this generation of young Giants fans as the ’70s were to their parents.
But again: To those younger fans, the ones born after Simms and LT won the team its first Super Bowl the way my oldest son was, Eli has been as much of a star of sports around here as the greatest of Joe Torre’s Yankees were. Patrick Ewing was a great star for the Knicks. Patrick’s Knicks never won it all, losing the NBA Finals in 1994 and again in ’99. You better believe Messier delivered the Stanley Cup to Rangers’ fans in ’94 after 54 years of waiting. But as great as Messier was, as much as he delivered on his Game 6 guarantee that year against the Devils, he will always belong to both Edmonton and the Big Apple.
Eli is starting his 16th season. Eli is that pass that David Tyree pinned against his helmet in Glendale and the pass to Plaxico Burress in the corner of the end zone that won the game. Eli is the pass to Manningham. He’s the quarterback who beat Brady and Belichick twice. And the night he did beat the Patriots the first time, he really did become the biggest sports star in New York, even with Jeter and Rivera still in town, and chasing one more World Series for themselves.
Eli didn’t do it alone. He never had the numbers that his older brother did, because very few guys in history ever had the numbers his older brother did. Tom Coughlin was Eli’s coach and the guys up front on defense were the real MVPs of Super Bowl 42.
“Remember one thing about where he ought to rank in Giants history,” Ernie Accorsi, who made the trade to get Eli on draft day in ’04, said on Friday. “He plays the most important position in football. And the most important in sports.”
Eli has done it for a long time in Jersey. Might not do it all the way through this season. His play, and the Giants’ play, will determine that. Then we’ll see whether or not Jones sees the field. Until and unless he does, just remember who you’re watching with No. 10. And what he’s meant. And no Giant ever meant more.
Jay-Z and Kaep, Mickey’s slapstick defense, and the Judge’s empty chamber …
If the Giants are any good this season, there sure are a lot of winnable games the first half of their season.
Who thought it was a good idea to have a competition in golf — the FedEx Cup — that you need a slide rule to follow?
And who knew that Roger Goodell and Jay-Z would make this cute a couple?
By the way?
No matter how noble Jay-Z tried to make this partnership of his with the NFL sound, the people saying that he’s providing cover for Goodell and the league on Colin Kaepernick are right.
That’s exactly what he’s doing.
And please spare me the usual claptrap about how if teams thought Kaepernick were good enough, he’d have a job in the league.
There isn’t a single owner or GM or personnel guy who has any idea what Kaepernick has left.
Because they won’t give him a chance.
And the reason they haven’t given him a chance is because they think his political beliefs are bad for business.
So it goes.
Mickey Callaway defended his decision to take out Steven Matz the other night after Matz had thrown just 79 pitches and retired the last 14 batters he’d faced by saying he, Callaway, would make the same decisions 100 times out of 100.
At which point Callaways’s defense — of Callaway — was as much of a head-scratcher as the boneheaded decision itself.
If you listened to the Mets manager that night, you started to get the idea that he was replacing Matz with Mariano Rivera and not Seth Lugo.
Every time you see Sam Darnold on the field, even in a preseason game, you think, Boy, you’d never pass up drafting a QB like this if your team had the chance.
Oh, wait….
By the way? We all love Saquon Barkley.
But go look at the all-time rushing leaders in NFL history after Emmitt Smith and see how many titles you can find with the guys in the Top 10 behind Emmitt.
The Mets are suddenly fun to watch again.
And have given their fans more of a season, since the All-Star Break, than those fans ever thought they might get when the Mets were 10 games under .500 about twenty minutes ago.
Adam Gase may turn out to be the coach who puts the Jets back in the playoffs, but watching him on the sidelines sometimes, he does look as if he’s taken the bridge to Crazytown once or twice.
Dan Orlovsky is the guy who ought to be in the Monday Night Football booth for ESPN.
Prokhorov, we hardly knew ye.
Put it this way:
I’m not betting against Tom Brady still being out there when he’s 45.
Going into the weekend, Aaron Judge had hit .112 over his last seven games, .182 over his last 15 and .212 over his last 30.
Maybe it is the lingering effects of his oblique injury.
But nine games out of those last 30 have been against the Orioles and the Blue Jays.
Maybe this is the weekend All Rise busts out.
But he came into the weekend with 12 homers and 32 RBI in 245 at-bats.
Now that it turns out Greenland isn’t for sale, as the president apparently hoped it might be, I’ve had people on Twitter asking if I wanted to go in with them in trying to buy New Jersey.
