Eli Manning admits Giants’ losing wore on him
When New York Giants great Eli Manning announced his retirement in January of 2020, he knew he was done. There was no questioning it or second-guessing it in his mind — he had had enough.
“I knew I was ready to retire. That’s kind of the only thing I knew was I was done, and I wasn’t going to second guess. I wasn’t going to look back and worry about it,” Manning told reporters on Thursday. “I knew that I was ready to be done playing football and when I look back on my time, I was just going to reflect on the good moments and the happy moments and the friendships I made, the wins we got to celebrate and remember those things. That was such a strange time and I wanted to take time away.
“Football takes up a lot of your time during the season, during the offseason, at nights, so I wanted to take the year off and just be around my family and see if there was anything else I wanted to pursue or wanted to be interested in and just kind of step away. With the pandemic, it made it easy to do that because there wasn’t many options going on.”
And Manning doesn’t have the itch to return. There will be no Brett Favre moment; no shocking return to the league when he gets bored at home or tires of the normal routine.
Ultimately, Manning says, he doesn’t want to take the hits anymore. And if he’s being honest, he doesn’t want to experience the losing anymore, either.
“There was no interest in coming back. I saw the hits the quarterbacks were taking, and I said I do not want to experience that anymore. I like how I feel every Monday morning when I wake up,” Manning said. “It’s not just the hits, it’s just everything. I enjoyed the preparation. I could’ve gotten back into that part, but just the losing, the everything, just the grind of it all. I think I don’t know if I could have totally got back into all of that.
“The losses hurt more. They affect your sleep. They affect your week. It affects family life with my wife and kids and it just got too much. I like watching the games and I root for the Giants and I feel for them after a loss. But you know what, I go to bed very easily on Sunday nights and wake up and feel good about the upcoming week, and it’s not something that lingers for three or four days like it used to.”
Giants co-owner John Mara has admitted that one of his biggest regrets was wasting Manning’s final years. Had that not occurred and the team was winning, would Eli have stuck around?
“Well, I mean, hey, with the contracts and the contract was up and it was time to be done. So, I wasn’t playing at the level I used to be playing and so it was just time to hang it up and I said I had a good run and now it’s time to be done,” Manning said.
It’s hard to play at a high level when you aren’t surrounded with the appropriate talent, but in typical Manning fashion, he refused to throw anyone under the bus. Instead, he blamed himself.
The fact is, had the Giants been winning and making quality personnel decisions, Manning likely would have stuck around. But they weren’t, his contract was coming up and they had already decided to move on to Daniel Jones.
The writing on the wall was clear and rather than turn it into something it didn’t need to be, Manning did right by the Giants one final time and called it a day.
