In Non-Defense Of Nepotism

I know you won’t believe this if you don’t live here, but on New York talk radio Roethlisberger vs. Eli Manning is treated as if it were a serious topic for debate, when in fact it’s sort of like debating about whether Houston is in fact generally hotter than Yellowknife. Even in 2006, Roethlisberger’s off year, he was better than Manning; the other three years he’s been very good-to-excellent while Manning has been below-average. (See here for the data.) What follows is an exhaustive list of the credentials Eli Manning has to be considered a quality QB:

• He is related to other, much better quarterbacks.

That’s it. If we were named “Eli Leaf” or “Eli Dilfer” nobody would have thought it was a good idea to effectively trade Roethlisberger and Shawne Merriman to acquire him, let alone think that it was defensible three years later. Or look at it this way — Joey Harrington has (correctly) been seen as a colossal bust; his lifetime QB rating is 69.6. Manning’s is 73.6, and I don’t think that “marginally better than Joey Harrington after 3 years” sounds like a potential elite QB to me; indeed, it doesn’t even sound like a good QB. This year he’s got a 75, playing against a very weak schedule. He’s a lot more comparable to Jason Campbell than he is to Roethisberger at this point.