By Eric Edholm
July 23, 2008

I was very happy for Eli Manning, like many others were, when he defied the odds in winning four road playoff games, underdogs in all four, to capture a Super Bowl title.

It was great theater watching Manning win it all and to do so against a highly respected defense and a team that was three-for-three in the big game.

Eli Manning

But what does that mean in fantasy terms? Can we lump him in with the great quarterbacks around the league, or at least has he made top-10 status?

I am here to say no. I say that despite Manning’s 23.7-TD average the past three seasons, he falls short in several other categories. And as far as his potential improvement, I think with Manning — save for that one, glorious stretch in December and January — what you see is what you get.

First, if we are going to attempt to put him amongst the best of the best, we need to see how he stacks up statistically with the top guys from PFW’s most recent QB rankings. Here are our top seven quarterbacks:

Now purely going off the ’07 regular-season numbers clearly doesn’t tell the whole story. Eli Manning was better in the playoffs, and if we include his Week 17 game against the Patriots plus his postseason numbers, he might have turned the corner in terms of hanging on to the football. He threw only one interception — on a poor play by WR Steve Smith — and lost zero fumbles from Week 17 through the Super Bowl.

But these numbers from the graph above stand out. Manning is below the top-seven average in the positive categories and higher in the negative ones in every case, except three-interception games, a category in which he's tied. That trend can’t be ignored. Through his career, he has been hot and cold, routinely reverting to old, bad habits that get him in trouble.

To boot, he’s the kind of hot-and-cold that freaks out fantasy owners. His three best games of the first 16 weeks last season were against the Cowboys in Week One, the Lions in Week 11, and the Eagles in Week 14. In those three games, he completed 73-of-111 passes (65.8 percent) with six touchdowns, one interception and zero fumbles lost.

But look at the three games that followed those good ones. In Weeks Two, 12 and 15, he combined to complete only 55-of-130 passes (42.3 percent), with three TDs, five interceptions and a fumble lost. If you play the way many fantasy owners do — by going with a hot hand from the week before — then Manning most certainly is not your guy.

And that right there is the problem with him, boiled down. If you take a top fantasy quarterback, you want him to be an every-week starter. We know going in that Peyton Manning or Tom Brady will have two or three bad games per season. But Eli is almost guaranteed to flop five or six times.

He had two or more touchdowns in only four of his first 15 games. He had two or more interceptions in six games. He lost seven of his 13 fumbles. These problems have not suddenly disappeared. It’s the guy he is and, I think, always will be on some level, Super Bowl or not.

Joe Namath, Jim Plunkett, Jim McMahon, Doug Williams, Jeff Hostetler, Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson all won Super Bowls. None of them had career seasons following their Super Bowl wins — and in fact, none had seasons the next year that were dramatically better than the one before. I think Eli Manning falls into that category. He’s a second-tier fantasy QB who will have at least four or five games this season that make fantasy owners wish they had gone with someone more consistent in their drafts.