If I’m forgetting that just 22 months ago, Eli Manning was hoisting the Vince Lombardi trophy it is because Eli Manning has been playing like garbage ever since then. He should be getting better as he becomes more experienced and familiar with running the Giants’ offense, but he isn’t getting better. He seems to be in some inexplicable premature decline. He was never as good as his brother, but he has won twice as many Super Bowls as Peyton. I’m grateful for that, but Eli needs to get real with himself. It’s not his offensive line. It’s not his receivers. He has flat-out sucked this year from the first pass against Dallas. Sucked. Like a rookie.
If next season is similar, I’ll be ready to bench Eli.
I disagree. Not that this hasn’t been off year, but the offensive line hasn’t started the same five guys two weeks in a row yet and they’ve been pushed around. A boat load of INTs have been off deflections and balls the receivers should have caught. The free agent TE is a bust. How many running backs started? How many did anything? I think the answer is one. The FB can’t catch a pass. Nicks? Where are you? Not in the end zone.
In many ways on offense only Cruz and Manning have played well at all.
It’s hard to play well when your QB is throwing 5 interceptions. I’ve been there (with you) and it isn’t fun.
I’m not ready to give up on Eli just yet.
His OL sucks and has been hurt, with the exception of Pugh – who’s a keeper, and he’s had virtually no running game this year.
Eli throws a great and accurate deep pass, but I see that when he throws mid-range balls, the ball kind of sails or sinks on him.
He’s also great at the end of games – especially, big games – ask Tony Romo is he doesn’t wish he’d had Eli’s career? Especially when under pressure!
But without a reliable and durable RB as a change-of-pace, every team knows that he’s got to pass the ball almost all of the time, and pass deep, and defend accordingly.
Cruz has been good, until he was injured last week, but Nicks has sucked big-time! I saw him play in college in NC, and I thought he’d be a great receiver – but he’s disappointed. And this year, it looks like, since he’s a Free Agent, he’s playing not to get hurt. I don’t want the Giants to resign him. Let him get hurt, drop balls with his huge, but not-too sensitive hands, and not stretch-out for throws, for some other team.
They also still haven’t found a reliable TE.
That leaves Eli having to play catch mostly with Cruz, since Randle will occasionally make the great catch, then drop the easy one.
And don’t get me started on the Defense!
If JPP can stay healthy, and return to form, the DL should be ok. If not, then their Defense is in big, big, trouble, and they need to rebuild. And I think Tuck, who’s been a terrific player, is about done – except maybe as a part-time pass-rusher. I’m ok with it if he decides to go somewhere else.
Rolle has been terrific, but the rest of the secondary, without a solid DL penetrating and harassing the opponent’s QB, is exposed for too long, and the coverage breaks down.
And their linebacking has been inconsistent – but better since Beason came aboard.
Since the Giants are in the NFC East, and if they’re smart about FA pick-ups and draft choices, they might be able to rebuild for another title run or two.
They could also, easily, go downhill, quickly.
The G-men’s secondary has sucked for a few years. They have a lot of high draft picks that never lived up to the hype. And Offensive Line problems or not, committing just as many TO’s as Geno Smith is unacceptable for supposed playoff team. Anyone ever notice that the Giants have always underachieved in the Coughlin era except the 2 years they won the Super Bowl? Look at the Patriots this year. They have injuries all over the place and will probably end up with the # 2 seed in the AFC. Even though Brady hasn’t won a Super Bowl lately, they still make the playoffs pretty much every year.
The Giants should have a strong pick this year, in a good draft for quarterbacks. Unfortunately, the two best will probably go 1-2 in this draft.
Except Mariota and Bridgewater are likely going back to school. It looks like the 2015 draft will be huge re: QB’s.
fans of good teams get so fucking spoiled.
At least half of the league would happily take Eli off your hands. I’m a Raiders fan, which makes me an expert on inadequate QBs. Eli is not one of those.
This.
