In a recent article on SI.com, Joe Posnanski explained a theory he has on talent. 

To sum it up—and I hope I do his argument justice—Posnanski believes that talent is the ability to frequently repeat your optimal performance. Given a wide range of possibilities, talent arises when one’s best becomes his or her standard.

Posnanski had sports in mind when developing this theory. 

He describes how if we could routinely go back in time and use only our absolute best golf swings on each hole, our performance would be comparable to, if not surpass, the best golfer in the world.  

I will let him explain:

“BUT, what if you had some sort of watch that allowed you to manipulate time so that you could actually shoot every shot over and over until you were able to hit the very best shot within your capabilities.  That is, you hook a drive out of bounds, you rewind, you slice your drive into the trees, rewind, you top the ball, rewind, you hit a 240-yard drive down to the left, rewind, you hit a 270-yard drive down the middle…eventually you will hit a great shot.  Maybe it will take you 10 shots, 20 shots, 50 shots, a thousand shots, but eventually you will hit a great shot.

 

"If you had this kind of watch, and you had the fortitude to keep swinging until the shot was just right, you would make every long putt.  You would make chip shots that would leave everyone in awe.  People would call you the most talented player who ever lived—and this is YOU, right now, with no more ability than you have as you read these words.”

I have thought about his theory a lot lately and it can apply to many other aspects of life.

If you ignored the broken omelets that I turned into scrambled eggs and only ate my best efforts, you would think that I made eggs as well as my father does.  Bad drivers are not bad all the time; they are just bad more often than good drivers are. 

There are endless scenarios in life that can be accounted for in this fashion.  Life is too improbable to expect to perform in the most favorable manner at every occasion. 

For example, I thought that the girl I dated most recently was perfect.  In reality, she was perfect at times.  But once you experience things at their best, you desire them more often and overlook any faults that everyone else but you may see.  My attraction was to the great moments.

Which brings me to Eli Manning.

There is not much in common between football and relationships.  One similarity between the two, however, is that great quarterbacks and great significant others are often underappreciated in the moment.

Two weeks ago, a good friend of mine sparked a debate on his Facebook page by announcing to his friends, “I have no idea how I will explain the Eli Manning era to my kids.” 

I decided that I would help him; it seemed easy enough.  The ensuing discussion his friends and I engaged in proved otherwise.

Throughout his prime, Eli has ranged from a top-five to a top-seven Super Bowl MVP-caliber quarterback.  Inexplicably, this is not good enough for some Giants fans.  Some call Eli an underachiever.  (If Eli is an underachiever, I am curious what EVERY other quarterback besides Tom Brady is.)

Eli suffers from his own high ceiling. 

Remember those great moments with a significant other?  They become the baseline expectation for the future. 

The same is true for quarterback play.  Many Giants fans hold Eli to a standard that they would never hold any of the other non-Brady quarterbacks because of how high the “good Eli”’s ceiling is. 

Sure, he has his flaws.  He forces too many throws on third down and in the red zone.  He has a little bit of the “just trying to make a play” mentality that his Louisiana-brethren, Brett Favre, made famous. 

He is not Tom Brady.  But guess what?  No one is.   

When Giants fans hold him to such a standard—if you include his brother, you are talking about an era with two quarterbacks in the “Greatest Quarterback of All Time” discussion—it tells me that they think higher of Eli than they realize.  They are as cognizant of his ability as I am.

That being said, Posnanski’s article opened my eyes to something. 

What separates Eli from Brady, and to a lesser extent, his brother Peyton, is not some innate talent that only those two quarterbacks possess; it’s Eli’s inability to be the best Eli at all times. 

Eli’s peak ability, his omelets minus the screwed-up eggs, is comparable to those two greats.  (Has Peyton or Brady ever thrown for 4000 yards or 30 touchdowns with an unknown WR corps with four career starts?) 

The difference lies in the disparity between his best and his worst.  Without that variance, there would be no question whom the third-best quarterback in football is.

But being Andy Roddick during the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal era is nothing to be ashamed of.  (The analogy would fit a lot more had Roddick held on to beat Federer at Wimbledon and if his last name was Nadal.) 

Like Roddick, on any given year, Eli’s ranking fluctuates somewhere between No. 3 and No. 7.  During those stretches when he puts it all together, Eli is as good as anyone is.  His legacy will hinge on how well he repeats those perfect omelets from here on.

Assuming that my friend is not hiding anything from me, by the time his kids are old enough to hold rational football conversations, the Giants will be playing football with a post-Eli Manning quarterback. 

By that time, it will be easier for him to describe the era, because life will no longer be as good.  Giants’ fans who complain about Eli will long for him when he is gone. 

For all that is said about parity in the NFL, more than half the league’s teams enter each season with a 0 percent chance of winning the Super Bowl.  (Three of these teams are still playing.)  Their seasons begin and end by starting a quarterback who is not among the league’s elite. 

From 2005 on, the Giants have never entered a season with that concern.  

I just don't know what more you can ask for from your quarterback.  The grass is not always greener on the other side.