Eli Manning and Peyton Manning welcomed legendary New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick to the ManningCast this week for the first time in a season-long partnership, and apparently, Belichick’s performance was enough for Eli to rank the coach even above his genius quarterback brother when it comes to who is the bigger football nerd.
In an interview on The Dan Patrick Show on Thursday, Eli said that even beyond what the ESPN2 audience could see on Monday night, Belichick was constantly dissecting the game and what he would do in it.
“I think I’ve got to go with Belichick. He’s just an encyclopedia of knowledge on football and everything,” Manning said. “You could hear him in the TV timeouts; there’s someone in his room that he’s talking with… He is constantly just game-planning, analyzing, looking at everything, seeing things that are unique or different.”
On the other hand, Eli said Peyton has “always got sauce on his face” from eating during commercial breaks.
Any ManningCast viewer knows, however, that what really gets Peyton going is bad football. Eli elaborated on Peyton’s disdain for mistakes while on with Patrick as well.
“It does hurt him, especially when a guy’s been out of training camp, you sit out, you sign this great big contract, and then you drop passes. Like, hey, get the contract done,” Eli said. “He’s just mad at the whole situation. The idea of missing training camp blows his mind. He looked forward to training camp. He’s like finally, I get to go, I think it should be a longer training camp, we should have a longer football season, and that’s his mentality. So I think if he senses someone doesn’t have that same mentality, he just can’t resonate.”
On Monday night, San Francisco 49ers receiver Brandon Aiyuk caught just two of his five targets after a summer-long holdout. One can assume Peyton was not pleased with Aiyuk in Week 1.
Regardless of his feelings about holdouts, Peyton was supplanted on his own show in the power rankings of football geekery.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.