The End of Eli, and Nothing Else
Most of being a sports fan is making work for yourself. Because it is not really an avocation that should take up much of your time. The game starts at seven and will be over around ten, and though it doesn’t need to be watched — perhaps shouldn’t; the team is an aggravating mess and your mind is dense with ducked obligations — it might be fun. And sometimes it is, but there is no point in dwelling on the experience if it isn’t. After another dismal loss, you should absolutely not check the postgame quotes, because you will find no joy there, only coaches muttering bassed-up lorem ipsum about the extent to which there is any quit in this team and players impatiently fielding questions about the bigness of the fourth quarter. None of this is interesting, and none of it is even sports. It is just boring people talking about stuff they don’t want to talk about, because they are not conversationalists, generally, and they don’t think about their jobs in the same grandly narrativized way reporters do. This action-adjacent nonsense shouldn’t concern you, the fan, who is looking for a good time. But in the midst of bleary late-day torpor, when nothing important is going to get done anyway, maybe it does.
More tedious, more flagrantly pointless and dumb, is worrying about your team when they are not remotely in the proximity of a sporting event — worrying about lineup choices that haven’t been made yet, trades that may or may not actually be in the works, the machinations within a coach’s office or executive suite you don’t have access to. What self-thwarting bullshit are these assholes up to? you wonder on Tuesday, when the game isn’t until Sunday, or in June, when the season doesn’t start until September. You live with the people who operate and play for your favorite team as much as you choose to, and when those people suck, you are always making a poor choice.
I hate thinking about the New York Giants. I’m under no obligation to do so, but I press on regardless. I think about them a lot more often now than I did when they were winning Super Bowls, or when they were in the deep, damp whatever of Eli Manning’s prime. They are currently neither good nor acceptably mediocre. They are perhaps the worst-run outfit in the sport, and have been for a while, having taken all the wrong lessons from employing an innovative-seeming dope of a coach and tripled down on an institutional conservatism that never had much merit in the first place. The greatest player in the franchise’s history was a rail-conquering maniac and its greatest coach a wildly profane blowhard. These are the types of personalities, if attached to extraordinary talent, that excel in football, a sport in which you arrange a crew of fifty-plus musclebound sadists and implore them to go knock the shit out of the opponent. New York’s ownership group, headed by ripening rich guy’s kid John Mara, is convinced that the Giants have won every title with troop-love, firm handshakes, and proper breeding.
And of course believing that for long enough increases the possibility you might accidentally hand the ballclub over to a prismatically incompetent charlatan like Dave Gettleman, who has over two years reduced a mediocre Giants’ roster down to gristle while not intending to do so, claiming the whole time that he’s building up what he’s obviously destroying, and not seeming to know the difference between the two processes. A truculent boomer with more idioms than acumen, Gettleman got the general manager job and continues to keep it because he knows how to please a dignified simpleton like Mara.
The key is not savvy team-building but the effortful maintenance of What The New York Giants Are All About. The Giants value experience, so they hire Pat Shurmur, a retread head coach who knows how to do the job — who also went 9-and-23 the last time he did it. The Giants are certain in their decision-making, so they draft Saquon Barkley second overall and Gettleman brags about not even considering trading down — despite the fact that successful franchises like the Eagles and Patriots do so all the time. The Giants conduct themselves with class, so they trade away the 26-year-old Odell Beckham for being a preening but decidedly harmless dick — and replace him with an aging slot receiver, Golden Tate, who gets himself suspended during the offseason. These are all really stupid decisions, but they make a certain kind of sense, if you understand the Giants not as a competitive entity so much as a platform from which Mara can espouse his empty, superficial all-boys prep school ideas about how the world should be.
Nothing has more clearly articulated this vision than the absurd gentleness with which the Giants have allowed Eli Manning’s career to wind down. Eli has never been an elite quarterback. Even at his peak, he was prone to baffling lapses in concentration and consistently delivered passes into windows several stories above the one he was aiming for. In the aggregate he was fine, certainly much better than the assorted Tom Savages and Derek Andersons who occupy the starting QB slots of the NFL’s lower tier squads every season. But averages don’t describe Eli well. His play from game to game has varied dramatically, topping out somewhere north of Tony Romo’s best efforts and on the bad days descending into a trench from which Manning lost games by himself, through sheer swirly-eyed dint of his fritzing conscience. It’s hard to say, when he’s dark in the recesses of an Eli Hole, whether individual tosses into triple-coverage are the product of overconfidence, fear, or aggressive bewilderment. You can’t tell from looking at Eli. His default emotional state is I Just Got Here.
Of course, Eli had some splendid moments, twice stringing together impressive performances in the playoffs, beating Tom Brady and the Patriots in a pair of Super Bowls. These runs were a blast for Giants fans because the possibility of a three-pick Eli outing loomed over each successive contest, and then a wonderful would happen: he’d keep playing great. He wasn’t the best player on either of those champions, but in both title games, he led game-winning fourth quarter drives. The finest play of his career might be this crunchtime throw to Mario Manningham in SB XLVI. It’s a beautiful ball from Eli — and fittingly, arguably an even better catch. Eli always needed quite a bit of help to reach the mountaintop.
