Ask ten NFL fans whether Eli Manning belongs in the Hall of Fame and there's a decent chance you'll get ten slightly different answers. Some will point to his 57,023 passing yards and two Super Bowl MVP awards. Others will bring up the interceptions, the inconsistent seasons and the fact that he was rarely regarded as the best quarterback in football.
Then somebody will mention the 2007 Patriots.
And suddenly the argument isn't really about passing statistics anymore.
New England had won every regular-season game. Tom Brady and Randy Moss were breaking records, and the Patriots were one victory away from completing a perfect 19–0 season. The Giants, meanwhile, had entered the playoffs as a wild-card team. They'd already beaten Tampa Bay, Dallas and Green Bay on the road, which was impressive enough. Beating New England was another matter.
Yet that's exactly what happened.
People tend to remember David Tyree's helmet catch and Manning somehow escaping a sack before throwing the ball. Fair enough. It's one of those plays that still looks ridiculous when you watch it back. What sometimes gets overlooked is how much the Giants' defence contributed. Brady was sacked five times, New England managed only 14 points, and a team that had spent the season overwhelming opponents suddenly couldn't get comfortable. Manning still had to deliver the winning drive, of course. He found Plaxico Burress in the end zone with 35 seconds remaining, and the Giants won 17–14.
Four years later, he beat Brady in another Super Bowl. That's a difficult pair of results to leave out of any discussion about his career.
Would Manning have the same Hall of Fame support without those victories? I doubt it. His regular-season record would still be substantial, but two championships against Brady's Patriots have given his career a significance that statistics alone struggle to capture.
Joe Namath is an even stranger case when you look at the numbers. He finished his career with 173 touchdown passes and 220 interceptions. His regular-season record as a starting quarterback was 62–63–4.
Those figures aren't exactly what you'd expect from somebody with such an enormous place in NFL history. But Namath wasn't inducted because he had a tidy touchdown-to-interception ratio.
In January 1969, his New York Jets faced the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. The Colts were overwhelming favourites, and there was still considerable scepticism about whether teams from the American Football League could compete with the established NFL.
Namath guaranteed the Jets would win.
It sounds like the sort of thing a player would regret saying for the rest of his life. Instead, New York won 16–7, and Namath became permanently associated with one of the most important upsets in American football. He didn't even throw a touchdown pass in the game. That's the detail I always find interesting. The performance wasn't a statistical masterpiece, but the result changed how people viewed the AFL. Namath's place in football history is tied to something much bigger than his individual box score.
There's a problem with this way of remembering players, though.
Quarterbacks get an enormous amount of credit for winning, even when the defence has done most of the damage. They also get blamed for defeats that might have had very little to do with their performance. A defensive tackle can dominate an entire playoff game without becoming the face of the victory. A quarterback can throw for 180 yards, win by three points and spend the next twenty years being described as a big-game player.
It's not always fair.
Still, expectations are part of what makes certain performances memorable. Beating a team everyone expected you to beat is one thing. Winning when almost nobody gives you a chance is something else.
Betting odds provide a useful record of those expectations. Fans checking the latest lines for each game can see which teams are favoured and how the market assesses a matchup before kickoff.
The odds don't tell the whole story, and they certainly don't guarantee a result. But they help explain why some victories become famous while others are forgotten within a fortnight.
A heavy favourite losing a championship game is going to be remembered differently from two evenly matched teams producing the same score.
That doesn't mean Hall of Fame voters should simply reward players for being involved in famous upsets.
Longevity matters. So does consistency. There are players who performed at an extraordinary level for a decade without ever getting the championship moment that might have made their careers easier to celebrate.
And plenty of ordinary players have Super Bowl rings. Manning's case is interesting precisely because those arguments pull in different directions. Two Super Bowl MVP awards are hard to dismiss, but they don't make the weaker parts of his career disappear. I'm not convinced there's a completely satisfactory formula for weighing all of that.
You can compare passing yards, touchdowns, interceptions and playoff records until every number has been accounted for. Somebody will still ask whether the player was feared by opponents, whether he changed the sport or whether he delivered when the pressure was greatest.
And with Manning, somebody will inevitably ask how many quarterbacks could have beaten that Patriots team.
Twice.
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