The Seahawks are having a great run, and should be good for years to come with Wilson, that D, and a very good GM/coach combination. They also had a nice run under Holmgren last decade. And in 36 years as a franchise they’ve been to a SB exactly once – which they lost.
Any complaint that starts “sure, they won a Super Bowl two years ago, and another one four years before that, but…” sounds like privileged whining to fans of every other team in the league, including the Patriots, Packers, Steelers, and other chronically good teams – let alone the half of the league that hasn’t made it to a SB in the 21st Century.
It’s like those tiresome articles the NYT and WaPo love about how tough rich peoples’ lives are. It’s life. Deal with it.
The Giants win, in large part, because their fans demand it.
But, more to the point, it’s ridiculous for you to say to me that I can’t complain about the quality of play by Eli Manning just because he’s won two Super Bowls. He was great both of those years, at least in the playoffs, but he has been dreadful this season. And I know he has less to work with, but he’s still been bad even taking that into account.
Also, I am not complaining that the Giants are not going to be in the Super Bowl. I am complaining that Eli Manning has been playing like crap. If Tom Brady were playing like crap, I’d expect Patriots fans to complain about it, too.
I am complaining that Eli Manning has been playing like crap. If Tom Brady were playing like crap, I’d expect Patriots fans to complain about it, too.
And Manning has better receivers, even this year!!
The Giants win, in large part, because their fans demand it.
Seriously? You should pass that on to 31 other fan bases. I’ll bet it’s never occurred to any of them to be dissatisfied when their team doesn’t win.
Your gripe isn’t with Eli – it’s with wins and losses. If he were playing poorly and they were 11-3 his play would be much less of an issue. And every team that has a poor season does so in large part because key players or units aren’t doing well.
Meantime, I’m betting a good coach, a generally very good front office, and strong, stable ownership have a lot more to do with the Giants’ long-term success. They demand success – and more importantly, accountability when success doesn’t happen. The Browns (to name only one) have hugely passionate fans, and it doesn’t seem to help much on the field.
You’re not from here, so I’ll give you a pass, but it matters greatly that Giants fans demand success. Jets fans don’t. And there you are.
Passion really has nothing to do with it. It’s a culture. The Giants win. Maybe not the Super Bowl, but they win. Everything about the team, from the ownership to the coaches to the fans to the media coverage, is based on excellence. It is expected. The same is true of the Yankees, but the Yankees are allowed to spend more than other teams to assure it. The Giants are not.
The most passionate football fans in the region live in Philadelphia. They expect disappointment, and that it what they get. Still, their passion drives the team to be consistently good in a way that Colts, Panthers, Jaguars, and Browns fans do not.
It’s true that ownership and management play a vital role in maintaining the winning culture of the Giants, but the fans play an equally vital role.
When you put on a Giants jersey, it’s like when you put on a Yankees jersey. You are responsible.
When you put on a Jets jersey, it means nothing more than it means to put on any NFL jersey. It means you are good enough to play. It doesn’t mean you are destined for glory.
Culture matters in sport. The expectation of success breeds success.
You’ve got it backwards. Your team has won a lot lately so you believe it’s because the team base expects to win. But in fact the expectation was caused by the recent success.
Fan base expectations will change as the team changes. Just ask fans of the 49ers or Cowboys. The 49ers were a top team for 20 of 22 consecutive seasons (excepting only the 1982 9-game strike season). The fans there were as arrogant as Yankee fans or Boston sport fans today. During the next 9 years their team royally sucked, and given the ownership it was rational to expect them to continue to suck like Detroit. But they kept selling out games and getting high local TV ratings.
I was on NFL usenet message boards in the early and mid-1990s and Cowboy fans were something to behold. They considered the NFC East title their birthright and a ticket to the NFC championship game a given. Today most of them are still rooting for the team but are resigned to being purely average – and know that this is their reality until Jerry Jones dies.
