There are a lot of great benefits to covering the Super Bowl. Tops on my list: The view.
You can see plays as they actually develop. And when Eli Manning wound up to throw the ball down the sideline to Mario Manningham late in the fourth quarter, I thought the throw was trouble. For the Giants.
The Patriots were playing two safeties deep like they were most of the game. Manningham was well covered. It was the type of throw Manning had judiciously avoided forcing into coverage all game, but the time had come to take a shot.
“In practice, you do not throw it to that guy,” said Manning’s backup David Carr to Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports “I was like, What’s going on? But Eli had been feeling that safety [Chung] was cheating over to the other side, and we’d talked about it through the course of the game. It was just an incredible throw.”
Victor Cruz and Hakeem were the primary reads on the play. But Manning made what Manningham called a perfect throw. It’s the type of throw most quarterbacks don’t attempt.
“Um, our quarterback does,” Victor Cruz said.