Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NFL

Eli’s year looking like dad Archie’s career

There has rarely been a time in his career as a professional quarterback when Eli Manning hasn’t been judged through the prism of his older brother. Part of that is the surcharge for being a kid brother, part of it a toll for being the kid brother of one of the greatest quarterbacks who has ever lived.

That’s probably grown tiresome for Eli, even if he’s rarely allowed as much, especially since he’s the Manning who presently owns the higher total of Super Bowl titles and Super Bowl MVP trophies. Still, Peyton came first. And so Peyton has always been the template.

Only now, as Eli flails away Sunday to Sunday, as Eli drowns in a pile of interceptions and Eli’s Giants suffocate under an unceasing avalanche of losses, Peyton isn’t the Manning that Eli most resembles right now.

It’s Archie.

It’s the patriarch, whose entire career was a blurry onslaught of beatings and battering and bloody poundings, whose entire career looked almost exactly the way this Giants season has looked so far, two 0-3 starts and two 1-5 starts and one 0-5 start and one 0-14 nightmare that didn’t end until Archie’s Saints ran into an equally inept Jets team at Shea Stadium.

“I honestly believe,” Tom Coughlin said, “that he’s trying so hard to get us going that he puts too much on himself.”

That was the Giants coach, trying to explain three more Eli interceptions accrued in this dispiriting 36-21 loss to the Eagles, trying his best to figure how the Giants got here — to 0-5, to the basement of the NFC East, one of only two winless teams in the conference, to a place where you honestly have to ask how many wins there really are on the Giants schedule this year. Two? Three?

Less?

That was Coughlin, but it easily could have been John North or Hank Stram or Dick Nolan or Bum Phillips, any of the men who coached Archie Manning in New Orleans, who would forever praise their quarterback as the one shining light in an unfiltered rush of lousy football. That was always Archie’s fate, his plight, his regrettable destiny, piloting hopeless teams stacked on top of one another.

It was one legacy he’d hoped to avoid passing along to the next generation, and with the exception of his two sons’ respective rookie years, that’s exactly how it has gone. Peyton and Eli haven’t ended all of their seasons in triumph, but they’ve rarely experienced the sourness their old man was forced to swallow whole.

Until now. Until this Giants’ season, which already feels like it’s lasted longer than the Mets’ and Yankees’ lost seasons combined.

“I know we can play better,” Eli said Sunday. “I know I can play better.”

But can the Giants really expect better than what we’ve seen from them so far, now that the Eagles stomped them in their own backyard? And even if Eli is better — and we keep believing he has to be better than 12 picks in five games, has to be better than a quarterback rating that’s actually a few points lower than Geno Smith’s — how can we be sure that’ll translate?

After all, in 1980, Archie Manning completed 61 percent of his passes, threw 23 touchdowns to 20 interceptions, had a QB Rating of 81.8, the highest of his career … and the Saints lost a letter in their nickname, became the Aints, lost 15 out of 16 games and inspired their fans to wear paper bags over their heads when they went to the Superdome.

The Raiders won the Super Bowl that year (in New Orleans naturally). Their quarterback, Jim Plunkett, had a rating 10 points lower than Archie’s.

Who do you think enjoyed the year more?

“He’s way too good a player,” Coughlin said, “to have these kinds of things keep happening to him.”

Eli isn’t the only reason the Giants are 0-5, of course. Coughlin has had an uncharacteristically poor season, and the defense is a sieve, and suddenly we are looking at a back-to-the-future-from-hell scenario where Brandon Jacobs is looming as the Giants’ new feature back (assuming Ottis Anderson isn’t available).

Still, being part of an ensemble is no consolation when the results, every week, are so depressing. Coughlin’s right; Eli is too good a player to keep looking like the worst quarterback in football. But even if he regains his form, that promises nothing. And Eli doesn’t have to go far for evidence of how true — and how painful — that is.