A NUMBERS GAME
BRETT Favre had just completed one of his typical workdays that Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006. He’d thrown the ball 42 times against the Minnesota Vikings’ defense, twice for touchdowns. He’d run it twice, for minus-2 yards. He’d been battered plenty, knocked to the ground a bunch, was limping in the postgame.
He had turned 37 years old a little over a month earlier.
“It’s funny,” Favre said that day. “When you get hit when you’re 27, it still hurts like hell if they get you in the right spot. But two plays later you’ve forgotten all about it.” He smiled and grimaced at the same time. “Now,” he said, “you remember every one of them.”
Thirty-seven might seem like a random benchmark for an NFL quarterback except for two things:
For one: a lot of the great ones never played a down at that age. Sid Luckman, Joe Namath and Otto Graham retired at 34, Bob Griese and Terry Bradshaw at 35. Bart Starr’s last full year with the Packers was at age 36, which is when Jim Kelly took his last snap for the Bills. Norm Van Brocklin won a title with the Eagles at 34 in 1960, and the very next year was head coach of the Vikings at 35.
For two: the quarterback of the New York Giants happens to be 37 years old.
“Thirty-seven is not old,” Eli Manning said last spring, after it became clear the Giants were committed to bringing him back as the franchise’s bedrock foundation. “I think 37 is young, so it’s all perspective.”
It was Frank Sinatra who, a couple of generations ago, provided the inspirational soundtrack for so many who hear time’s footsteps trampling up their spines and down their hamstrings: “For as rich as you are/It’s much better by far/To be young at heart …”
Eli certainly looks like a young 37. Early reports out of the Giants’ camp are that he is playing quarterback as a young 37 (although, sure, anything that happens before the first earnest tackle is speculative).
And he does have a couple of young bookend weapons in Odell Beckham Jr., 25, and Saquon Barkley, 21, that provide a 37-year-old quarterback with the same proper motivation to act a decade younger that a 37-year-old — or 47- or 57-year-old — accountant or lawyer or teacher has to suck in his stomach while strolling along the beach.
“I think there is always expectations and no one has higher expectations than I do for myself and this team and what we want to do,” Manning said last week.
Of course, most of those expectations are predicated on Manning belying his birth certificate. He does have a few things going for him, starting with the genes. His father, Archie, might have fled the game at 35, but his big brother, Peyton, two years removed from what looked like potentially career-ending neck surgery had, in 2013, by far the singlegreatest year any quarterback has ever had in his age-37 season.
Peyton threw for 5,477 yards, 55 touchdowns, completed 68.3 percent of his passes and had a rating of 115.1 in his second season as a Bronco, leading Denver to the Super Bowl and bettering, at least in that category, the 2014 season of his eternal rival Tom Brady (who, at 37, threw for 4,109 yards and 33 TDs with a rating of 97.4). So there is that. There is also an old Giants tradition of older quarterbacks performing very well. Y.A. Tittle actually has the second-best age-37 NFL season ever, with 37 touchdowns (in only 13 games) in 1963, a season that ended in a title-game loss to the Bears. Now, it was less than a year later that Tittle looked about 87 in that famous bloodied-and-on-his-knees shot from Pitt Stadium, but that was for 38.
(At 38, in fact, Phil Simms had his thanksfor-the-memories swan song for the 1993 Giants; his age-37 year was forgettable thanks to injury and Ray Handley, and was limited to only four games. Charley Conerly led the Giants to the 1958 NFL championship when he was 37, though he spent much of the year in a two-QB “platoon” with Don Heinrich.)
So there is little question you can win with a 37-year-old quarterback and little question that depending on the quarterback you can accomplish great things. Look at 2016 Drew Brees (37 TDs, 5,208 yards), 1998 Steve Young (36 TDs, 4,170 yards), even 1970 Johnny Unitas, whose numbers (14 TDs, 18 picks, only 2,213 yards) were substandard for him but who led the Colts to an 11-2-1 record and the Super Bowl (where he was replaced by 36-year-old Earl Morrall) in his last full year as a starter.
For these Giants, though, it’s more of a must. They could have had their pick of any quarterback in a draft class bursting with them, but chose to stay with Eli.
“You have to stop worrying about age,” Giants general manager Dave Gettleman, who ultimately made that call, said at the time. “There are some guys that are just freaks. Brady is 41. I mean c’mon: [Manning] is our quarterback.”
And Gettleman believes Eli still has enough to join Brady, John Elway (1997) and Unitas as the only 37-year-old quarterbacks to ever win a Super Bowl. Maybe he knows the rest of that Sinatra song: “Fairy tales can come true It can happen to you … If you’re young at heart …”