In the nine weeks of the season leading up to his first start, Eli rode the bench and watched Kurt Warner play. Still, Coughlin kept him as busy as if he were actually on the field. The people in the video department would run off clips, organized by theme, of the N.F.L.'s top quarterbacks -- Chad Pennington, Donovan McNabb, Tom Brady and, of course, Peyton Manning. And so every week Eli found himself watching and rewatching themed tape of his older brother: Peyton's footwork, Peyton's two-minute drills, Peyton's long pass plays. One afternoon in early November, I sat with Eli and watched a reel -- it was edited to isolate the "red zone," the turf within 20 yards of the opposing team's end zone. "A lot of good decision making is just eliminating what receiver you're not looking at," Eli said, as he reached for the tape. His goal in life seems to be to not make a big deal of anything; or, rather, he makes a big deal about not making a deal. On the surface, he is a passive creature. By all accounts, he cooperates with his elders, is polite even when he doesn't need to be and hasn't a mean bone in his body. But at his core there is a truculence. He insists on detaching himself from the life story that was, in a way, written for him at birth.

When he talks about being an N.F.L. quarterback, his chief concern seems to be minimizing the drama of it all: "A lot of it is knowing who should be open. It's a process of elimination that starts even before you take the snap. A lot of it just comes naturally. It's hard to teach someone how to feel pressure, for example. You aren't really thinking about moving around in the pocket. You just kind of have to have a feeling for it."

Into the machine Eli punched the tape and onto the screen popped his brother, trying to punch the ball into the end zone against the Tennessee Titans. Immediately you saw that Peyton's style of play, at least before the play began, was unlike that of any other N.F.L. quarterback's, an overwrought sequence of waving and pointing and hollering more commonly associated with conducting a high-school marching band than a pro football team. Opposing players scream at Peyton to shut up; writers suggest the N.F.L. reduce the time between plays so that Peyton has fewer seconds to turn the line of scrimmage into a soliloquy. "A lot of that's for show," Eli said. "Here, look." Peyton was waving and hollering and pointing again; it looked as if he was designing something very, very complicated. Then he handed the ball off to a halfback, who ran straight ahead for the touchdown. Eli chuckled. "All that noise and it was just a running play."

He has watched his antic brother a million times. "Have you seen anything you hadn't noticed before from watching him?" I asked. Eli thought about it. "He complains a lot," he said finally. "Here. . . . " He rewound the tape and then ran one of the previous plays in slow motion. Peyton stuck the ball into a running back's hands, and the running back hurled himself onto a pile. But Eli still had his finger on Peyton, who receded into the distance at the top of the screen. When the back failed to score, Peyton threw up his hands and marched around in a huff. "He does that a lot," Eli said. Archie and Olivia Manning raised their sons to be well-educated members of New Orleans' upper middle class -- nice boys, good people. Archie never intended for them to make careers in football, and he made a big deal of steering as far from their ambitions as he could and still remain intimately involved in their lives. Whatever he contributed to his children's success, he contributed inadvertently. Archie had a phobia that someone might mistake him for one of those Little League dads whose idea of fatherhood is to holler at the umps. ("I've never been embarrassed by my dad," says Cooper Manning, a New Orleans investment analyst whose own promising football career ended for medical reasons. "Not a single time.") He actually made a point of not learning all the bewildering changes to the pro game since he quit playing, in 1985, so that his sons would be more reluctant to engage him in conversation about football, as opposed to something else. And when the Mannings went looking for a school, they picked the one most likely to leave their children with something else to talk about. The Isidore Newman School (my alma mater) isn't, to put it kindly, a football school. Perhaps more effectively than any secondary school in a hundred-mile radius, it is capable of taking the raw material for an All-Pro quarterback and turning it into a high-priced lawyer.

A father agnostic about his sons' football careers, a school ill suited to encouraging them, a society, the New Orleans upper middle class, from which a member is about as likely to matriculate into professional football as into, say, Cosa Nostra: how did this combination of forces yield not one but two pro quarterbacks, both top picks in the N.F.L. draft? In countless ways, small and large, Peyton has explained his own case: he refused not to play in the N.F.L. Eli wasn't like that. He was detached; he had no obvious internal drama; if you didn't look extremely closely, you might even say he was indifferent. Even as he became perhaps the best high-school quarterback in the country, he never let on that football was critically important to him. He couldn't remember his father playing; he didn't bother to sit down and watch the old tapes. "Elway and Marino were Peyton's heroes," Cooper recalls. "Peyton could probably have named every player in the N.F.L. I don't know if Eli could name a hero. I don't know if Eli could have named a player in the N.F.L. With Eli, it's all very internal. You have to dig a bit to see how it all works." To which Eli replies, "I'm not the guy who runs down the field with his finger up in the air like I just saved the world." When Eli Manning submitted his brain to the N.F.L. for inspection, he relaxed his pretense that nothing much was going on inside of it. The N.F.L. actually requires that prospects take an intelligence test -- which is, of course, surprising to everyone outside the N.F.L. As Charlie Wonderlic, the C.E.O. of Wonderlic Inc., which creates the N.F.L.'s intelligence tests, puts it, "Why in the world would you want to know how smart a football player is?" But you do want to know, especially when that player is a quarterback. The Wonderlic Personnel Test, given to all prospects, is identical to the test given to more than two million corporate employees each year. It consists of 50 questions. The taker is given 12 minutes to answer as many as he can. Here is one of the easier questions:

"FAMILIAR is the opposite of 1) friendly, 2) old, 3) strange, 4) aloof, 5) different."

And here is a hard one:

"In printing an article of 24,000 words, a printer decides to use two sizes of type. Using the larger type, a printed page contains 900 words. Using the smaller type, a page contains 1,200 words. The article is allotted 21 full pages in a magazine. How many pages must be in the smaller type?"

The test has been used by N.F.L. teams for decades, but the emphasis placed on it has grown with the complexity of the game. (Archie Manning recalls, during his senior year, some guy affiliated with a pro team turning up at Ole Miss and handing out an intelligence test. "We all took it sitting on stools in the locker room, with no one watching us," he says. "Two of the tackles cheated off each other.") Teams use it to weed out players whose minds are simply inadequate to the task. The rule of thumb -- on offense at least -- is that the closer you are to the ball, the smarter you need to be. (Centers are the only players who routinely test as highly as quarterbacks.) The average test score for lawyers is 30 and for janitors is 15. The average test score for halfbacks, the lowest-scoring players, is 15, and for quarterbacks is 25. The head of scouting for the Giants, Jerry Reese, says, "If a quarterback's score comes in under 25, we worry; otherwise we don't pay that much attention to it." Eli Manning scored a 39, putting him in the 99th percentile of last year's two and a half million Wonderlic test takers. His brother Cooper (he was laughing as he spoke) said, "I think the only guy who scored higher than Eli was a punter from Harvard who didn't make a team." (Actually, Pat McInally, the Harvard punter who scored a perfect 50, did make it on to the Cincinnati Bengals.) Eli Manning's score was so high that when I mentioned it to Charlie Wonderlic, he suggested I recheck my facts and said, "There's not a job on the planet that requires a person to score at that level."

But Eli Manning may be the only person in the history of the Wonderlic who can score a 39 and not recall his score. Wandering down a hallway in the Giants front office one day I asked him how he did on the test. "Ummmmm -- I think I got a 41 or a 42 out of 50."