The Wednesday news (confirmed by the team) that longtime Giants quarterback Eli Manning will announce his retirement on Friday brings one of the most interesting questions of this era into focus: Five year from now, when he’s eligible, will Manning be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame?
Based on the numbers, it’s a very tough sell. Among quarterbacks of his era with at least 2000 passing attempts, Manning ranks fifth in touchdown passes (366), but he also ranks first in interceptions (244) by a fairly wide margin — Drew Brees ranks second with 206, and Brees has 518 touchdown passes to date. Manning’s touchdown rate of 4.5% ranks 19th in his era, below Andy Dalton and Jay Cutler. His interception rate of 3.01% is 10th-highest from 2004 through 2019. When you have a higher career interception rate than Blake Bortles, Matt Schaub, and Kerry Collins… well, that’s not great.
Manning ranks 23rd in his era in Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt, Pro Football Reference’s most advanced quarterback efficiency metric. He’s below guys like Jameis Winston, Donovan McNabb, and the aforementioned Schaub and Dalton. He’s tied with brother Peyton and Philip Rivers, with whom he switched teams in the 2004 draft, for fourth in his era in fourth-quarter comebacks, which is nice, but for every statistic that runs in his favor, there are three that don’t.
Manning ranks 33rd in completion percentage in his era at 60.29%. Actually, he’s tied with Ryan Fitzpatrick at 33rd. That may have worked a generation ago when the idea in the NFL was to create shot plays downfield and to heck with completion rate, but that’s not how the NFL works now — nor has it been in any part of Manning’s career.
Manning also never finished in the top five in Football Outsiders’ DYAR metric, which measured cumulative opponent-adjusted efficiency through an entire season. The highest he ever made it there was eighth in 2011. He had just five seasons in the top 10. So, if you want to bring the old Bill James “black type” argument (i.e., the seasons in which this player can be seen to lead his league in any category), Manning doesn’t really have that. He’s led the league in interceptions three different seasons (2007, 2010, and 2013), he threw the longest completion in 2010 and 2011, he led the NFL in sack percentage in 2012, and he led the NFL in both fourth-quarter comebacks and game-winning drives in 2011. That’s the only black type he’s got.
Of course, the counter-argument to any Eli Manning Hall of Fame argument is the two Super Bowls his Giants won over the Patriots at the ends of the 2007 and 2011 seasons. In those two Super Bowls, Manning combined for 49 completions in 74 attempts for 551 yards, three touchdowns, and one interception. He had great throws in both Super Bowls — the David Tyree helmet catch in Super Bowl XLII, and this insane 38-yard completion to receiver Mario Manningham on the Giants’ game-winning drive in Super Bowl XLVI. That’s still one of the best throws I’ve ever seen.
Eli. pic.twitter.com/w4nEQnwyBD
— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) January 22, 2020
Manning was awarded the Most Valuable Player award in both of those Super Bowls, but it could easily and credibly be argued that defensive lineman Justin Tuck should have been the MVP in XLII, and Tuck had an equally compelling case in XLVI. In both Super Bowls, Tuck choked Tom Brady’s primary escape hatch — the ability to step up in the pocket to throw — and this had more to do with New England’s failures than anything Manning did. Tuck was also the primary creator of pressure in XLVI when Tom Brady was called for intentional grounding in his own end zone with 8:52 left in the first quarter, leading to a safety and the Giants’ first points.
So, if we’re going to argue for quarterbacks with two Super Bowl wins and no bust in Canton, how about Jim Plunkett, who was under center for the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XV, and for the Los Angeles Raiders in Super Bowl XVIII? Plunkett was the Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XV, and he matched Manning’s touchdown pass total in that game alone. Is Manning demonstrably better throughout his career, adjusting for era, than Plunkett was?
In the end, when we’re discussing what makes a Hall-of-Famer, we’re supposed to be able to find things that were special about this particular player. Things that say, “We can’t write the history of the NFL without this person.” Yes, he’s had a long and storied career, and yes, he does have those two rings, but to say that the history of the NFL can’t be written without Eli Manning is a stretch at best. Most likely he will get in the Hall of Fame someday, and given his ties to the country’s top media market, he may even make it on his first ballot. But that’s not to say it’s the way it should happen, based on the numbers and the tape.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”