He hasn’t had enough since that last Super Bowl victory. Russell Wilson has overcome terrible offensive lines for much of his career, but Eli ain’t Russell Wilson. Aaron Rodgers has rarely played with a decent running back, but Eli ain’t Aaron Rodgers either. When the Giants aren’t loaded, Eli looks average or downright awful, and as the roster around him has deteriorated, and Eli himself has gotten old, his play has tapered off severely: it’s all nervous checkdowns and weak heaves now. This oxidation process has been ongoing for at least five years.
Most other franchises would have given up on him sometime around 2015. It happens: legends get old. You throw them a farewell press conference, tell them you love them, and move on. The Giants have stuck so stubbornly with Eli, not because he can still do the job well, but because their breasts swell with pride when they think about what he stands for. What that is, exactly, is difficult to unpack because there really is nothing there but sentimentality and the gauzy outline of a Nice Young Man. Eli is polite, professional, and titanically dull. Have you ever watched a golf tournament in which some guy who looks like Justin Long blankly moseys toward the green and Jim Nantz is breathlessly exalting the man for having a wife and a daughter? Eli is like that. Becoming a Republican folk hero is occasionally as easy as standing somewhere near success and not having any tattoos.
That success is faded to the point of illegibility, but the Giants only just recently began to consider relieving Manning of his duties when they drafted Daniel Jones, a Duke grad with a carbon copy personality, with the sixth overall pick in last year’s draft. The selection was almost universally panned — bad process, bad value, bad player — and Gettleman, who relishes the opportunity to get supercilious in front of the press, assured everybody Daniel Jones would prove to be an excellent choice. But Jones was not chosen to play excellently. He was drafted to replace Eli, and in that respect, he couldn’t be a more perfect fit. He attended the Manning Passing Academy as a teenager. His college coach was Peyton and Eli’s mentor. He speaks in the same noncommittal anti-statements — well, that’s maybe kinda not the way you should, you know, go about doing things — that Eli has been extruding for a decade and a half. He’s an ideal Giants Quarterback, nevermind his pocket presence or ability to read the field.
On Tuesday, Pat Shurmur announced that Jones is now the team’s starter. This happened more quickly than some folks expected, but as Gettleman and Shurmur will tell you, glowingly, as if it means anything at all, Jones had a dynamite preseason and (they will not tell you this part) the Giants suck so boldly that it’s not like the mistakes of a rookie signal-caller are going to derail an otherwise fruitful season. The guy might as well get out there and start honing his craft. The coaching staff, perhaps feeling their rear ends warming, might as well start learning to work with what they’ve got.
This means benching a beloved character who, again, was never the main reason the Giants were whatever they were in a given season, a two-time champ closer in ability to Brad Johnson than Joe Montana. The G-Men traded for Eli after the Chargers took him first overall in the 2004 draft. They would have been better off staying put and hanging on to Philip Rivers, who has a more accurate arm and what can credibly be called a personality. Make no mistake: it all worked out happily and goofily enough. There is a drunk-dreaming quality to those Eli Super Bowl jaunts that Rivers couldn’t have inspired — in part because he’s simply a superior player.
If Eli Manning is the model, which he very much is, Daniel Jones won’t have to be awesome in order to solidify his position as the Giants starting quarterback for a long time. This season will be an extended mulligan, and beyond that, all he has to do is win some games and merely dabble in the spectacular while functioning as the bland figurehead management drafted him to be. Jones will excel at the latter, and that’s what makes Gettleman, not a good general manager, but the executive John Mara hired him to be. Getty understands, if not much about the modern NFL, then precisely what he needs to in order to keep his job.
These are unexpressed desires, or ones expressed using terms like locker room culture or team-first players. Mara never said get that obnoxious negro out of here, but Gettleman sent Odell Beckham away. He didn’t say bring me the palest, lamest QB prospect in several years, but Gettleman knew what kind of floppy-haired goober he was in the market for. Whether this is evidence of Gettleman’s wiley obsequiousness or simply his tastes aligning with Mara’s by coincidence doesn’t matter. It’s the taste itself that’s rancid. Nevermind that it inspires a needlessly difficult method for building a competitive team.
And man, is it ever unappealingly packaged as clueless and solemn pride. You see, the folks who run the Giants have principles — dimly defined and baroquely self-important, sort of useless if you consider them for more than a minute and definitely at least a little bit racist, in that nasty yet plausibly deniable way in which old rich white guys specialize — that essentially boil down to calling authority figures Sir. So it follows that their football concern functions as a soup-brained but clear enough political argument, about doing things the right way and certain people falling in line, while also being apocalyptically shitty at winning games.
The first thing is objectively more offensive. It is, after all, a relatively benign manifestation of a force that is, in other sectors of the culture, melting the planet and inflicting daily pain upon large swathes of the population. But if I’m honest, the second thing bothers me more acutely, because sports fandom encourages you to waste vast sums of emotional energy on stuff that doesn’t matter. Rooting for the Giants is an exercise in getting mad at the metaphor. You wish you could break into that room where the bad-faithed morons are cocking things up, you wish you could strangle them, but you can’t. No matter how hard you fret and fume, nothing changes. If anything, it gets worse, because all the worst people seem to have all the power.
