His Own Manning

COOPER

ARCHIE

ELI

PEYTON

ONE NIGHT every summer, in an old basketball gym on the bayou, Peyton Manning conducts a class on quarterbacking. He stands in the middle of the court, 900 high school boys in the bleachers, as still as 900 boys can be. They have come to the Manning Passing Academy at Nicholls State to learn the family secrets, and no one shares them with as much enthusiasm as Peyton. "Everybody here know the Cover 2?" he bellows into a handheld microphone. And before anybody can answer, Peyton is crouching behind an imaginary center, peering across an imaginary line of scrimmage, barking meaningless calls and flashing meaningless signals to volunteer receivers who are no more than 14 years old. It is July in Thibodaux, La., but to Peyton it might as well be January in Indianapolis.

Peyton arranges camp counselors in various defensive formations—Cover 2 man, Cover 3, Cover 4—then explains how he recognizes each alignment before the snap and decides which protection and play will best counter it. As the formations get more complicated, Peyton's voice becomes more hurried, his drawl gaining decibels. "Now we've got a four-wideout set," he says. "It looks like Cover 2, maybe Cover 4. The safeties are up a little closer, the linebackers are up a little closer. What's going to happen? That's right, they're going to blitz. We've got our linemen and our running back. How many guys can we get blocked? Five, right?"

A former camper, looking a bit skeptical, catches Peyton's eye. "Six guys," the former camper says, so quietly that only Peyton can hear. Peyton pauses and does the arithmetic in his head—five linemen plus a running back—before breaking into a wide grin. "Check that," Peyton says. "We can get six guys blocked. Thank you, thank you very much." The boys in the bleachers giggle, partly at Peyton's self-deprecating sense of humor, and partly because the former camper who corrected him is his brother Eli, the New York Giants quarterback.

The exchange, brief and innocent, underscores what the NFL discovered about Eli last winter. He may never outperform Peyton, but on the right night Eli can at least keep up with him. Former NFL quarterback turned camp coach Sean Salisbury was struck by the new dynamic in the Manning family. "Eli is no longer Peyton's little brother," Salisbury says. "Peyton is not walking in front of him anymore. When you look at them now, they are walking side by side."

IT HAS been six months since Eli became Super Bowl MVP, and a year and six months since Peyton was Super Bowl MVP, but the notion that two brothers could win such an award in consecutive seasons continues to boggle the mind. There are days when Archie and Olivia Manning turn to each other in their New Orleans home and pose the same question that countless mothers and fathers have asked them: "Can you believe this?"

Raising two NFL quarterbacks, with one becoming Super Bowl MVP, was remarkable enough. But this off-season the Mannings entered a new realm of celebrity, usually reserved for the families of presidents and pop singers. They realized that something fundamental had changed when Eli married college girlfriend Abby McGrew at a resort in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, in April and paparazzi showed up. The Mannings were more bemused than bothered. Cooper Manning, the oldest of the three brothers and a partner at the energy research firm Howard Weil in New Orleans, may have unintentionally thrown off the shutterbugs when he wore a hotel staff uniform and a Panama Jack hat to the rehearsal dinner.