Eli Manning’s big gamble down the stretch foils Tom Brady, Patriots again

Time：2012-2-6 6:47:26    

 He received the shotgun snap at his own 7-yard line, the length of a football field and Bill Belichick’s defense standing between him and immortality. With his top two receivers lined up on the right side of the line, in the final stages of a scintillating Super Sunday serving up a hearty helping of high drama, Eli Manning knew exactly where he wanted to go with the most important pass of the 2011 season.

Think counterintuitive. Think cocksure. Think champion. With a deceptive glance to his right and a glorious, perfectly placed throw down the left sideline, Manning sent the New York Giants on their way to a second Super Bowl victory in four years and took a major, irrevocable step on the Road to Canton.

When Manning’s career-defining, 38-yard pass looped into the tiny window between a pair of New England Patriots, cornerback eStrling Moore and safety Patrick Chung, and landed in the hands of wideout Mario Manningham, there were 68,658 fans at Lucas Oil Stadium – and hundreds of millions of television viewers worldwide – who marveled at the audacity of it all.

 A little more than three-and-a-half minutes of thrilling action later, including the uncontested six-yard touchdown run by Ahmad Bradshaw that put New York ahead with 57 seconds remaining, the Giants had captured Super Bowl XLVI by a 21-17 margin, and game MVP Manning – not the Patriots’ Tom Brady, and not Eli’s big brother Peyton – was the future Hall of Famer atop the football world.

Manning didn’t just win this game, he did it his way, by taking a massive risk at the most important time. When Manningham came through with a catch that rivaled David Tyree’s on-the-helmet masterpiece from Super Bowl XLII, somehow keeping both feet inbounds while getting blasted across the sideline by Chung, the Giants knew they were on the verge of seizing control.

“It changes the whole thought process right there,” Manning said late Sunday night, having just emerged from the shower in a jubilant Giants locker room. “It was big-time; there’s nothing else you can say. I didn’t have many options and I saw the safety cheat inside a little, and I decided to take a shot and try to fit it in there. And oh, what a catch.”

And oh, what a throw.

“Man,” Manningham said, “Eli threw a perfect ball.”

Most quarterbacks don’t pull off a pass like that. Even fewer attempt it in the first place.

“Um,” wideout Victor Cruz said afterward, “our quarterback does.”

The play, “Otter W Go,” isn’t designed to result in a backside throw against the Cover-2 zone the Patriots were playing. Instead, the receivers on the right of the line, Cruz and Hakeem Nicks, were the primary options; Manningham was basically the last read.

“In practice, you do not throw it to that guy,” said David Carr, Manning’s backup. “I was like, What’s going on? But Eli had been feeling that safety [Chung] was cheating over to the other side, and we’d talked about it through the course of the game. It was just an incredible throw.”

We’ve known Manning has a penchant for taking bold gambles throughout his eight-year career, and the results haven’t always been stellar. As brilliant as he was during the Giants’ unlikely championship run four years ago, culminating in his Super Bowl MVP performance in a classic comeback against the Pats that was hauntingly similar to Sunday’s, Manning’s subsequent three seasons had their share of choppy play.

Coming off a 2010 campaign in which he threw a league-high 25 interceptions, Manning was asked if he considered himself to be in Brady’s class. When he answered in the affirmative, the response was subsequently ridiculed by many fans and analysts.