{"id":893966,"date":"2026-05-17T19:27:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T19:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/893966\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T19:27:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T19:27:23","slug":"how-eli-manning-was-almost-a-cleveland-brown-before-new-york-giants-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/893966\/","title":{"rendered":"How Eli Manning was almost a Cleveland Brown before New York Giants trade"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Eli Manning was almost a Cleveland Brown before New York Giants trade<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a>. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to imagine Eli Manning<\/a> wearing any other jersey but a New York Giants<\/a> one.<\/p>\n

Advertisement<\/p>\n

But he almost did exactly that before he was traded by the then-San Diego Chargers<\/a> to the Giants, and that jersey wasn’t a Chargers<\/a> one.<\/p>\n

In an interview on “Bussin With The Boys”<\/a> with Taylor Lewan<\/a> and Will Compton<\/a>, Manning revealed the Chargers were going to trade him to the Cleveland Browns<\/a>, another place he didn’t want to end up.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, the Giants stepped up and traded for Manning and the rest, as they say, is history.<\/p>\n

When it comes to his decision to not want to play for the Chargers, Manning admitted he was the one behind that and his father, Archie was against it.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy parents really weren\u2019t supportive. My dad didn\u2019t like the idea,\u201d Manning admitted \u201cNow, he came to my defense and like supported me after everything was going down, but . . . he didn\u2019t like that. And afterwards he took the brunt of a lot of the criticism because he came to my defense and people were saying, \u2018Oh, you played in New Orleans<\/a> all those years you didn\u2019t win, so you\u2019re trying to dictate like where your son\u2019s going.\u2019 And and he just bit his tongue and said, \u2018Hey, this is what Eli wants to do and I support him\u2019 and he did some media to try to save me from doing all the media and taking the hits.\u201d<\/p>\n

Advertisement<\/p>\n

Manning said his reason for not wanting to go to the Chargers had to do with the fact he believed the team wasn’t “the most committed team to winning at the time.”<\/p>\n

Manning pointed to friction between then-head coach Marty Schottenheimer and the front office and ownership as another concern.<\/p>\n

Safe to say, it all worked out for Manning, who avoided disaster in not ending up in Cleveland.<\/p>\n

MORE NFL News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How Eli Manning was almost a Cleveland Brown before New York Giants trade originally appeared on The Sporting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2067],"tags":[241,54,3724,7,519,896,1917,56,2321,2469,6,9399,5340,120311,6315],"class_list":["post-893966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-giants","tag-chargers","tag-cleveland-browns","tag-eli-manning","tag-football","tag-giants","tag-new-orleans","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-giants","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkgiants","tag-nfl","tag-taylor-lewan","tag-the-chargers","tag-then-san-diego-chargers","tag-will-compton"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116591568083417672","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}