"Sunday, Eli Manning raised the roof. The sleepy-eyed New York Giants quarterback woke the past, beating the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl for the second time in four years — a 21-17 victory at Lucas Oil Stadium," The Los Angeles Times reports. Peter King previewed the match-up in Sports Illustrated, harkening back to the 2008 game.

Ian Thomsen profiled the quarterback when he was in college. "Little did the younger fans realize, as they sat in Mississippi's Vaught-Hemingway Stadium last Saturday night, cupping both hands around their open mouths, cheering on one play and gasping on the next, that Eli Manning was taking them back in time. This is how it was in his daddy's day. Except Daddy didn't work overtime," he wrote. "Eli's father is Archie Manning, who was a scrambler and a gambler when he was Mississippi's quarterback more than 30 years ago. Archie led the Rebels to 22 wins and three bowl appearances in three seasons, but the two-time All-America is remembered most of all for his performance in a 33-32 loss at Alabama in 1969. That day he ran for three touchdowns, passed for two more, had an SEC-record 540 total yards and afterward was seen crying on the sideline by a national television audience."

Michael Lewis caught up with him as his NFL career began. "The only thing that distinguishes Eli Manning, outwardly, from a slightly shy 23-year-old recent college graduate unsure of what he wants to do with the rest of his life is the way he plays quarterback," he wrote. "He offers new hope to introverts everywhere; such characters don't normally land in such exalted positions of leadership. This may be because conventional leadership skills are necessary for the role. But it may also be a matter of false selection. There aren't many introverts playing quarterback in the N.F.L. for the same reason that, until recently, there were not many blacks playing N.F.L. quarterback: they never get the chance. Shy, quiet kids aren't tapped by their Pop Warner coaches to play the position -- unless, of course their fathers were famous N.F.L. quarterbacks. The biggest unseen edge that Eli possesses may be that he is expected to excel at the position. Because of this he will be given more time than most to do it."

Seth Wickersham discovered one of the secrets to his success. "Two brothers pass each other in a doorway, the younger one entering, the older one exiting. Each carries a laptop containing secrets not available to the other. They are in Durham, N.C., breaking down film with their old college coach. Each of the brother's sessions is kept confidential. In fact, one of the biggest misconceptions about Peyton and Eli Manning is that they watch film together, talk shop. They don't. And now that each has won what both want in excess—Super Bowls—they protect their secrets more fiercely than ever," he writes. "David Cutcliffe, Peyton's coach at Tennessee and Eli's at Ole Miss, serves as their therapist this March afternoon, as he does every winter when the boys visit. He reviews film with them individually for three hours, sometimes four. Nobody—not even their dad, Archie—knows how to dissect the past two Super Bowl MVPs better than Cutcliffe, an amazing line on the résumé of the football coach at Duke."

And John Ed Bradley told the story of the other Manning brother. "It's a fool's task to guess how good he might have been. But consider his father's career and who his brothers are, and you might conclude that he would've made something halfway decent of himself. You might even decide that Cooper Manning, now 29 and more than a decade out of football, would've been one of the best players of his generation. If nothing else, he'd have been a college All-America and a first-round NFL draft pick. And young parents all across the Deep South, smitten with his good looks and winning personality, would be naming their newborns after him," he writes. "Cooper's ballad tells the story of a gifted 18-year-old receiver who seems destined for the big time until doctors inform him that he suffers from a congenital narrowing of the spinal canal—spinal stenosis, they call it—and his football career abruptly ends only months into his freshman year at Ole Miss, in 1992. He endures three major operations, one of them a harrowing spinal surgery that leaves an eight-inch-long scar along the back of his neck. His chest and shoulders lose their once muscular form. His right hand becomes atrophied and disfigured and has a constant tremor, and he can't control the fingers well enough to throw a football or type except by the old hunt-and-peck method. His left leg is numb; his right leg is sometimes so sapped of strength that he drags it."