Last Sunday, the Chicago Bears stacked eight and nine men at the line of scrimmage to stop Tennessee’s league-leading running game and dared Kerry Collins to beat them.
Collins did, throwing for 289 yards and two touchdowns, just his fourth and fifth TD passes of the season, to run the Titans’ unbeaten streak to nine games. It was his first 200-yard passing game this season.
Wasn’t Collins just supposed to be a “game manager?” Wasn’t his job at age 35 to let the running backs and defenders win the game and use his experience to avoid mistakes, something his younger and more athletic and explosive predecessor, Vince Young, was unable to do?
Game manager? It’s become a description for aging QBs or those whose don’t throw for a lot of yards or a lot of TDs.
“It’s like they want to say something good about the quarterback and they look at his stats and the numbers are not high. So they say ‘Well, he must be a kind of game manager,’ “ says Amani Toomer of the Giants.
Toomer knows what kind of “manager” Collins was.
yards receiving when Collins was the Giants’ starting QB from 1999-2003. Collins, now 14th in career yards passing, threw for 3,000 or more yards in four of those five seasons, including 4,073 in 2002.
Blame the term to some extent on the media explosion that inflicts inside-the-locker-room terminology on the public at large.
So “game manager” has come into vogue because “expert” jobs are available on radio and television for any ex-player, coach or executive who can put together a coherent sentence – and some who can’t. As Toomer notes, it’s a facile way to say that quarterbacks who win but are setting no records, must be doing something right.
But like any cliche, it’s oversimplified.
“Every quarterback is a game manager,” laughs Bill Polian, the Colts’ president. “It’s what the job is all about.”
Polian, of course, has one of the best: Peyton Manning, whose management is evident to anyone who watches him wave his arms, whisper to his center and either change a call or pretend to.
But Manning, one of the few QBs who calls many of his own plays, is rarely considered a “manager” because of his stats.
ding New England to three titles.
But Brady was a lot more than that.
In two of his Super Bowl victories, he led New England on drives in the final minute that set up winning field goals by Adam Vinatieri. And his breakout game came before the first title: The “tuck rule” playoff game in the Foxborough snow when he led a late drive that sent a second-round game with Oakland into overtime. He won those games, he didn’t manage them.
Then there is Peyton’s younger brother Eli, the MVP of last season’s Super Bowl.
Until the final game of last season, when he threw four TD passes against the Patriots as the Giants nearly kept New England from the first 16-0 regular season, Eli was considered a disappointment. At times, he was an object of ridicule close to the kind Chicago’s Rex Grossman received even though, at his worst, Manning often excelled in clutch situations.
But as the Giants kept winning on the road in the playoffs, he suddenly demonstrated the consistency that had been expected since he was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2004 draft. Because he didn’t put up big numbers, the most common sentence used to describe his play adhered to the Toomer rule: “He’s learned how to manage the game.”
Except, like Brady, he did far more than that.
the game 14-14 at the half. It came after Dallas used up almost all of the second quarter to drive the length of the field for the go-ahead score, and gave New York the momentum it needed to finally win 21-17.
Then in the Super Bowl, Manning engineered two fourth-quarter touchdown drives to upset the unbeaten Patriots.
The second, which started at the Giants 17 with 2:39 left, was marked by the 32-yard pass that David Tyree somehow pinned against his helmet and held onto as he fell to the ground. It came on a third and-5 with 1:15 remaining and made the hitherto obscure Tyree famous. But Manning’s work on the play was equally heroic – he was surrounded by the entire New England defensive line, spun away from Jarvis Green and Richard Seymour as they seemed about to pull him to the ground, and somehow managed to hurl the ball accurately downfield.
Then he converted another third-down pass to Steve Smith, and finally threw a 13-yard TD pass to Plaxico Burress to pull off one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history.
That made Eli the MVP; got him into almost as many commercials as his older brother; and established him in the public consciousness as one of the NFL’s top quarterbacks.
He’s remained consistent this season as the Giants have jumped to an 8-1 record: 14 touchdown passes and just six interceptions, three of them in Cleveland in his team’s only loss.
ng questions – at least in New York, where it’s being pointed out that in his last four games, he hasn’t passed for more than 200 yards in any. No matter that the Giants have won all four and that in two of them, they have rushed for 200 yards or more.
Management?
On what turned out to be the key play in last week’s win over the Eagles, he persuaded coach Tom Coughlin to challenge a third-quarter call in which Manning was ruled over the line of scrimmage on a 17-yard completion to Kevin Boss. Coughlin challenged, the replay showed the quarterback’s judgment was correct, and New York went on to score the go-ahead touchdown.
So is Eli Manning, like Tom Brady before him and Kerry Collins right now, considered too good to be a “game manager?”
Might be a good phrase to ditch.
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DIRTY DOZEN: The top six and bottom six teams in the NFL based on current level of play:
1. Tennessee (9-0). You get the sense the Titans wouldn’t be devastated if they “manage” to lose a game or two. See New England 2007.
2. New York Giants (8-1). Handling the hard half of the schedule almost as nicely as they handled the easy part.
3. Carolina (7-2). No style points from win in Oakland. Often hard to get up for really bad teams.
4. Indianapolis (5-4). You do get style points by beating the Patriots at home, then the Steelers on the road.
bility for his own mistakes, which is why good teams have good locker rooms.
6. Baltimore (6-3). Finally, an offense to go with the defense.
27. San Francisco (2-7). The intensity was there in Arizona. The clock management and late play-calling weren’t.
28. Kansas City (1-8). The 2011 AFC West champions.
29. Cincinnati (1-8). Marvin Lewis probably would prefer other work at this point.
30. St. Louis (2-7). Back where they were during the Linehan administration.
31. Oakland (2-7). Was it really Tom Cable who relieved Greg Knapp of play-calling duties or was it Al Davis? Does it matter?
32. Detroit (0-9). Even money to finish 0-16.