Perhaps the Chargers can thank Manning’s spurning for jump-starting a better commitment to winning. San Diego went to the playoffs in five of the next six seasons after the Manning rejection, and while the Chargers couldn’t get over the postseason hump, they deployed some excellent teams led by Rivers, Hall of Famers LaDainian Tomlinson and Antonio Gates, Shawne Merriman, etc. After going eight seasons without a postseason bid before 2004, the Chargers, who moved to L.A. in 2017, haven’t gone more than four campaigns in a row without reaching the playoffs, including back-to-back wild-card berths under Jim Harbaugh.<\/p>\n
The discord part of the equation was more or less known as the reason Manning didn’t want to play in the lovely city of San Diego. A new tidbit Manning relayed was that it was his decision, not his father, Archie, meddling.<\/p>\n
“My parents really weren’t supportive,” Manning said of his decision to reject the Chargers. “My dad didn’t like the idea. He came to my defense and supported me after everything was going down. … Afterward, he took the brunt of a lot of the criticism. People were saying, ‘You played in New Orleans. All those years you didn’t win. So you are trying to dictate where your son is going.’ He just kind of bit his tongue and said, ‘This is what Eli wants to do. I support him.’ He kind of did some media to save me from taking all the hits.”<\/p>\n
Manning also noted that the Cleveland, who held the No. 7 pick, considered trading for his services, but the QB’s agent, Tom Condon, nixed that idea as well.<\/p>\n
In the end, it all worked out for Manning, who won a pair of Super Bowl MVPs for the Giants.<\/p>\n
The new sliver of news from this is that Archie backed his son and never let on for more than two decades that he disagreed with Eli’s initial decision. That’s fathering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perhaps the Chargers can thank Manning’s spurning for jump-starting a better commitment to winning. San Diego went to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1227,7,262,56,88,6,609,4267],"class_list":["post-894614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-around-the-nfl","tag-football","tag-los-angeles-chargers","tag-new-york-giants","tag-news","tag-nfl","tag-no-minute","tag-offseason-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116595767641567123","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894614","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=894614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}