Eli Does Not Equal Peyton

Seth Wickersham has me vexed. He seems to think Eli and Peyton Manning are equal players and thinks the rest of football wants to know what Eli does to make himself so good. Fortunately, I can answer that. He is not a good QB so they don't have to search anymore. Seth has a different answer though, and it deals more with coffee and other things like that, which have nothing to do with football.

Two brothers pass each other in a doorway, the younger one entering, the older one exiting. Each carries a laptop containing secrets not available to the other.

Please quit being so dramatic. They are NFL Quarterbacks not spies.

David Cutcliffe, Peyton's coach at Tennessee and Eli's at Ole Miss, serves as their therapist this March afternoon, as he does every winter when the boys visit. He reviews film with them individually for three hours, sometimes four.

David Cutliffe is currently the head football coach at Duke University. They won this weekend but they are overall very horrible. I like David Cutliffe and think he is going to actually make Duke have a good football team in 3 years but he is going to say something that is very, very, very wrong in a second.

After watching his two pupils work, a somewhat shocked and very proud Cutcliffe thinks to himself, There's no difference between them.

If this were the SAT, I would proudly put an "F" beside this statement because it is false. Then I would wonder why I never freaked out about the SAT and everyone else did. Then I would freak out because there is no true/false on the SAT and I am definitely in the wrong room taking a different test.

I am not even going to justify this statement with statistics, if you don't know off the top of your head Peyton Manning is a better QB than you have no business thinking or talking about football...or you could be from New York.

Peyton long had the football credibility but needed to overcome the public's impression that he was stiff and unlikable. Eli, universally amiable, had to convince skeptics that he was serious about football.

Peyton's personality has nothing to do with whether he could win a Super Bowl or not. It had to do with beating the New England Patriots and he finally did that when he got a home game against them. It does not matter if Eli is serious about football, it matters more if he is good at football, which he still is not. I don't want to be the one to break this to everyone on the Eli Bandwagon but Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer have won Super Bowls also. Eli's numbers from last year:

56% completion percentage, 23:20 TD:INT ratio, and rating of 74. He had a great post season in that he did not play as poorly as he did in the regular season.

I searched and searched, trying to cherry pick stats and these are the worst numbers for Peyton Manning in one year:

57% completion percentage, 26:28 TD:INT ratio, and a rating of 72. That was his rookie year and his numbers have never and will never be that low again. Eli's highest completion percentage ever has been 58%, his best TD:INT ratio is 24:17 and his highest passer rating for a year is 77.0.

They are not equal and never will be.

Peyton may never publicly admit it, but many close to him are convinced that his know-it-all image is why he lost the Heisman to Michigan's Charles Woodson in 1997 and why the Titans' Steve McNair, with grossly inferior statistics, tied the Colts Pro Bowler for MVP in 2003.

The problem with this reasoning is that statistics don't always measure who is the Heisman winner and who should be MVP. I dare say Steve McNair and his bubbly personality was just as valuable to that Titans team as Peyton was to the Colts. I also dare say Charles Woodson does not have a good personality, so maybe he just won the Heisman far and square.

Does Peyton also think his personality had to do with Tee Martin winning a National Championship and Peyton not?

Few got to know that side of Peyton, which is why he began sculpting his commercial image with IMG's Alan Zucker in 2004.

If by sculpting his image he means, "being in every commercial on television from August to January," then consider this a big win for Team Peyton.

The safe thing to do, the easy thing, would have been to follow Tiger and every other image-conscious superstar who watched Michael Jordan make millions by perfecting the art of being vanilla.

Since when is Michael Jordan vanilla? I can name at least 10 different memorable commercials he was in.

Isn't it ironic that Peyton blames losing two major trophies, individual trophies by the way, to his personality and hires an agency to change it, then Seth Wickersham says he was not image consicous? Just play it like it lays Seth, he is image conscious and there is nothing wrong with that.

Ok, enough ass grabbing about Peyton Manning, here Seth is VERY wrong about how good Eli Manning is and how he has changed his personality, which we all know makes him a better football player. If his name was Eli Horton, we would never hear about him and he would be considered a game managing QB like Dilfer and Brad Johnson.

Giants coaches, even some players, were convinced that his struggles were more about personality than about fundamentals. Eli was too unexpressive, they thought, leaving doubt about how much he cared.

Eli is unexpressive and has very little personality but does it really matter if he chases the wide receiver with a pitchfork after an interception or just walks back to the bench with a sad face? If he was a good QB, then it would not matter, but the fact is that he is not a good QB, so everyone looks for something to blame. Because he is a Manning so he has talent, right?

Whether it hurt him or pissed him off, he didn't want anyone to know. Not that it mattered. "You can't change the way you are," Eli says. "If you're trying to say something just to be heard, people can tell you're being phony."

You know who else is not a phony? David Carr. Just like Eli, that does not make him a good QB. This whole column is about how his personality affects his play and it is senseless bullshit.

After Tiki Barber retired, in 2006, Coughlin asked Eli to replace the veteran running back's pregame pep talks. Rather than compete with Barber's rhetoric, Eli did it his way. He didn't shout, but he did cuss. He didn't spew clichés, but he did occasionally turn a corny phrase, like before the Miami game in London. "Don't be content with what we have," Eli said. "Be content with what we could have."

Eli is soft spoken, I think everyone knows this by now. What we don't know is why David Cutliffe thinks Eli is as good as Peyton. Enlighten us Seth!

Following that game, he knew something had to change. So he junked the Italian Roast for a Starbucks Latin American blend. Soon the Giants won three playoff games in which Eli threw four touchdowns and no picks, prompting outsiders to ask what was different. Nothing, except for his morning beverage.

Coffee? Seth Wickersham just attributed the winning of three playoff games and the Super Bowl to a Starbucks coffee. He gets paid to write articles for ESPN and began the column comparing a QB who will be in the Hall of Fame to his brother who accidentally won a Super Bowl last year, said they were equal players in some people's minds, then chalks it up to a change in coffee. I don't like this reasoning.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Eli knew better than to change his routine. He ate his usual breakfast: scrambled eggs, fruit medley, English muffins and black coffee, of course.

Is he Rain Man or an NFL Quarterback? Success has nothing to do with breakfast, unless you are a long distance runner and eat an entire pizza, or if you eat Mexican food all day, then play in the Super Bowl.

Saturday didn't know what Peyton thought after Eli began the fourth quarter with a 45-yard strike to tight end Kevin Boss, a play that wasn't even in the game plan.

Did they get out a Sharpie and draw it in on the field? At some point this play had to be in a game plan somewhere, so this really is not that exciting.

The Manning brothers' success shouldn't be a surprise. Peyton and Eli first learned about quarterbacking by osmosis, as toddlers scurrying around the Saints' locker room

Osmosis is mostly how a lot of good NFL players learn as youngsters. Little known fact. They keep books under their pillow and hang out in locker rooms. Also, Archie Manning quit playing for the Saints in 1982 and Eli was all of one year old then. I doubt he was really learning that much.

Worse, Cutcliffe had no idea which brother was the culprit.
He was sure it was Eli.
But it could have been Peyton.
Can't quite tell anymore.

I can! Eli is the one throwing interceptions who miraculously has a Super Bowl ring and Peyton is the one throwing touchdowns that for some reason has only one Super Bowl ring. Flip on a game at any point on Sunday and you should be able to tell a difference.