Eli Manning’s football career is reportedly coming to an end. According to Dan Graziano and Jordan Raanan of ESPN, Manning, the two-time Super Bowl winning signal caller for the New York Giants, will hold a press conference at the end of the week where he’ll announce that he’s calling it a career.
Eli Manning will hold a news conference Friday to announce his retirement, sources tell @JordanRaanan and me.
— Dan Graziano (@DanGrazianoESPN) January 22, 2020
The decision isn’t a huge surprise. Manning had been flirting with the idea of retiring after the Giants’ season has come to an end, and had said that if he kept playing, he wanted a starting gig, as he was relegated to a backup role after two games this season with a few spot starts late in the year due to injuries. While Manning never appeared to have major gripes about being a veteran mentor on the bench for rookie quarterback Daniel Jones, he was quoted as saying, “Backing up is not real fun.”
This marks the end of one of the strangest careers in NFL history. While Manning was turnover prone (244 career interceptions) and suffered from lengthy stretches of poor play, he led numerous fourth quarter comebacks and game-winning drives while throwing for 57,023 yards and 366 touchdowns. And of course, he led the Giants to a pair of wins in the Super Bowl over the New England Patriots. Both wins required Manning to engineer late drives to topple Tom Brady and Co., and on both of those drives, he was responsible for two of the greatest throws and catches in Super Bowl history.
Manning’s Hall of Fame credentials will assuredly be debated for years, regardless of whether or not he gets in. But for now, we’ll wait until Friday afternoon, when one of the best (and, of course, most meme-able) quarterbacks of his era says goodbye to the NFL.
