The Giants gave Eli Manning a $5 million bonus. Looks like they’re going to pay him $17 million this year, and it looks like he’s going to get another season as a starter. (We’ll see what the do in the draft; maybe they draft a quarterback who takes over during the season.)
Manning is 38, and one narrative is that he simply can’t play anymore. He’s lost some arm strength, hurting his ability to connect on long passes. He has no mobility, making it tough for him to buy time when pass protection starts breaking down. And he’s never been an accurate passer.
Over the last two years, he’s 8-23 as a starter. That’s worst among all quarterbacks who’ve started at least half the time.
| WIN-LOSS RECORDS SINCE 2017 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Player | W | L | T | Pct |
| Drew Brees | 24 | 7 | 0 | .774 |
| Jared Goff | 24 | 7 | 0 | .774 |
| Patrick Mahomes | 13 | 4 | 0 | .765 |
| Tom Brady | 24 | 8 | 0 | .750 |
| Ben Roethlisberger | 21 | 9 | 1 | .694 |
| Carson Wentz | 16 | 8 | 0 | .667 |
| Philip Rivers | 21 | 11 | 0 | .656 |
| Deshaun Watson | 14 | 8 | 0 | .636 |
| Andrew Luck | 10 | 6 | 0 | .625 |
| Alex Smith | 15 | 10 | 0 | .600 |
| Dak Prescott | 19 | 13 | 0 | .594 |
| Russell Wilson | 19 | 13 | 0 | .594 |
| Mitchell Trubisky | 15 | 11 | 0 | .577 |
| Marcus Mariota | 16 | 12 | 0 | .571 |
| Case Keenum | 17 | 13 | 0 | .567 |
| Cam Newton | 17 | 13 | 0 | .567 |
| Tyrod Taylor | 9 | 7 | 1 | .559 |
| Matt Ryan | 17 | 15 | 0 | .531 |
| Joe Flacco | 13 | 12 | 0 | .520 |
| Kirk Cousins | 15 | 16 | 1 | .484 |
| Matthew Stafford | 15 | 17 | 0 | .469 |
| Blake Bortles | 13 | 15 | 0 | .464 |
| Aaron Rodgers | 10 | 12 | 1 | .457 |
| Andy Dalton | 12 | 15 | 0 | .444 |
| Derek Carr | 10 | 21 | 0 | .323 |
| Josh McCown | 5 | 11 | 0 | .313 |
| Jameis Winston | 6 | 16 | 0 | .273 |
| Eli Manning | 8 | 23 | 0 | .258 |
But as I pick through his stats from 2018, they’re not as bad as I expected. I completed 66 percent of his passes; that’s the highest of his career. He finished with the lowest interception rate of his career. And he averaged 7.5 yards per attempt, his best since the 2011 season.
Like the offense around him, Manning got better in the second half of the season, after they started feeding the ball more to Saquon Barkley. The Giants averaged 58 fewer passing yards per game in those final eight games, but with Manning throwing 13 TDs versus only 5 interceptions.
And the offense was working. New York got shut out by Tennessee, but that was its only poor effort in the second half of the season. It lost 25-22 at Philadelphia and scored at least 27 points in each of its other six final games. The Giants averaged 27.4 points in the second half of the season; only four teams scored more. That’s a nice turnaround from the first eight games, when they averaged only 18.8 (with only five teams scoring fewer).
Not that Manning is great (certainly not a guy anybody should be drafting in a fantasy league). But he played well enough in the second half of the year that I don’t think it would have made sense to replace him with somebody along the lines of Joe Flacco, Case Keenum or Nick Foles.
—Ian Allan