Eli Manning is Not a Hall of Famer - By: Jeffrey Scott Krol / Sports

If you ever stumble upon our tailgate at a Bills home game (La Galleria lot, seriously, stop by) you will quickly hear conversations regarding Eli not being good, and should not be in the Hall of Fame. Jeff, the loudest of us all. broke it down. 
-sorry Rachel-


Eli Manning is garbage. You knew that, right? You’ve watched him play? And yet I keep hearing it… from friends, from broadcasters, from Sports Center talking heads: “Eli Manning is a sure-fire Hall of Famer”. Wait, what? When did the Hall of Fame start inducting the overwhelmingly mediocre?

Let’s take a look at his credentials and recap why Eli Manning should never, ever be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Every Pro-Eli argument starts with two basic facts:

1. He won TWO SUPERBOWLS!
2. He’s in the Top Ten all-time passing yards and passing TDs!

Cool.

Let’s talk about all of his “winning” first.

Two time Super Bowl champ.  That’s a big deal right? You play the game to win championships, after all.  You know who else has won two Super Bowls? The legendary Antowain Smith. Zero time Pro Bowler Chris Long.  Four time released wide receiver Billy Davis. What about Mike Wilson? That guy has FOUR Super Bowl rings with the 49ers, including one catch in each Super Bowl, 159 total catches over a ten year career, and fun fact – you’ve never even heard of him. Not one of those guys is ever going to be in the Hall of Fame.  Being great may make you a champion, but being a champion doesn’t necessarily make you great.

Not a fair comparison?  That’s probably true. Quarterback is the hardest position in the game, and carries more pressure than anyone else on the roster.  But Trent Dilfer, Brad Johnson and Joe Flacco each won a Super Bowl too. If the Baltimore Defense had carried Flacco to one more Super Bowl title, would we be giving him a bust in Canton?  Super Bowl wins alone don’t define a career, and that’s why Dan Marino is in the Hall of Fame and Trent Dilfer is not.

The thing that kills me about this narrative of Eli as a “winner”, is that he very demonstrably isn’t.  He won two championships (with the help of some minor miracles along the way – thanks Tyree!), but we can’t ignore the other 12 years of his career.  What kind of success did he have outside of two big wins over the Patriots? Well for starters, he’s 0 for 4 in the playoffs in non-Super Bowl years, which kind of shoots a hole in the “but he’s clutch when it counts” argument.  But hey, playoff games are tough, and 31 teams go home losers every year, so that’s probably not a fair argument. Let’s instead look at his career win-loss record, which should be pretty outstanding for a future Hall of Fa… wait, no, he’s only 124-118, good for a .512 win percentage.  To put that in perspective:

• In 14 seasons, he’s won only 6 more games than he lost.  If you’re wondering, big brother Peyton won 108 more games than he lost.
• If he comes back for a 15th season, Eli is just one 4-12 campaign away from a career losing record, which is very possible given the Giants’ recent struggles.
• There are 27 active players in the NFL today with a higher win percentage as a starting Quarterback, including such unforgettable legends as Teddy Bridgewater, Trevor Simian, Andy Dalton, Joe Flacco, Drew Stanton, and even Mr. Butt Fumble himself, Mark Sanchez.  What elite company.

Football is a team game, and wins and losses are not solely on the quarterback.  But if we’re going to stake Eli’s Hall of Fame candidacy on his “big wins”, it would help if he were good at, you know, actually winning.

So that brings us to the other Pro-Eli argument – you can dispute the credit he deserves for wins and losses, but you can’t argue the fact that he is in the Top Ten all-time for passing touchdowns (8th!!!) and passing yards (7th!!!).  Case closed, Hall of Famer!  

Not quite.  Look at the all-time charts, and they’ll tell you exactly what you already knew: passing totals are way, way up across the League over the past twenty years, and pretty much anyone who has stayed healthy and in the lineup over that period of time (truly, Eli’s greatest strength) is going to be high on the all-time lists.   Jay Cutler has more passing yards than Steve Young. Matt Hasslebeck has more passing yards than Jim Kelly. Kerry freakin’ Collins has more passing yards than Joe freakin’ Montana. And sure, Eli Manning has more passing yards than John Elway. Was it difficult to decide who was better in any of those groups?

