When bored, pull up your news search site of choice and enter the key words “Archie Manning” and “Draft” between January 1, 2004, and April 25, 2004. Before we had a discourse about Caleb Williams and his father, Carl, Archie was the original shadowy figure when it came to the kind of high-carb, pre-draft media snack du jour. The person we discussed far beyond what we actually understood, because it’s fun to talk about, and, sitting in our armchair, we get to tap into our personal haughtiness as well as our own parental and maternal instincts.
We tend to fall into two camps: The people who position ourselves as mommy and daddy Rambo, would bury our kids in our arms and run them through a sea of bullets, or mommy and daddy Bunker, the people who believe that each subsequent generation is too soft and that helicoptering only make matters worse.
The coverage on Manning was mixed. The New York papers, perhaps failing to read the tea leaves on a potential Giants trade and missing the opportunity to extend an early olive branch, were surprisingly critical. A favorite headline of mine was “ARCH MADNESS.” Indeed, most of the northeast, where Manning’s son would eventually make his home, seemed to paint Archie as a villain. The great Phil Sheridan of The Philadelphia Inquirer called Archie the “Bonnie Lindros” of professional football (and, as a bonus, a young reporter named Adrian Wojnarowski, working for ESPN in 2002 long before his famous Woj Bombs, called Bonnie Lindros a “pain in the ass” on the level of Richard Williams, the father of tennis prodigies Venus and Serena). The internet is a beautiful time machine.
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One would have to venture firmly into Manning territory—the family’s home state Shreveport Times, which was nestled between Ole Miss and Eli’s birthplace in New Orleans—for the wholesome take on Archie. Reporter Scott Ferrell said that Archie wasn’t a meddler, and quoted the director of the Independence Bowl as evidence (the director of the Independence Bowl told the paper that Archie didn’t ask for extra tickets to the Independence Bowl, which means he couldn’t possibly try and strong arm the draft). Again…Beautiful. Time. Machine.
The point—as we head into a draft process where Caleb Williams’s dad is being labeled everything from a grifter to a pain in the league’s backside for allegedly inquiring about ownership stake for his son, surrounding him with a “team” that includes a vaunted public relations specialist, or withholding him from medical evaluations—is that these conversations can reach such a level of supreme absurdity. We now lose sight of the fact that these supposed helicopter parents are sometimes right, because, as difficult as it is to see through the haze, they are being parents, just those whose actions are relayed through the lens of someone else who wished they could be controlling that part of the athlete’s life for a small fee. As annoying as that is to admit, Archie was right. Eli Manning almost certainly would not have won a Super Bowl in San Diego, nevermind two. His marketability post-career has, I’m guessing, expanded beyond the family’s wildest imaginations. Lamar Jackson’s mother, Felicia Jones, was absolutely correct. Lamar the defensive back would have probably been cut by the Patriots three times now.
Last year, I wrote a pre-draft profile of Bryce Young, whose parents, Craig and Julie, shuffled him through the venomous world of youth quarterbacking almost by themselves, keeping a tight circle along the way. They were right about their son, too. They were also, more than any parents I had come across in 14 years of covering the sport, genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of their incredibly famous son. Any reticence or defensiveness was merely a representation of their love for a child.
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Camp Williams is right, too. For the best prospects, and especially for the top prospect, the combine, bowl games, post-bowl season all-star games, medical testing and cognitive testing are totally idiotic and counterproductive. Carl was right when he said Williams was better off not being drafted so he wouldn’t be stuck in the same situation Young had to endure in 2023, running an offense pieced together out of a delusional owner’s fever dream. Carl was right to put other teams on notice and suggest in a national magazine interview back in September that they might just return to USC (the way Peyton Manning once did to avoid the Jets, by the way).
Let’s back up for one second and note that this isn’t an anti-agent take whatsoever. Young had good agents. Manning had one of the most revered agents in the history of football. Having someone who understands the machinations of professional football is a worthwhile endeavor. I’ve met agents who have cared more for players than their families did. This is important to keep in mind.
It’s also important to keep in mind that there are some parents who obviously warp and abdicate their primary responsibilities. That could be anywhere on the spectrum between the money and power-hungry LaVar Ball, to the controlling Marv Marinovich. Even Ball, who some feared would end up wedging himself into the basketball lives of his children, ended up being a bit of a paper tiger. If he, years later, has had almost no tangible impact on the daily operations of the NBA with all of his outward operations, how concerned should we be about someone like Williams and his own camp?
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But, as Carl Williams may be showing us, and as Felicia Jones did a few years back, there now also necessitates a kind of brazen protectiveness that doesn’t currently exist within the NFL universe and that you can’t really pay for. As the sport becomes larger, as NIL balloons, as the pre-draft industry continues to fatten itself on the desperation teams have for something they could convince themselves is concrete information, as the media continues to drift into a sensationalist deep ocean of horror, the only sensible stopgap is the person who has waited up nervously for that kid to come home from a night out in high school every night for almost half a decade. The person who has put on most of their Band-Aids. That kind of singular devotion is what can produce the genesis of ideas like: why the hell should everyone have my kid’s medical information if only one team is going to pick him?
I understand the arguments to the contrary when it comes to medical evaluations. Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst said that he wanted players to take tests, like the much-discussed S2 cognition exam from a year ago, because it gives him a baseline of data. If a player is hovering too far below that baseline, he wants to be able to assist and step in.
Related: Takeaways: Why the Bears’ 2024 Quarterback Plan Will Materialize Soon
But the sensible reply is that you’ll know a player is hurt or struggling if he or she trusts you. If you put in the hours. If you treat that person like a human being. If you love them like you promised the parents you would during the high school practices, the college recruiting visits and the pre-draft phone calls. If you cared for them like a parent cared for a child.
So, I’d be interested to see how much cacophony there would really be around Williams if we leant his dad the perspective we now have on other famously maligned quarterback parents; the one that has greatly eased with time. I’d be interested to see if we would already be at the common sense point we should have arrived at by now: Williams is almost certainly going to the Bears with the No. 1 pick, just like he was always going to be. As the game and its business components evolve, so, too, must the lengths that a parent must go for what they believe to be common sense protections. The definition of love may be executing that strategy, knowing full well that everyone else who relies on the very machine you are disrupting will try and make it sound like something that isn’t love at all.
