Giants All-Time Top 5 QBs: Almost Elite

Eli Manning polarizes a nation. Y.A. Tittle becomes an icon. Charlie Conerly probes opponents. Giants fans aren't booing, they're shouting Bruuuuuuuuuuuunner.

The All-Time Top 5 QB series chugs along! There will probably not be an installment next week, as I plan to publish a mailbag (don’t leave questions in this thread), and I want to run the Eagles at the end of August when I am doing College Dad stuff.

1. Eli Manning

We all know Manning was a something-but-not-something quarterback: good-but-not-great, steady-but-not-superlative, successful-but-not-Hall-of-Fame worthy. It’s a truism that none of us, as enlightened Too Deep Zone customers or proprietors, were fooled into thinking the 2007/2011 Giants’ accomplishments were Manning’s accomplishments, but that millions of hypothetical rubes were. Furthermore, we all know that Pro Football Hall of Fame voters, despite their decades of experience covering and analyzing the game, will side with the rubes.

Now that we all agree, try to explain the success of the 2007 and 2011 Giants without giving Manning significant credit. 

No, you cannot just cite David Tyree’s miracle catch, Asante Samuel’s dropped interception or Wes Welker turning the wrong way on a Tom Brady bomb. Those things happened in the fourth quarters of Super Bowls. Try to explain how the Giants reached the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl with a chance to beat the Brady/Belichick Patriots twice without giving Manning significant credit.

The Giants defensive front? Certainly! Of course, no one would mistake the 2007/2011 Giants defensive front for the 1985 Bears, or even the 1986/1990 Giants front. Michael Strahan (2007 only), Justin Tuck and the others were no Steel Curtain or Purple People Eaters. The Giants had playoff-caliber defensive lines in the Manning era, not historic ones.

Tom Coughlin? I think he’s a Hall of Famer. But are you ready to make him the foundation for an argument that Manning was nothing special? Remember that Coughlin nearly lost the locker room for being too dictatorial before the 2007 season and began getting fuzzy around the edges by the mid-2010s. Oh, and his Super Bowl teams looked ordinary for long stretches of the regular season. It’s a real stretch to claim he became Vince Lombardi for a pair of December-January stretches, then went back to being Grumpy Gus. 

The offensive supporting cast? Do you even remember those guys? Oh, there was Plaxico Burress in 2007 and salsa-dancing Victor Cruz in 2011. It’s hard to pretend that Hakeem Nicks, Brandon Jacobs, Jeremy Shockey and the others who passed through East Rutherford from 2007 to 2011 bear any resemblance to the 1980s 49ers. 

Gosh, this is hard. When Washington won all those Super Bowls with good-not-great quarterbacks, they had Hogs and Smurfs. Jim Plunkett’s two Super Bowl victories for the Raiders were aided and abetted by (depending on the year) Marcus Allen, Cliff Branch, Lester Hayes, Gene Upshaw, Art Shell, Ted Hendricks, Howie Long and other certified legends. Brad Johnson’s Buccaneers had four Hall of Famers on defense and a coach who knew the opponent’s playbook. Yet here are the Giants, with TWO Super Bowls in a five-year span, with Strahan as the only superstar and Colonel Boomer as their head coach. 

Maybe it was luck. Lightning struck twice. Or maybe the stats and skeptics missed something when it comes to Manning.