A steady Eli Manning is helping Giants win the race in NFC East

Reporting from East Rutherford, N.J. —

Eight years with the Giants, and Eli Manning still resists doing anything in a New York minute.

The drowsy-eyed quarterback refuses to be hurried through life, instead cruising along at his own speed. Even with all the demands of being a football centerpiece in the nation’s biggest market, he’s seldom edgy, irritable or even excitable.

“He never loses his cool, never gets frustrated,” said his backup, David Carr. “It’s kind of weird, actually. It throws you off a little bit. He’ll show emotion, obviously, fist-pumps and stuff after the touchdowns. You can tell he’s fired up, but it doesn’t stay around very long.”

That used to be a knock on Manning. Fans questioned his competitive fire, his passion for the game. Likewise, he caused an uproar in August when he said during a radio interview that he considered himself among the top five quarterbacks in the NFL and deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as Tom Brady.

That might have sounded presumptuous then, but not now. Week after week, Manning has proved he not only has a pulse, but the steady hand of a safecracker. His even-keeled personality is among his biggest strengths. He has calmly guided the Giants to the top of the NFC East, breaking all sorts of records in the process.

Five times this season his team has overcome fourth-quarter deficits to win, tying a franchise record for comebacks. With three games to play, Manning has already thrown for a club-record 4,105 yards. He has thrown 14 touchdown passes in the fourth quarter, tying his brother, Indianapolis’ Peyton Manning (2002) and Hall of Famer Johnny Unitas (1959) for the most in a single season. No one else has thrown more than nine fourth-quarter touchdown passes this season.

Manning also leads the NFL with a fourth-quarter passer rating of 117.0, with Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers second at 112.6.

Making that feat more remarkable is Manning is doing it without a ground game. Even though the Giants ran the ball better in their last two games, they own the league lows in average yards rushing at 85.8, and runs of 20 yards or longer with two. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the NFL’s other comeback artists, the Denver Broncos, who are averaging a league-best 156.2 yards rushing.

For Manning, it’s not about the numbers.

“It’s about winning,” he said. “That’s when it is fun. Football, it’s fun. A plane ride after a big win or being in the locker room after the game or Mondays coming in after a win. Those are the feelings. Those are the things you want to win for. It’s not about throwing yards or touchdowns. It’s about being in that locker room with all your buddies after that big win that you prepared for all week and you know you’ve done everything you could and it paid off.”

If it’s possible, those wins mean even more to the Mannings now because, with Peyton recuperating from multiple neck surgeries, the family is focused almost entirely on the Giants.

“It used to be that you’d go 1-1 and feel pretty good about yourself sometimes on a Sunday,” said Peyton’s brother, Cooper, the eldest of the three Manning boys. “Now, it’s all or none. So I’m looking forward to maybe having Peyton back in the scheme of things next year and continue to go 2-0.”

The Giants control their own destiny, but they aren’t in the clear. To clinch the division, they probably need to beat either Washington on Sunday or the New York Jets the following week, then knock off Dallas in the finale.

It was the Cowboys who lost a thriller to the visiting Giants last Sunday night, a game that included a season-high eight lead changes. Manning helped secure the 37-34 victory with two touchdown passes in the final 3 1/2 minutes.

“I saw one of Eli’s buddies this week after that game,” Cooper said. “He was like, ‘I could tell Eli was so fired up about that.’ I was like, ‘I couldn’t tell anything. He looks the same whether they’re down 40 or up 40.’ ”

That’s a stark contrast to Peyton, whose raw emotions have been on display on just about every Sunday for the last 13 seasons.

“Peyton got both swings,” Cooper said. “He’ll get so juiced up, and then he’ll get so mad. Eli just stays there at the equator.”

The personality differences between the brothers are stark, even though they have lots of commonalities as well, including both being No. 1 draft picks and both winning Super Bowl rings.

Still, while Peyton is Type-A, Eli is Type-E — as in his lifelong nickname: “Easy.”

“I could tell you every quarterback in the SEC for the last 20 years,” Peyton once told The Times. “We had to teach Eli the 12 teams in the SEC before he went to Ole Miss.”

Perhaps the coach who knows the brothers best is Duke’s David Cutcliffe, who coached Peyton at Tennessee and Eli at Mississippi. He still works with them in the off-season, remains close friends with the family, and sat in the Mannings’ suite during the Giants’ game against Green Bay two weeks ago.

Cutcliffe said behind Eli’s easygoing personality is a brilliant football mind.

“When he sees the field, it’s incredible how many people he can see and what they’re doing at one time,” Cutcliffe said. “That’s very difficult. Just being able to see it all, and know the depth of the corners and backers, and know what he can get in there. And then he’s deadly accurate with the football when he’s in rhythm.

“Eli’s a guy, that if he decided Wall Street interested him, he could do it at his tempo and make millions of dollars and have everybody saying, ‘Hey, he’s not even working hard!’ That’s a great talent. He’d have everybody else angry, because he’s not hurrying from this to that, trading this, all of these things we perceive Wall Street to be. He would change the tempo of Wall Street. He’d slow it all down.”

Steve Tisch, who co-owns the Giants, shares a ritual with Manning after victories.

“I go to congratulate Eli after the game, and he always says the same thing,” Tisch said. “He says, ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’ Game after game, nail-biter after nail-biter, heart attack after heart attack, his response to me is, ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’

“From his perspective I’m glad it was fun. It probably keeps him very loose and lets him play without a lot of anxiety. For 82,000 fans in the stadium, ‘fun’ is not the first word that comes to mind.”

But who would those fans want as their quarterback?

The answer is Easy.

sam.farmer@latimes.com