Eli Manning is all grown up. Sure, he finished his 2011 season on Sunday by winning the Super Bowl and taking home the game’s MVP trophy after completing an instant classic of a fourth-quarter drive, just as he did at the end of the 2007 campaign. The differences between the process enlisted by Old Eli and New Eli, though, are stark. The old Eli Manning struggled through an uneven regular season before raising his game to unforeseen heights during a shocking playoff run. The new Eli Manning? He’s been playing at an excellent level all year and rose to something even higher during the playoffs. In 2007, while Manning may have been playing the position traditionally associated with leadership, he wasn’t anywhere close to the best player on his team. He did not lead his team to a title; he was dragged, kicking and screaming, by a dominant defense. Four years later, Eli Manning stood at the helm and dragged a flagging defense to a second World Championship. This, so much more than 2007, was Eli’s title.

The numbers don’t lie. In each of his two Super Bowl runs, Manning has followed a four-year stretch with a playoff performance that dramatically improves upon his established level of play.

 Notably, during his two title runs, Manning has been able to essentially avoid interceptions while becoming a much more accurate quarterback than the guy he had previously been.

Extremely Lucky? Incredibly Close

As frustratingly cliched and simplistic as it is, this game came down to two big plays and a smattering of luck. When Wes Welker got open up the seam for a huge play with 4:06 left in the fourth, a catch might have sealed the game for the Patriots. If Welker went on to score a touchdown, the Pats would have led by 10 points with four minutes (and one Giants timeout) to go. Only the Cowboys can blow that kind of lead to the Giants. Even if Welker were tackled and the Patriots stopped, they would have been able to kick a field goal and go up six points with about two minutes to go. Instead, the pass didn’t go quite as planned. While Welker was open, Brady had to throw the ball away from the safety in the middle of the field to keep Welker from getting creamed. In attempting to do so, he overthrew the pass and forced Welker to make an awkward turn for the ball. Welker still could have made the catch, but it was far more difficult than it needed to be. The receiver has tried to take responsibility for the play, but it’s likely more on Brady than it is on Welker. Welker dropped his game-changing bomb, and when the Giants were backed up on their 12-yard line two plays later, Manningham got free up the left sideline and caught his. Flip the success on those two plays and the Patriots win.
Those plays aren’t lucky, of course, but what happened with the game’s two fumbles was. Fumbles from Hakeem Nicks and Ahmad Bradshaw bounced dangerously on the Lucas Oil turf, but the Giants were able to get to each ball and fall on it before the Patriots could recover. The Bradshaw fumble would have been particularly devastating, as it would have given the Patriots the ball on the Giants’ 11-yard line early in the fourth quarter with the chance to go up two scores. A third Giants fumble was recovered by the Patriots, but came on a play where New England had 12 men on the field, which returned the ball to the Giants and wiped the fumble off the books. 




Now, angry Giants fans, let us clarify what “luck” means in this context. The Giants were not lucky to win Super Bowl XLVI because they fumbled twice and fell on both of them. They played a very good football game against a great football team, but it’s pretty clear that this game was close enough that either team could have won without the other team feeling like they had something stolen from them. In tight games like this one, the reality is that the difference between winning and losing often comes down to the bounce of a football or some arbitrary fluke of timing, like who gets the ball last in a shootout or (under the old rules) won a coin toss at the beginning of overtime. That doesn’t mean that the Giants were lucky to win! It means that the two teams were so close that an act of randomness was important enough to dramatically shift the game in their favor.

If Bradshaw’s bouncing fumble was picked up by the Patriots and returned for a touchdown as part of what eventually became a Patriots win, would the Giants be any less talented of a football team? Would they have deserved to win any more or any less? Of course not. There’s no shame in getting the breaks. Someone’s got to get them, and they’re incredibly valuable. The Giants recovered eight of the 10 fumbles that hit the ground during their four playoff games, and had they failed to recover either of the Kyle Williams muffed punts or the Bradshaw fumble on Sunday, they might not have won the Super Bowl.

A third factor, of course, were the effects of Rob Gronkowski’s high ankle sprain. After two weeks of talk about how Gronkowski was 100 percent, he was just the latest victim of that dreaded injury, struggling through a game where he was clearly a shell of his normal self. Gronkowski caught just two passes for a total of 26 yards, and according to ESPN Stats and Information, he played a season-low 72.6 percent of Patriots plays. He was the intended receiver on the lone turnover of the game, a bomb where Gronkowski was one-on-one against Giants middle linebacker Chase Blackburn. That would normally be a huge mismatch for the Patriots, but Brady underthrew his pass and Gronkowski wasn’t able to make a creditable play on the football in the air, allowing Blackburn to pick off the pass.2 Of course, Gronkowski was also unable to come up with a deflection off of the Hail Mary on the final pass of the game, and while it’s not clear that he would have been able to do so with a healthy ankle, it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have had a better shot at it.  



It didn’t take an injured Gronkowski, some friendly bounces of the ball, and a win in the biggest two-play exchange of the game to get the Giants to win this Super Bowl. They might have been able to beat a healthy Gronkowski, get past a long completion to Welker, and even survive a lost Bradshaw fumble. They only play each Super Bowl once, though, and in the game that played out on Sunday, those tiny differences qualified as the margin of victory.