The smarter comparison would be to look at his contemporaries and see how Eli has done against them.  Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady are often held up as the four best quarterbacks of their (and Eli’s) era.  Rightfully so I’m sure, but how does Eli compare against even the next tier of QB’s? There are plenty of stats you could look at (none of which, I suspect, are going to make Eli look particularly good) but I’ll focus on ESPN’s Total QBR, a metric designed to measure all aspects of a QB’s performance: passing, rushing, turnovers, penalties.  The metric itself is a scale of 1-100, but I’ll focus more on each player’s ranking compared to other QB’s by season, and then finally their average rank by season. Data is only available online from 2006 onward, so I’m going to ignore Eli’s first couple of years (which in theory would have been his worst anyway), and then I’ll filter out QB’s that have a sample size lower than three seasons (Steve McNair was amazing in 2006, but that was his last season, so I won’t bias the comparison by including him).  Let’s take a look at how our future Hall of Famer Eli Manning stacks up!

Ouch.

The top of the chart is exactly what you’d expect.  Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees have been the best QB’s in the League over the past 12 years. Brady is ranked highest, but only because of Peyton Manning’s disastrous final season – if we could erase that year from history, Peyton would be the highest ranked by a wide margin.  Rodgers was surprisingly low at 7th, but highly underrated Matt Ryan, actual Hall of Famer Kurt Warner, and (somehow) Dak Prescott were the only others ahead of him.  Russell Wilson is tied with Rodgers, with Romo and Roethlisberger rounding out the top ten. Sounds about right.

And then there’s our friend Eli, the 26th ranked player on the list.  He averaged out to be the 16.5th best QB per season, and I think that’s a pretty fascinating number, considering there are 32 teams in the National Football League.  16.5 puts Eli in the lower half of the League’s quarterbacks, on average. Over a twelve year period, 25 other quarterbacks had a higher average finish, including Cam Newton, Jay Cutler, Matt Stafford, Andrew Luck, Kirk Cousins, and Philip Rivers.  And that’s not counting another 11 quarterbacks that beat Eli’s average rank but played only one or two seasons.

Total QBR admittedly may not be the best metric for evaluating performance.  Other stats like passing yards per game, completion percentage, yards per attempt, or TD to INT ratio may be preferable measures to those who don’t like the confusing Total QBR calculation.  I won’t make a chart for each of these, but here are Eli’s career rankings compared to other active NFL quarterbacks in each of those categories:

• Passing yards per Game – 11th
• Yards per attempt – 17th
• Completion % - 22nd
• TD to INT ratio – 22nd

Hardly among the best in the NFL even now, much less all time.  In fact the only statistics I can find that rank Eli among the game’s elite are based solely on volume. He has played 242 career games (third amongst active QBs behind only Brady and Brees), which have helped him (slowly) accumulate all those passing yards and touchdowns his supporters love to cite when stating his Hall of Fame case.  Arguably his greatest achievement has been somehow staying in the starting lineup for 14 years despite playing very mediocre football along the way, and even that he probably owes more to the famous Manning name than what he earned on the field.

Did it EVER feel like Eli was among the best in the league?  What was his peak exactly? 2008, when he had the sixth best Total QBR in the NFL?  He was never, even at his best, the guy that opposing fans had to fear. Brady, Brees, even Luck and Rivers – these are guys that you knew your team had to bring it’s “A” game against or you were going to lose.  Did you ever once feel that way about Eli Manning? I can’t imagine. This is a guy who never led the league in passing touchdowns, but did manage to lead the league in interceptions on three different occasions.  Brady, Brees, Ryan, Prescott, Rodgers, Wilson, Roethlisberger, Cousins, Rivers, Luck, Wentz, Winston, Newton, and Stafford all have better volume-adjusted career statistics than Eli Manning. How can one be the 14th best QB in the League and a Hall of Famer at the same time?

Jerry Rice recently said “I don’t see Eli as a Hall of Famer...  When I’m judging a player, I’m looking at what he brings to the table.  What I see with Eli Manning, there’s not consistency... there’s a chance of him getting in, but I’m not going to say he’s a true Hall of Famer”.  Exactly right. Eli Manning has always been a statistically shitty quarterback who lost half of his games throughout his career. He’s a Manning, and that makes people want to see a greatness in him that was simply never there.  The Pro Football Hall of Fame is meant to immortalize the best who ever played the game, and deep down, I think we all know that has never been Eli.