Not to mention ending the current longest and 2nd overall starting streak for a QB. They’re trying to frame it as “Eli said it was okay,” but it was basically “Geno will start, or we’ll put you out there for just the first drive so you can say the streak is still going”
I understand maybe sitting Eli for the sake of injury in a lost season, but not portraying it that way is an insult to the best QB they’ve ever had. Or one of the best, anyway. I don’t think he’s done, his team just blows ass.
Benching any quarterback with his history, for Geno Smith, would be a deliberate insult from any coach who wasn’t utterly clueless.
Remeber those halycon days of yore when people were arguing that Eli was an “elite” NFL QB. Time has told.
Eli Manning is one of the most overrated QB’s of all time, just below Joe Namath and slightly above Joe Flacco. He’s been a slightly above average NFL QB for most of his career and outside of a very impressive run in the 2012 playoffs, he’s been … just meh. His two Super Bowl rings, his health, and the fact there are bunch of mediocre QBs out there are the only reasons he’s still a starter in the league.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s a much better QB than Geno Smith. But give me Simms or Tittle anyday.
As a Pats fan, I have zero love lost on Eli Manning. But this is unbelievably low rent garbage by the Giants and he does not deserve to be treated this way. And the offer to let him be the starter on paper so he can keep the streak going is basically “constructive dismissal” and kudos to him for refusing to go along with it.
That’s a pretty deeply uninformed opinion. Eli Manning has been a much, much better quarterback than Phil Simms was, by literally every measure. Statistically? It wasn’t even close - from a numbers perspective (and even by the standards of his era), Phil wasn’t really much more than a solidly average QB for most of his career. Titles? They both have two rings, but Phil got his second in a cast. Eye test? Well, I watched every single game of Eli Manning’s career (give or take a few, I guess), and nearly every game of Simms. It was not close (and I loved Simms as a player). I won’t bother to compare Eli with Tittle, who played a game that’s not really recognizable as football.
Ultimately I think Eli is pretty properly rated, all things considered. He will finish his career short of the Hall of Fame - among his closest contemporaries, well behind Brady, Rodgers, Brees, Ryan, and his brother, around equal with Roethlisberger, and ahead of Flacco. I’d be willing to argue he was a better quarterback than Phillip Rivers, but not with any real passion. He’s certainly waaaaaaaaaay better than Joe Namath, who quietly sucked for most of his career.
But the point isn’t really how good he was or wasn’t. He was good enough to make the Giants competitive most years, gave us (the fans) some really special moments and two championships, and never embarrassed himself or the franchise. He was the face of the team for almost 15 years and he acquitted himself with distinction for most of that time. He deserves better than to be benched for a guy with no future in New York in a season where the team is going nowhere anyway.
Even Rich Kotite is shaking his head at this move…
My point was that.
He had a couple of runs where he was great, but it was rarely the case where the Giants were competitive because of him. His career win loss records (if that’s how you want to measure “competitive”) is 110-100, good for a .532 winning percentage. That’s well behind Simms’ .598 and on par with the greats like Matt Hasselback and Trent Dilfer.
HE didn’t always give you those, the team did. David Tyree made the catch. Asante Samuel dropped the potential game ending interception that Manning threw. People remember the good stuff, but forget games like when he cost the Giants a divisional round win in 2008 with 2 interceptions and 40.7 passer rating, despite having the #2 scoring defense in the league. Or the one playoff game (a loss) that the Giants have made in the last 6 years.
Outside of the pouting and punchable face, I agree. By most accounts, he’s a solid person who has represented the franchise well, if incredibly boringly.
I agree with this also. If they had a young QB to develop, maybe, but benching him for Geno Smith is inane.
Ditto ditto ditto.
I tend to agree with Hamlet that Eli is overrated - he’s been solidly mediocre for a long time with a couple of spikes of glory that I biased-ly think were extremely lucky. The way he wilts under pressure and throws interception after interception makes me smile.
But this is bush league treatment that seriously makes no sense.
