When the Chargers selected Eli Manning as their first round draft pick years ago, the choice was considered fantastically risky. Although fans love a great quarterback they love winning teams even more, and many coaches oppose spending their salary capped fortunes and draft picks on quarterbacks on principle: they simply don’t believe quarterbacks are worth the cost. The same balking at the costs of Manning were repeated when he was traded to the now world champion Giants.
Eli Manning’s greatest strengths seemed to be “a special ability to cope with risk” and his remarkably high intelligence (his score of 39 on the 12 minute Wonderlic IQ test implied an IQ of around 136), Michael Lewis argued in an essay in the New York Times Magazine in December of 2004. The ability to cope with risk was what lay at the heart of Lewis’ bond trading book Liar’s Poker.
“Compared with managing, trading was admirably direct… [The traders at Solomon Brothers] took risk. They proved their superiority everyday by handling risk better than all the rest of the risk-taking world,” Lewis wrote in the book. It was coping with risk that made the game of liar’s poker such a great metaphor for trading. For Lewis it was more than a metaphor: liar’s poker itself was a test of a trader’s character and instincts for risk.
If we put these two assessments together, we can see that Lewis was essentially arguing that it was this trader’s instinct that defines Manning. Can anyone who watched Manning’s incredible performance in the final minutes of last night’s Superbowl doubt that Lewis got it right?
Update: Thanks to our readers for some corrections about Manning’s history with the Chargers and for pointing out that the third Manning brother is using that ability to cope with risk as a commodity trader!
The Eli Experiment [New York Times Magazine]
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Michael Lewis
Liar’s Football: Nonrequired Reading On Eli Manning As A Bond Trader
By John Carney — Advertisement —
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- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker
Eli is the master trader, he traded shattered dreams for football immortality with the Pats. That’s a gain of like a billion percent.
cute sentiments all around but how are they the World champions when we’re the only country in the world playing the game
dont mean to be a buzzkill but im genuinely curious
Come on. Genuinely curious? I’m literally on the edge of my seat.
If you’re suggesting we all give up on Football and start playing Futbol, please go ahead and say so and spare us the rhetoric.
The Chargers drafted Eli, then traded to the Giants. Good effort otherwise though.
@ Girl
Because little italian/french/etc men are too dainty to play Football, thats why the Giants are World Champions. The absence of foreign competitors only cements their dominance. If Lyon or Milan could compete (which they can’t) would that suffice for your standards?
Nobody is stopping anyone else in the world from putting together a football team and challenging a US-based team. Therefore, they are world champions. It is not there fault then no one else in the world wishes to embrace America’s game…
To bolster your argument, note that the third Manning bro is a commodities trader.
chill guys, yes it was a genuine question.
@Anal_yst: by the same logic, when I used to get the gold in bookshelf hurdles during practice olympics in my parents basement, i was a world champ. I mean, no one else was really competing but me, but that doesn’t detract from my dominance
girl, et. al.,
There are professional European teams that play American football – however their players would literally be killed if they were to try and play against even a bottom-ranked NFL team. I know some kids who played DII and even DIII football and then went over to Europe to play there “professionally”.
Stick to writing things you know about.
1. The Wonderlic test reflects the ability to think under pressure, not intelligence. The test is designed to see how quickly the taker can provide answers and how accurate they are, not how smart they are.
2. Few coaches oppose spending draft picks and salary cap fortunes on Quarterbacks because it is the most important position. Consider that in the last 3 NFL drafts, 37 Quarterbacks have been taken by the 32 teams, including 8 in the first round, 3 in the first 3 picks and 2 first overall. Quarterbacks are essential to any team’s success and teams regularly pick them early and often. Teams are much more willing to invest money and early picks, even with established Quarterbacks already on the roster (See: Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay, Jay Cutler in Denver, Matt Schaub in Atlanta, Kellen Clemens in New York, Phil Rivers in San Diego, Tony Romo in Dallas, Tom Brady in New England) to ensure that they will have strong leadership and a good player at the most important skill position. To put it simply, most, if not all, coaches and GMs think quarterbacks ARE worth the cost.
