The New York Giants and Eli Manning took a tremendous amount of heat for a draft day trade that brought the Ole Miss quarterback to East Rutherford by way of San Diego, and things didn’t get much easier in the immediate aftermath.
Not only was Manning initially frowned upon for refusing to play for the Chargers, his rookie campaign began on the bench and got no better once he reached the field.
Manning lost his first six starts and did not look good doing it. He was absolutely beaten into the ground during a Week 14 game against the Baltimore Ravens and in the season finale against the Dallas Cowboys, Giants brass were looking for anything to provide some optimism.
Manning obliged.
In what would be the first of many, Manning engineered a fourth quarter comeback, scoring 21 points over the final 15 minutes, including an extremely gutsy audible to run Tiki Barber up the middle and into the end zone with just 16 seconds remaining.
It was far from the flawless performance for Manning, but it was the first time he had showed the leadership, intelligence and late-game magic that would come to define him.
It was also the performance that led late Giants owner Wellington Mara to declare, “we’ve got our guy.”
Sadly, that would be Wellington’s final game with us.
“I also remember the last game of the 2004 season, Eli’s rookie year, when he took the team down the field at the end of the game in the closing seconds to beat Dallas, it was the last game my father ever saw, and I can remember walking to the locker room with him afterward and him saying to me, ‘I think we found our guy.’ And how right he was,” co-owner John Mara recounted on Friday.
Mara’s voice cracked as he recalled that moment, and it resonated with everyone in attendance. But Giants Nation can take solace in knowing that Wellington knew Big Blue was in good hands.
And as John said, “how right he was.”
