NFL Week 7 thread: "I will not die on Taysom Hill"

"From Mr. Irrelevant to Mr. Incarcerated."

 

So I guess that's scored as a fumble, and not an interception?

 

Boo.

 

Its a little bit of a reach, but I admire the creativity.

 

Wait. There are actually people on this board who think that Eli Manning is a Hall of Fame football player? The same Eli Manning I saw last night?

 

I think he's probably a slam-dunk Hall of Fame football player.

I also think he's a shitty football player who has never been better than mediocre.

He won two Super Bowls for a team in New York. He's going in the Hall of Fame.

 

Nah. Sports has gotten smarter over the years. Look how Cy Young Award winners used to be chosen. Look at the way NBA offenses run compared to decades ago.

I have faith that in 10 years, Hall of Fame voters will be swayed by more than two lucky games in the Super Bowl and a New York zip code.

 

Whether he deserves to make the HOF is debatable. But struggling in his 15th season really shouldn't be much of a factor.

 

Perhaps not, but some ugly seasons at the end of his career could hurt how he is viewed by voters. He has some nice career numbers, but they aren't anything special compared to his contemporaries. The two Super Bowl victories are the only things that give him a shot. He was named MVP both times, though he didn't really deserve it in 2008. It should have been somebody on that Giants defense. What Manning did was throw a ball up for grabs and have one-hit wonder David Tyree make the play of his life. If he had been making a throw like that to a quality receiver, giving a teammate a chance to make a play, I would give him some credit for it. Throwing a ball like that to a scrub who caught four passes that season and would never have another reception in the NFL shows just how much of a fluke the Giants got in their favor that night.

 

All of this is true. It's also true that without the Tuck Rule (since rescinded), Adam Vinatieri and Malcolm Butler, Tom Brady's Hall credentials aren't quite as good either. Even without those breaks they're better than Eli's, of course. My point is, you can't take historic events out of a player's credentials for the Hall.

 

I've always said there are basically three paths to the Hall of Fame for quarterbacks.
1) Be so statistically awesome that championships don't matter (Dan Marino, Dan Fouts, Warren Moon, Fran Tarkenton)
2) Win multiple championships with A-minus or B-plus stats (Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, Bart Starr)
3) Some overwhelming combination of the two (your first-ballot guys like Favre, Peyton Manning, John Elway or Joe Montana)

Eli is an odd duck because he's sort of in category three historically, but so are a lot of other guys of his era. There are four other quarterbacks playing right now or who are recently retired (Peyton, Roethlisberger, Brees and Brady) who are first-ballot guys and Eli was never better than any of them over the course of a season. There are a few others he played alongside in his prime that you could say the same about.
The only passing category he's ever led the league in is interceptions, and he's done that three times. So he's not in category one.
His stats compare almost identically to Phillip Rivers, who I think most people would agree is a borderline HOF candidate at best. The two Super Bowls would give a big edge to Eli in that debate, but he was never part of a dynasty like Aikman or Bradshaw. So he's not really in category two, either.

Eli might get in eventually, but I think the only way he gets consideration early in the process is if he times it just right to where he's the only major QB candidate on the ballot in a given 2-3-year period. Like if he retires after this season he might be able to slide in there between his brother and the upcoming wave of Roethlisberger, Brees, Brady and even Aaron Rodgers who would probably start becoming eligible around 2025.
Peyton is eligible in 2020, and there's no other QBs in that window who are going to merit serious consideration. Maybe the committee gets starved for a star quarterback and, much like his Super Bowl wins, things break right for him.

 

Brady would certainly be viewed differently if he was 1-7 instead of 5-3 in Super Bowls, but at this point he would still be a no-brainer first-ballot guy. He's going to finish his career second all-time in passing yards and either first or second in touchdown passes. If he'd never won a championship his stats are so insanely great that there isn't any debate.