Eli is the anti-Peyton. When Peyton was putting up huge reg season numbers but losing every year in the playoffs he was bashed.
Eli also doesn't have the luxury of playing in a dome like Peyton or Brees where the conditions are perfect. Look at what happens to Brees on the road.
Which just underscores who the GOAT is... Rogers has a shot to compete, but like Eli he got off to a slow start (although much of that wasn't of his doing) and has now become one and done. Brady was a HOF lock 4 years into his career. Nobody wins 'em all but Brady rebounded pretty damn close to doing that 7 years in. Now a decade in counting one missed season due to catestrophic injury, he has rebounded on a team in transition to the tune of a unanimous league MVP season followed up by a 5th friggin' superbowl appearance in a decade...
Media lives to hype. Lots of QB's are elite one year and crap the next. That's because they aren't actually, you know, elite. Elite is about a number of things including winning, statistical performance, and the most overlooked accomplishment of all...consistency.
Eli is like the Forrest Gump of QB's, the proverbial box of chocolates you never know what you're going to get until a season is in the books. He can both drag an otherwise poised for dominance team down or inexplicable carry a struggling team on his back. Ergo the truth about who he is lies somewhere in between. As does Romo. Coming out of college he was actually hyped as the better Manning QB. Only even after their daddy picked the spot where he believed he would be best positioned to succeed, as opposed to Peyton who was asked to engineer a total turnaround - Eli floundered while Peyton basically led a one man band who while they may not have won it all dominated on the way to being perennial conference contenders.
Eli is improving as he enters his 30's - he almost had to and if he hadn't he'd have been jettisoned along his HC but for that ring in hand, and his remaining shortcomings are less noticable down the stretch because he kept them in striking distance in the NFCE (which is becoming akin to competing in the AFCW) and the Giants managed to rally as a team heading into the playoffs. Again, a lot like Forrest Gump's story... Hey, not the guy you'd have picked to succceed based on lifelong observation, but one you might decide to bet on going forward simply given the alternatives and where they have landed and where he is now heading. He's gone farther than expected while clearly elite performers went home emptyhanded. Typically shortsighted what have you done lately media's immediate kneejerk inclination is to reassess or reconfigure the definition of elite.
Carson Palmer, Marc Bulger, Kurt Warner, Romo, Sanchez...there is just a littany of QB's and for that matter players in this league who are elite, bums, jags, elite, clutch, chokers, at one point if not off and on over the course of their careers based on both erratic performance and media spin. Eli is just the lastest and it remains to be seen who and what he ultimately is. My guess would be he remains near the top of that maddening heap, right behind Roethlisberger and just ahead of Flacco and the rest of the wannabes.
