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The Mystery of Eli ManningCan a meek, befuddled youngest sibling become a great quarterback?

By Roger Director
Posted Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008, at 5:05 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Throughout his career, Eli has done little to assuage Giants fans' fears that Accorsi bought the Manning name but, upon unwrapping the package, came away with some knockoff imitation. There have been times, though, when he has shown sparks of the cold-blooded lethality a great QB needs. He stunned Philly with a late game-winning drive last season and beat Denver the same way the year before. Such displays of Mission Impossible-esque élan are usually associated with quarterbacks like Elway, Brett Favre, Tom Brady, and, of course, Eli's older brother. Those guys are Harrison Fords in helmets. Eli doesn't look like an action hero, and he often plays like his helmet is twisted around, leaving him peering empty-eyed through the ear hole. But perhaps you don't have to look like a great quarterback to be a great quarterback.

Colorless, inscrutable Eli—on the brink of the Super Bowl, outshining his older brother for the first time—challenges our assumptions of what a quarterback needs to be. Somehow, after that hapless stretch late in the year, he has managed to win the games the Giants have needed to win. He hasn't done this through the force of his personality, but rather through his unassuming play on the field.

The Patriots game was the pivot point. They lost, of course, and the Giants players were saying all the right things about refusing to see anything good in a loss. "They took our best shot and we took their best shot," defender Justin Tuck said afterward, "only they came away with the victory."

But Eli had thrown four touchdown passes. Four. Against the Patriots. Although he threw a late interception to seal the defeat, he played three-and-a-half quarters of inspired, winning football. The Giants and Eli and their coach, Tom Coughlin, were fortified by realizing just how good their best shot was against New England. The coach saw an opportunity not to rest his players for the playoffs, as some advocated, but to underline for them his assumption that they were winners. They had responded by playing like winners. They knew what that felt like now. "This is the way we want to be playing heading into the playoffs," Eli said, dressing at his locker. "You want to be executing plays."

That's about as much as Eli ever says. Which people find irritating. He is not content-heavy. Drill down and there will be no gushers. No predictions. No trash talk. No swagger. No Namath. None of the manifest, fingers-through-the-hair anguish haunting Tony Romo after the Cowboys loss.

Win or lose, even after coining his own version of "the Drive" at the end of the first half against Dallas, Eli doesn't move the needle and doesn't want to. Maybe this, rather than the frequently infuriating plays he actually does make, is what irritates us. We want something from our sports heroes. We want our quarterbacks to be tabloid-dimensional, to provide an adrenaline jolt when we see their pictures in the sports pages. And Eli doesn't. And won't. Maybe he's quietly telling us to keep things in perspective, to put away the popcorn machines. Maybe we're so busy telling him to grow up, we don't realize we're the ones who need to.

But athletes are meant to be tested. And for some, like Eli, the questions will never die. That's life for the little brothers of the world—they always have something to prove. And so Eli will go into Green Bay on Sunday, where the wind chill will be below zero, and no matter what he did against Dallas or Tampa Bay or New England, Giants fans everywhere will be gnawing on their knuckles and wondering who the hell the kid will be this week.

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Photograph of Eli Manning by Chris Graythen/Getty Images.
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