The Giants' generous trust in Dave Gettleman could keep Eli Manning around through 2020

An accepted position on the current state of the New York Giants is that even though running back Saquon Barkley was a smash success as a rookie, the franchise erred in not drafting Eli Manning’s successor in the first round of the 2018 draft. 

In the NFL, you either have your quarterback, or you’re doing whatever you can to acquire him. Eli had his run and his glory days, this mindset concedes, but that’s over now.

Fans and the media have been ready for some time for Eli to bid farewell to New York. Following a subpar 2017 season, it was thought he was likely to be traded to quarterback-needy Jacksonville to reunite with former head coach-turned-front-office-consultant Tom Coughlin for one last title run. And that might have happened if Blake Bortles hadn’t extended his stay with the Jaguars by one more year after a relatively impressive postseason run.

Eli’s numbers bounced back a bit in 2018, but the public restlessness to move on was roughly the same given that the Giants were about as bad as the year before — and he had some howlers on the field. Yet when the regular season ended with 10 losses or more for the fourth time in five years, reports kept circulating that the Giants were prepared to keep the 38-year-old signal-caller around for the final year of his contract, for which he is scheduled to make $17 million.

As starting quarterback money goes, that’s not exorbitant, but keeping it on the payroll when New York didn’t absolutely need to meant losing safety Landon Collins to NFC East rival Washington in free agency. The Giants also dealt star receiver Odell Beckham Jr. to Cleveland, not even a year after giving him a five-year extension that averaged about $17 million per season.

Now a report emerges suggesting the franchise is potentially willing to keep Eli around not just through this coming season, but with an extension for 2020 as well. According to SNY beat reporter Ralph Vacchiano, the Giants would prefer to land their new franchise quarterback this offseason, though they’re still on the fence about the presumptive best QB available at the sixth pick, Dwayne Haskins. Fans may be largely fed up with general manager Dave Gettleman, but according to Vacchiano, he still has the faith of ownership.

That means that as much as Gettleman has messed up in the eyes of fans, he still has the chance to nail the decision that matters above just about all others: whom the next franchise quarterback will be. It’s one that will affect the Giants for at least a good chunk of the next decade, so as restless as fans are to arrive at the next era, getting it right means more than the prospect of excitement going into 2019.

Assuming the Giants do commit to a quarterback high in this year’s draft class, Eli should still figure prominently throughout the 2019 season — not only because it could be a send-off for a likely Hall of Fame career, but also because the organization has often cited the “Kansas City model” in bringing along a young quarterback. This is in reference to the Chiefs sitting Patrick Mahomes for nearly all of his rookie season (he didn’t play until starting the Week 17 finale) before he took the NFL by storm and won MVP in 2018. This is probably a fine methodology for easing a young quarterback into the pressures of the job but by no means a guarantor of success. What it does accomplish with certainty is to make Eli's role as mentor more pronounced.

Vacchiano reports that the Giants really want Eli’s skills and expertise to rub off on whomever takes his place. That’s not a bad idea, and Eli himself had the benefit in his rookie season of being a teammate with now Hall of Famer Kurt Warner.

There’s plenty to question about how the Giants got to this place. If they don’t land their next quarterback this offseason, there will be an uproar, and deservedly so, for failing to get the future underway. That said, if the organization is fine waiting out its next quarterback, weathering the onslaught of negative PR and building a new roster to wait for him, letting Eli carry the reins in the meantime isn’t the worst idea. 

He can relay critical lessons to a young, developing roster while signaling to fans that this is about the long game in a way that a stopgap quarterback could not. There will be embarrassment and lots of jokes if Eli Manning is still a Giant in 2020. But if the Giants eventually do manage to do right by their QB situation, that’s a small price to pay.