For another perspective, read the Wiki page on the “Miracle at the Meadowlands” – the infamous game in 1978 where the Giants lost to the Eagles on the last play when they ran the ball instead of kneeling, and a fumble was returned for a TD. It’s a good write-up, not just of the play itself, but of how it figured into the Giants history. Before that play the Giants were a mediocre team – the write believes that the play kind of woke up the management to invest in building a winning team. It also shows that Giants fans had come to accept mediocrity. They did then, they did it during most of the 1990s, and most likely they will again over the next few years.
He didn’t just lose it. His O-line sucks, he doesn’t have a real running back and his receiving corps is diminished.
It’s a natural evolution of pro football teams. It’s hard to keep ahead of age and injuries by fattening up your roster. That’s why I’m a big Baalke fan. He’s been loading up the Niner roster the last few years. Wish he could draft another slambang pass receiver, though.
The football press and the fandom puts way, way, way too much emphasis on a quarterback’s Win/Loss record. Although the QB has the most influence on a team’s win, it’s nothing like the pitcher in baseball who single-handedly is responsible for half of the game.
Eli has always been a somewhat-better-than-average NFL QB, nothing more, with ups and downs over time. He’s had great defense most of his years, above average special teams, above average supporting talent on offense, and a capable offensive scheme. Yeah, he won more Super Bowls than Peyton, but if you could magically go into the past and have them trade places Eli would never have gotten close with Indy and their somewhat-below-average defenses and Peyton would have won more SBs with the Giants.
This obsession with SB wins clouds the picture. How many SBs does Terry Bradshaw win if he spends his career with the 1970s New Orleans Saints? How about Joe Montana and the 1980s Tampa Bay Bucs? The multi-SB winning QBs of this century all enjoyed far-above-average defenses – Brady, Rapensburger, and Eli. It’s not entirely a coincidence that Brady’s last SB win was the year before the NE defensive performance and talent began a big decline.
And offensive talent. Name some of Bradshaw’s offensive supporting cast. It’s easy, many of them are in the Hall of Fame. Ditto Montana – one in the Hall of Fame, and at least one OL and possibly one RB who are still on the HoF ballot annually. Now try to name significant offensive players on Denver’s three super bowl losing teams in the 1980s. That’s actually a good test of your football trivia knowledge because none of those guys stood out.
So back to the Newark Giants. Looks bad, real bad. Total rebuilding project. Like Pittsburgh and Chicago they had a strong core of defensive talent that got old before equivalent replacements were found. Unlike Pittsburgh and Chicago they also saw a big drain on the offensive side. And all of the guys who are good are on the back end of their careers.
Probably best to give Tom Coughlin a warm retirement party – he’s still a great coach, but is he the right guy for a 3-5 year rebuilding project given his age? Eli will be mid-30s by the time the team is good again – would it be better to cut him now, with two years left on his big contract and most of the signing bonus already capped away, and use the funds on younger players part of a rebuilding movement?
Also have to wonder about Gilbride. He’s done a nice job of evolving his game planning. Hard to remember that this was actually a run-and-shoot offensive coordinator 20 years ago. But he too is struggling with recent game developments.
I never liked his act. He makes pissy little faces when his receivers aren’t perfect and his interviews are masterpieces of sophomoric “Y’know” excuse-making. He had good teams, good genes, a good arm and good training, but he missed the “class” part. Send him to the Je
sts…errrr, ahhhh….Jets. That’d teach him. That’d teach both of them.AG
I got a feeling he is going to start getting better on Sunday. Whether the cure is permanent or not, I can’t say, but I think he will do lots better in Detroit. 🙂
Period. Get the right players and coach around him. “Superbowl winning” is meaningless as a metric. Eli is never going to wing a bad team to 8-8 on arm strength.
NY football Giants fan’s concerns should be whether Coughlin can adjust to the “new” NFL. (Lovie Smith is another guy whose head coaching value is dropping like a rock.) It’s not their fault changes in NFL rules and shifts in HS and college player development have changed the game so quickly, but there you are.