QBs handle adversity; Bears, Chargers impressive

	Eli Manning led the Giants to an improbable 30-24 overtime win over the Eagles on Sunday. AL Tielemans/SI
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NEW YORK -- Amani Toomer's IV bags. Tom Brady's voice. Buffalo's surprisingly Killer D. Rex Grossman playing superbly. Brett Favre's back-to-the-future day. Those are the Week 2 things that really stood out to me from my perch in the fifth-floor command center of NBC's Football Night in America and from a lot of phone calls afterward. Sunday's headlines:

The Giants saved their season. I said all along that this was the toughest opening three-game stretch in football this year -- Indy at home, at Philadelphia, at Seattle -- and the Giants looked like they would be staring at an 0-2 start with a 3,000-mile flight ahead of them before Week 3. Down 24-7, Eli Manning led them on a crazy rally, which you've no doubt seen a hundred times by now, and the Giants wake up this morning tied for the division lead at 1-1 instead of being two games out. 

"Eli really grew up out there today,'' Tiki Barber told me afterward from the Giants' noisy team bus. "He was so calm, even when things were bad.''

That's one of Manning's strengths, obviously. He doesn't know any other way. He drove the Giants 63 yards in 51 seconds to the tying field goal; then, with an all-out Eagles blitz trying to put the Giants out of field goal range with three minutes left in overtime, he lofted the winning touchdown to Plaxico Burress.

And how about the play of Toomer? Twelve catches (13, really, but one was reversed by a replay), and almost as many IV bags after the game. "Amani was on IVs for 90 minutes, I swear,'' said Barber. For the record, he had four intravenous hydration bags before getting on the bus back to north Jersey. That was a hydrated, and relieved, group of Giants that made the 90-mile ride home Sunday night.

The new Brady Bunch. This was just before 8 p.m. on Sunday night, and Brady sounded like the man who'd just lost a game to the Jets, not won. "This was a long day,'' he told me, winding down after New England's survivalist 24-17 win over the Jets. "I'm very tired.'' New England almost blew a 24-0 lead, enduring a late blocked field goal by Jonathan Vilma and a frenzied Jets rally to hang on.

Brady is the guy who has to make everything right on the field after all of the Patriots' free-agency losses and contract-related crap, and it's an exhausting job. But you know what? He just does it. No wonder the Patriots' management and coaching staff thinks they'll always be OK with Brady behind center. He bails them out continuously. Look at what happened in the fourth quarter of this one.

With 9:20 to go, New England was grimly trying to hold on to a 24-17 lead and took the ball at its 30. Bleed the clock. That was Brady's job. With 7:51 left, on third-and-five, he hit Reche Caldwell for six. With 6:00 left, from the shotgun, on third-and-five again, he dumped it to Kevin Faulk for six. Tick, tick, tick. With 4:08 left, from the shotgun again on third-and-seven, he threw to Troy Brown, who burrowed for eight. Notice the pattern?

They need five, they get six. They need seven, they get eight. They converted another first down, bled the clock some more, then got into position for the clinching field goal. It was blocked, but Brady had done his job. He'd taken new England 63 yards downfield, but more importantly, he'd taken eight minutes and 15 seconds off the clock ... and he'd done it, amazingly, with the Jets burning all three timeouts and the two-minute warning stopping the clock another time.

The numbers say Brady had a pedestrian game (15 of 29, 220 yards, one touchdown, one pick), but he led his team to a 24-0 lead on the road, then helped the Pats survive with that drive. "We're a long way from being where we need to be,'' he said. "A long way. There're times we don't look so good. We've got to be able to put the nail in the coffin. But that's what happens with a new team.'' That's what this group feels like, a new team.