Eli Manning Named NFL’s Most Overpaid Player

Whichever way you spin it, winning a pair of Super Bowls between a number of mediocre regular seasons is going to draw some haters. For New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning, those critics like to point to his inconsistency, interceptions and inability to carry his team. But now, they supposedly have the numbers to back it up, with Pro Football Focus ranking Manning the league’s most overpaid player.

According to PFF’s Director of Analytics, Nathan Jahnke, the study involved weighing a player’s 2016 cap hit against the monetary value assigned to said player by the website’s proprietary performance based system. Without getting into specifics, Jahnke claimed Manning’s “cap hit has increased, while his play continued to decline.”

“Manning’s passes have been getting shorter, from an average depth of target of 10.1 yards in 2013 to 9.2 in 2014 to 8.1 in 2015,” Jahnke continued. “You would expect his accuracy to go up with that decrease, but his completion percentage was lower in 2015 than in 2014. When under pressure, he completed only 49 percent of his passes, which ranked just 24th overall. His touchdown totals remain high, but that has more to do with Odell Beckham Jr. than with Manning.”

The study is a little misleading in the sense that, in the modern NFL, the only position a team can really overpay for to the point of crippling its salary cap is a quarterback. That number is multiplied when dealing with a franchise QB; a man who has defined your team for many years and still has the ability to get it done.

Manning is entering his third season under former offensive coordinator – and now head coach – Ben McAdoo. In his past two seasons, Manning’s completion percentage has climbed back into the sixties (he infamously set himself a target of 70% when the new scheme was first implemented), he has comfortably managed 4000 yard seasons in each campaign, and logged 68 touchdowns and 28 interceptions in that time, easily the most efficient two-year stretch of his career.

So if you want to talk about numbers, there isn’t much in his recent resume that suggests he isn’t worth his $17.5 million in 2016. Let the egghead analysts worry about his proprietary value. Manning is still the man on Sundays, and he’s shown no signs of slowing down yet.