newjerseynewsroom.com

BY SAM HITCHCOCK

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

Eli Manning will win the MVP award this season, next season, or possibly the season after. And when he does, it will be long overdue. Manning is playing like the best quarterback in the NFL right now, better than Matt Ryan, Tom Brady, older brother Peyton, Alex Smith, and Drew Brees. Football Outsiders, an advanced metric “innovative statistics, intelligent analysis” website for statheads, has Manning leading the NFL in its two most important statistical categories for quarterbacks: DYAR and DVOA.

DYAR, or Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement, is “the value of the quarterback’s performance compared to replacement level, adjusted for situation and opponent and then translated into yardage.” In other words, this metric favors a signal-caller who has more total value in comparison to his contemporaries.

How well is Eli playing? His DYAR is almost double that of Sunday’s opponent, Alex Smith (who sits in eighth overall in the NFL). Manning’s total DYAR is 582, making him one of three quarterbacks above the 500 mark. The biggest difference between Manning and the other two quarterbacks is that their totals are much closer to each other than they are to his. With Peyton sitting in second place with a 535 DYAR, and Tom Brady at 503, Eli has a 46-point lead over his brother, while Peyton is outdoing Brady by 32.

The second metric worth dissecting is DVOA, or Defense-adjusted Value Over Average. This metric represents “value, per play, over an average quarterback in the same game situations. The more positive the DVOA rating, the better the player’s performance. Negative DVOA represents a below-average offense.” Translation, DVOA evaluates a quarterback’s value per play.

Manning tops the NFL in DVOA as well, with 31.0 percent as his leading total. Ranking second and third are Matt Schaub and Tom Brady with 29.0 percent and 28.9 percent. Manning is the only quarterback who has a DVOA above 30 percent, while everyone else in the top five has a percentage over 20 percent. Moving beyond that top tier, there is a steep drop into the teens. Christian Ponder is eighth overall with 10.7 percent, which means Manning’s value per play is almost triple that of Ponder’s.

The Giants’ competitor for attention and the back pages is what puts Manning’s extraordinary accolades into perspective. The New York Jets’ quarterback, Mark Sanchez, a recent victim of the Giants’ upcoming opponent (the San Francisco 49ers) has a 29th ranked DYAR and DVOA.

Sanchez is in the cellar for both categories, getting beaten out for the lowest total in the NFL by only Josh Freeman, Brandon Weeden, Matt Cassel, and Blaine Gabbert (33 quarterbacks are ranked).

Manning and Sanchez both came into the NFL as highly drafted franchise-changing quarterbacks. They were rising superstar signal-callers expected to lead their teams to multiple Super Bowl wins. It reminds me of a slightly altered version of the movie Trading Places, where both Manning and Sanchez start the movie as Louis Winthrope III (Dan Aykroyd). Unfortunately for Sanchez, he ends up being the down-on-his-luck Winthrope, who eventually is so desperate that he tries to plant drugs in Eddie Murphy’s desk in an attempt to get his job back (he also uses a firearm to flee the scene).

The upshot is that Manning will go down as the best Giants quarterback ever and one the NFL’s all-time greats. As for Sanchez? My guess is he will not be with the Jets in two years. Manning should make some room on his trophy case, because an MVP award is imminent.

SUNDAY’S MATCHUP:

The 49ers are running the football very, very well. In fact, Football Outsiders’ Vince Verhei recently wrote an article highlighting that the Niners are rushing for 5.34 Adjusted line yards. Adjusted line yards is a “metric that attempts to measure the quality of a team’s run blocking by adding a penalty for stuffs in the backfield, and it caps off all runs at 10 yards. To grade well in this statistic, a team must make strong, consistent gains of 5 to 10 yards. The number can’t be skewed by one 80-yarder among a sea of 1- and 2-yard plays.”

This means the Niners are on pace for the highest ALY in Football Outsiders’ database! The highest previously recorded was the famed 2002 Denver Broncos rushing attack, and the Niners are light-years ahead of Denver’s 5.06 mark with their 5.34.

The Niners are a dominant run-blocking unit that is opening up highway-sized lanes for ball-carriers Frank Gore and Kendall Hunter. How this will fare for Big Blue given that they are 25th in rush yards per attempt, and have seen their explosive edge rushers defused (the Giants’ D has a woeful eight sacks through five games) is yet to be determined.