Eli Manning’s phone pranks, leadership are cherished memories for former teammate David Carr

There were some great games on Sunday, but the best, for me, was the Giants and Eli Manning making his last start at home.

They made some plays and won the game. The crowd was getting into it. It has been a rough year in New York, so that was good to see.

Manning’s family, his wife and kids were all there to meet him in the tunnel and his post-game speech was great.

Coach Pat Shurmur gave him the game ball and Manning made a speech that was totally selfless and really epitomized what he is all about. He just talked about trying to win a football game. That’s it. That’s his best quality – he never rode the roller coaster of emotions that most guys do and for a quarterback that’s one of the best traits to have, especially in that city. You just think about the next play and doing your job.

I’m glad he got a chance to do that – he’s the reason I have a Super Bowl ring.

With Manning, there are two things to know. One, he has a great sense of humor. Two, he is a great leader, one of the best I’ve been around.

Manning loves pranks

You had to know him for a while to catch on to his humor. It was really dry and you didn’t really know when he was joking, but he loves pranks – especially changing the language on everyone’s phone.

If you left it out, forget it. He had you. That’s his go-to move.

I can’t tell you how many times I’d pick up my phone and the characters would be in Japanese or Korean. I didn’t know how to change it and he wasn’t going to help me. He’d always pretend not to have any idea. He’d walk in the locker room and say, “What’s wrong, man, what’s happening?” The whole time, just totally dry. It was great. You loved it.

It happened so often that players took to sharing directions for fixing it on the training room whiteboard.

After a while, if there was any phone laying around I’d just grab it and take it to him. “Here you go – Zak DeOssi’s phone …”

Eli’s attention to details

The beauty of Manning’s leadership, he didn’t say a lot as far as rah-rah speeches would go, but he would take the time. Every day he would meet with a different position group without the coaches because he wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page.

His thing was, the coaches aren’t going to be on the field with us on Sunday, so we have to figure this out with the game plan they’ve given us.

He would sit down and chart out the film that he wanted to show the running backs – he would be with them on Friday afternoon. He’d have a 20-play reel that he wanted the running backs to see and he wanted them to know what he expected on every play.

He did that with every position group.

I think true leadership is caring more about the success of the team than yourself and he was excellent at that.

He’s just a great teammate.

Does Packers offense work for Davante Adams?

The Packers are 11-3, but clearly they’re still trying to figure out a few things on offense.

They’ve always been good spreading the field. They wouldn’t give you a lot of variety with their formations, because Aaron Rodgers liked to be able to know how teams were going to play each formation. It was like Peyton Manning when he was with the Colts and later the Broncos.

They’d be in a 2 by 2 set and as a quarterback when you do that consistently you get used to how teams are going to play you, you see the same coverages and when anything is different you can automatically adjust.

But when you play a ton of formations. change the splits or bring guys into bunch sets, teams are going to play it a lot of different ways.

That works for the majority of the Packers’ guys. Much like the Rams or the 49ers, they’re trying to create situations where their receivers don’t necessarily have to win the one-on-ones. They create space for those guys and win with formations and alignments.

But when you have a guy like Davante Adams, he’s one of the few receivers in the league that you really just want to line up at that “X” spot and see how a defense is going to play it. Are they going to double him? OK, we have ways to win there. Are they going to single him up with their best corner? OK, we still like our matchup there. We’re going to throw it around and we’re going to make things happen.

Rodgers wants to have control and be able to do things after the Xs and Os, so there’s a learning curve there.

That’s where the inconsistency has been.

The interesting part is when it comes down to it and they’re in the second half of a playoff game, what’s that offense going to look like then?

Are they going to stick with it or are they just going to say, “Let’s put Adams over here and let him go to work?”