Other than your complete lack of understanding about football, it was a nice post.
Article on NFL recruiting foreigners. Hence world champions.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/06/sports/ARENA.php
go girl! none of them dudes whose team won could imagine their team to be anything but than #1 worldwide…. and none of them dudes whose team lost could imagine it taking anything but the world’s best team to beat them.
nice troll though.
They are world champions because there is nothing stopping foreigners from playing in the NFL, except immigration issues. It’s free-market baby and a Ron Paul presidency would only bolster the worldliness of the game.
To girl:
We’re World Champions the same way baseball has a World Series and Curling has whatever the heck Canadians do – we called it. It’s the American way.
In actuality, there was an American football league in Europe (NFL Europe) and there is a football league in Canada (the CFL, with slightly different rules), but for the most part, the NFL is the only place where professional football is played. If we are the only people that play the game, our champion is the world champion by default, isn’t it? You pretty much answered yourself in your first post – the Giants are world champions because nobody else is playing. Yes, you’d be world champion of bookshelf hurdles, but nobody else really cares about that (no offense).
@girl, i respect your desire to engage in petty semantics. i’d say it depends. can we agree there is an invisible line that is crossed that if your bookshelf hurdles is being televised to reach 800 million people it is reasonable to say you are the world champion?
http://espn.go.com/page2/s/closer/020228test.html
From looking at the test, I can see how Eli scoring a 39/60 clearly shows his 136 IQ. I had to bust out my calculator for question four, and question six is damn near impossible. Really, how does anyone make it to almost 60%? No wonder the Giants won!
Hey, wasn’t there a Family Guy episode where Peter went to London to play gridiron with a bunch of English wusses?
The NBA calls its championship the ‘World Championship’ but NBA all-stars consistently get spanked by the Bosnians, Croats, etc…
How is that an effin ‘world’ championship. please brotha, don’t kid yourself….
agreed, NBA is not a world championship
@11:53 is right. CFL (Canadian Football League) has slightly different rules and slightly different players (all NFL cast-offs). They even tried expanding to the US a few years back, and Baltimore were the league champions (can’t remember the name of the team though)
Baltimore Stallions
Played the 94 and 95 seasons, won the Grey Cup in 95
Ron Paul = Tom Brady?
well if i’ve learned one thing its that there is indeed something else that guys can get fired up about in the morning.
much obliged.
(I stand by my initial argument nonetheless)
Thinking about Bess gets me fired up in the morning.
JorgeCad -
The teams was called “The Stallions” eventually, but there was a bit of a mess caused by their original name choice – “The Colts”……
Definitely CBA, ECHL, AAA MLB level – I think Erik Estrada or some of the Hollywood Squares set used to sing the anthem….
Who scored more this weekend Mr. “Her back was to me so I just knew” or Manning? Let’s hear about both games – espcially the parts involving tight ends and wide receivers. Details!
receiving a nice warm blowjob gets me fired up every morning
12:18, haha
Just knowing her back is on the other side of mine gets me fired up.
If Bess were here she’d segue a story into a reference to Danica Patrick’s beaver.
danica … whah?
@ 11:49
I’m not getting in a debate about whether IQ tests measure intelligence. This always winds up with someone insisting that intelligence means something obscure or is undefinable.
I’m highly annoyed by definitional arguments of this sort, and even more so by question begging redefinitions of the concepts involved.
But other than that, your comment is highly appreciated.
Carney, couldn’t you have made even a teensy weensy allusion to beaver ?
Anybody who wipes that smirk off tommy’s face is fine by me.
Also, as a new fan to football Brit style, there ain’t no pussies playing in the Premier League. My heart will always belong to American football (and particularly to that other Manning bro and the total class act of Dungy and the Colts) but from a strictly biz point of view (take it from Tom Hicks and Malcolm Glazer) better to have a market where you have the potential to sell a billion jerseys.
Took me awhile to warm up to Eli after his refusal to play for SD but he has proven himself in the face of enormous criticism and anybody who wipes that smirk off tommy’s face is fine by me.
Also, as a new fan to football Brit style, there ain’t no pussies playing in the Premier League.
