By Anthony Cardone
All athletes know the pressure of playing in a big city like New York. The pressure comes with the media, the big stars, the insanity of the fans and no one knows it better than Eli Manning. Still, he has been doing this for almost two decades and has led the Giants to two Super bowls during his tenure, so he’s been mostly successful.
After a dreadful 3-13 season last year, Giants fans had had enough of pretty much everything that had to with the team; they wanted a new start. The Giants’ owners thought otherwise.
After drafting Saquon Barkley second overall in the draft, the Giants organization still thought they could win with Manning under center. They didn’t want to just give up on him, especially following the outcry when former head coach Ben McAdoo benched Manning for Geno Smith last season, snapping the former’s start streak. So they skipped over all of the quarterbacks and drafted Barkley, which helped the run game in a big way.
Throughout the league, many of the top quarterbacks from this year’s draft have already been successful. If Manning mentored one of them and they watched the Giants this season, they could have had a head start on the future of the team. But now, Big Blue is basically behind with everything because they thought they could “win now.”
But here we are again. Week 7 of the NFL season and the Giants sitting dead last in an underperforming division with a 1-5 record. Beckham has had his problems on and off the field, the defense is banged up with injuries, the offensive line still can’t do anything right and Eli looks worse than he’s ever been in his career.
Fans are getting tired of losing week in and week out with the same play calls every drive. Everyone thought firing McAdoo and bringing in an offensive-minded coach in Pat Shurmur would help the problems for this offense, but it didn’t seem to fix anything.
Manning currently sits with 1,662 passing yards and only six touchdowns in six weeks along with four interceptions. It doesn’t seem like the Giants made a great move drafting a running back instead of quarterback. Manning does not seem like he has the arm strength to get it down the field anymore. All the play calls nowadays are these little check down passes to Barkley. It works maybe one out of five times behind that dreadful offensive line, but they keep calling it no matter what. Then Beckham gets mad and starts punching things on the sideline to make matter worse. It’s a cycle.
Hopefully they can turn things around soon because if not, this season is a disaster, if it isn’t already.
It’s also not all Manning’s fault. He doesn’t get any protection, and he’s getting up there in age. He did win two Super Bowls for this franchise, and was the MVP of both. But, everyone goes through these struggles towards the end of the careers. So do us all a favor, Eli, and hang up the cleats and move on.