I really, REALLY don’t want to be in the position of attacking Phil Simms. But Simms’ success was even more a function of the team around him than Eli’s has been. The Giants’ defense in the mid-80s, when Simms compiled all of those wins, was as good as or better than anything they’ve had in the Manning era. Phil also played behind Brad Benson and Bart Oates, who were better linemen than literally anyone who has ever stood in front of Eli Manning.
I think I see the disconnect. You’re a Packer fan, right? OK. I get it now. See, as Giants fans our expectations are very different from yours when it comes to the QB position. Eli Manning has given us more than a decade of slightly above average QB play. That’s nothing, you say, but we have never had that before. Simms in his prime was equally solid, but his prime really only last six years or so. And after Simms we got Hostetler and Kanell and Kent Graham and Dave Brown and Kerry Collins - those are all people who actually started full seasons for the New York Giants - and then a year or so of a basically battered Kurt Warner. Oh, and before Simms the guys older than I am had Scott Brunner and Joe Pisarcik and Norm Snead.
It’s not that we forget about the bad times with Manning. It’s just that for Giants fans, the experience of having a reasonably competent QB who made winning even vaguely possible for 10 years plus has been completely novel. From your standpoint - going from a Hall of Famer behind center for 250 games to a guy who’s even better - it may sound ridiculous to be happy about this, but see it from our perspective: you have Brett Hundley for ten games or so. We had Brett Hundley for most of fifty years.
And Hundley is actually better than some of those guys!
I don’t disagree with where you’re ranking Eli among his contemporaries, and I agree with the poignancy of your later post:
However, where I suspect that Hamlet is coming from (and where I’m coming from) in feeling that Eli is overrated is years of hearing from fans (particularly NY fans) who point to things like Eli’s two rings and 210 starts (and the other “counting stats” that come along with having been the starting QB for an often-good team for a long time, like 334 TD passes), and earnestly argue for his election to Canton.
My point wasn’t that Simms is demonstatively a better QB than Eli. He’s not. My point was about your assertion that Eli makes the Giants competitive and trying to find a metric or evidence to determine the veracity of that assertion.
I agree that having Eli is better than having the garbage the Giants have trotted out for the previous decades and better than the 10-15 quarterbacks who start in the league any given year(although the last 3 years have been pretty bad for Eli).
But that doesn’t make him good.
I think that we agree that he’s an average to slightly better than average NFL QB who, on rare occasion and for short periods of time, can be very good. Where we disagree, as you point out, is the value of that. Having survived the Lynn Dickey/Don Manikowski era Packers, I can appreciate the value of having even an average NFL QB. I just dont think that changes the evaluation of how good Eli actually is. You can like and appreciate him all you want. But dont try to convince me he’s better than he actually is.
Yeah, I don’t think we actually disagree about anything 
Except Lynn Dickey might have been better than anyone the Giants have ever played excepting Fran Tarkenton.
Baltimore Hundley or Pittsburgh Hundley? Because Baltimore Hundley would have easily been the worst QB of the week if not for the shitbomb Buffalo put in as a starter.
Rich Kotite! That is an excellent callout…this feels so much like that era.
Green Bay Hundley against the Squeelers.
Nah, Tittle > Dickey, for sure. Which sounds like an adult film title, actually. 
I’m also reminded of a bumper sticker that was popular in Wisconsin back then: “They may kick our butts, but they can’t lick our Dickey.”
Agreed. I’m an Eagle fan, and the Giants have had the worst injury season in a long time. What QB could do better? Geno? Really? Sheesh, the best guy you have left on the starting roster is Eli, 2 SB rings, plenty of postseason workload, experienced, etc. Let him start FFS. You don’t like his game performance? Fine, bench him then. But starting your squad with Geno over Eli just means you gave up. Hope they fire McAdoodle tomorrow.
They’re just trying to get that #1 pick from Cleveland. Unfortunately, they screwed up and won a game - there’s no way they can steal that from an 0-16 team that’s already planning the parade.