Plus, my heart will always belong to American football (and particularly to that other Manning bro and the total class act of Dungy and the Colts) but from a strictly biz point of view (take it from Tom Hicks and Malcolm Glazer) better to have a market where you have the potential to sell a billion jerseys.
@girl – as an aside, the first “World Series” (ever) was played by two teams seperated by a mere 622 miles, Boston and Philadelphia.
Hey, double post, cool – guess you can’t hit cancel while the little whirly thing is going – sorry, what can I say, I’m a tax and spend Demo, so you can tell it takes me awhile to learn.
third Manning brother is in research sales at Howard Weil in New Orleans, not a commodities trader. but why let details get in the way of a good story??
actually, I just read the article about Eli in a New York Mag from the past few weeks. Me bad, but I was sure it said commodities trader. In the future I’ll have to double check my sources. Esp given the high journalistic standards here.
well geez, i mean New York Mag said so, huh? Funny the card HE GAVE ME LAST MONTH says research sales. but yeah, go with the NY Mag instead.
@3:26 YOU HAVE HIS CARD????????? You must be very important.
I would like to know what this has to do with Ron Paul and if we can please re-focus this discussion to Dr. Paul’s candidacy.
@3:29-important enough to have better sources that New York Mag
Samples from a Wonderlic test:
http://www.testprepreview.com/wonderlicpracticequestions1.htm
http://www.testprepreview.com/wonderlicpracticequestions2.htm
Regardless of the semantics of what is or is not intelligence, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that this is not testing how smart a player is. The challenge with the Wonderlic is that 50 questions are asked in 12 minutes, leaving just over 15 seconds per question. Those questions are mostly basic algebra but doing them in 15 seconds requires a person to show that they can quickly solve the problem.
More importantly, football teams do not really care how smart their players are (in the traditional, grades and books sense), only in how quickly they make decisions and whether those decisions are correct. The Giants did not and do not care if Eli is a Mensa member, only whether or not he can quickly read a defense, make a decision and execute, which is why the 3 seconds before and after the snap are the most exciting 6 seconds in sports.
Finally, you had the right idea but the wrong logic with your thoughts on why Eli was considered a risk. It wasn’t because he was a QB and it wasn’t because he was taken first overall. He was widely regarded as the best prospect at the most important position – why wouldn’t a team take him there? (Incidentally, this was the draft that gave us Phil Rivers, who has done a great job leading the Chargers, and Ben Roethlisberger, who won a Super Bowl already). The risk was in what the Giants gave up to get him, which was a slew of draft picks. Jimmy Johnson, former coach of the Cowboys, was the first person to value draft picks and gave each one point values. This gave him a system to decide what a fair trade was – if the points matched, the trade worked. As a rule, a pick from the following year (IE, trading a 2006 pick during the 2005 draft) received the value of a pick in the current draft one round later (so the 1st overall pick in 2006, 3000 points, next year would be worth 580 points in 2005). To get Eli at the 1st pick in 2004, the Giants gave up the 4th pick in 2004, their third round pick in 2004, their first round pick in 2005 and their 5th round pick in 2005. To put that in perspective, it was as though they traded Phil Rivers (4th pick), Nate Kaeding (Kicker, third round), Shawne Merriman (2005 first round) and Roman Oben (2005 fifth round pick traded for him). The Giants gave up a solid QB, a pro bowl and defensive MVP linebacker, a pro bowl kicker and a solid defensive tackle for Eli, who had never even played a game. The risk wasn’t in taking a QB, it was giving up a king’s ransom, on top of the money they would have to pay him as first overall pick, for a QB when there were clearly other quality QBs available.
Did someone just mention The World Series of Major League Baseball? That was named after a newspaper called The World, their corporate sponsor. Today it would be the Daily News Series.
@ 11:49/4:18
Actually they DO care about how “smart” the QB is. Take a look at Anthony Morelli, Penn State’s “star” QB. Yea the kid’s gotta great arm, but thats about it. He couldn’t even memorize the playbook, let alone go through his progressions!
RXpnHK Thanks again for the post.Thanks Again. Keep writing.