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NY- All the problems with the most over-analyzed mechanics outside of a NASCAR pit crew were on display near the end of the Giants’ Oct. 23 game against Denver last season. There was Eli Manning back-pedaling nearly 10 yards to avoid the pass rush, throwing off balance into double coverage. He even threw off the wrong foot.

It was the type of pass armchair quarterback coaches harped on all season.

Only this one went for a 2-yard touchdown to Amani Toomer with five seconds left in an amazing, come-from-behind, 24-23 win over the Broncos.

It was, perhaps, Manning’s finest moment in 2005 – and one of his ugliest passes. It was all wrong and all right, all at the same time.

The same can be said of Manning’s first full season as starting quarterback for the Giants. He went into hostile San Diego and threw for 352 yards, but then tossed four interceptions at home against Minnesota. He led the amazing comeback against Denver, yet completed only 43.3% of his passes in two games against Dallas. He threw for an impressive 3,762 yards and 24 touchdodwns and went 11-5, but had 17 interceptions, a 52.8 completion percentage and fizzled in the playoffs.

The first half of the season he was so good that he was drawing comparisons to his older brother. But the last six games he looked so bad that some wondered if he was related to Peyton Manning at all.

That brings him to this, his third NFL season and a mini-crossroads in his career. Will he ever be the second coming of Peyton? Or will last season’s late struggles continue?

“Professionally, the third year is a big year for quarterbacks,” says receiver Amani Toomer. “He realizes that.”

“Certainly, by the third year you would hope there has been enough experience that he’s going to feel comfortable,” adds quarterbacks coach Kevin Gilbride. “And you’ll hope with having seen things enough times that his decision making is going to be as good as necessary to be successful. You would like to see him grow as well.”

The growth charts will be out on Sunday night when he goes up against his ultimate measuring stick – big brother Peyton – when the Giants face the Colts in the much-hyped “Manning Bowl” at Giants Stadium. But while unavoidable, measuring Eli against Peyton isn’t fair. After all, Eli threw for more yards than Peyton (3,762 to 3,747) last season and nearly as many touchdowns (24 to Peyton’s 28). Given that, their shouldn’t be any worries about the younger Manning anymore.

But it’s those last six games that are so hard to forget. Midway through the season, Manning was one of the best quarterbacks in football (14 touchdowns, 5 interceptions). But in the last six games, he had only four touchdowns and 10 interceptions. The worst came in the Giants’ horrible, 23-0 home playoff loss to Carolina, when he went 10-for-18 for just 113 yards with three interceptions.

Those are the games that Manning, Gilbride and Coughlin studied the most during the offseason, when the quarterback was at Giants Stadium nearly every day. They noticed the low completion percentage and poor mechanics just like everybody else did. But they also noticed something else.

“A couple of things happened,” Gilbride says. “One was some of the decision making. And the decision making isn’t, ‘OK the coverage did this so you went to the wrong guy.’ It isn’t the wrong guy. It’s ‘I’m about to be hit. Can I really make that 45-yard throw down the field? I know the receiver is open by half a step, but should I have just dropped it off?'”

In other words, when a play came from the sideline that called for a long pass downfield, the 25-year-old Manning, in his quest for perfection, would do anything in his power to get that pass downfield. He’d lock in on the first option, forgetting that there were two or three others available, including the always available dump-off to the dangerous Tiki Barber.

“I think it got to a point where there were a couple of times where he was trying to do maybe a little bit too much, and do right by us, and it wound up getting us hurt and him getting burned because of it,” Gilbride says. “He’s trying so hard sometimes to do exactly the right thing that sometimes that turns out not to be the right thing.”

Gilbride says that was evident in the Giants’ 26-23 overtime win over Philadelphia on Dec. 11. Manning spoiled a pretty good performance (28-for-44, 312 yards) by throwing three interceptions late – one that led to the game-tying field goal at the end of regulation and two more in overtime.

Two of those were throws that he never should have tried to make.

“Sometimes the ceiling to that play is a sack,” Gilbride says. “That’s the best thing you can do with that play. He’s trying to protect us, but take a sack. Sometimes the way it just happens, the best thing you can do is take the hit, go down, it’s a five-yard loss, and that was the best thing we could do as a team.”

That’s not an easy lesson to learn. Former Giants quarterback Kerry Collins was a seven-year veteran and had already taken his team to the Super Bowl when former Giants coach Jim Fassel tried to teach him that lesson after the Giants finished 7-9 in 2001. Collins was terrific at getting to his “check-down” receivers – Barber averaged 69 catches during Collins’ five seasons in New York – but Collins wasn’t good at giving up on a play and throwing a ball out of bounds.

In 2002, he made a concerted effort and the results were obvious. The Giants went 10-6 and Collins had his best statistical season – a career-best completion percentage of 61.5% and 4,073 passing yards.

“It’s hard,” Barber says. “You’re so ingrained in your thoughts on how to go through your reads. But as you get older you know right away when a play is not going to work.”

The Giants are convinced that as soon as Manning learns those lessons, his numbers will go way up. Gilbride, in fact, believes Manning can reach 60% this season without changing the Giants’ downfield approach to their passing attack.

“We’re not a dink-and-dunk team,” Gilbride says. “We’re not going to throw 100 balls underneath. But I think we can get 60%. I think he’s a good enough player. He has enough talent. He has enough knowledge of what’s going on around him. I think he can do that.”

There are certainly signs that Manning has taken steps in that direction. His completion percentage in preseason was 63% (29-for-46). Coughlin says, by his charts, Manning had the most accurate camp of his short career.

But it’s in the little things that don’t show up on the stat sheet where Coughlin has noticed the most improvement.

“(Like) throwing the ball away,” says Coughlin. “Not trying to throw the ball into a spot where there are two defenders and one receiver, or into a very tight situation. I think he has done a good job with finding a second and a third (option) and a check-down, even to the point sometimes where he’s gone from one side of the field to the other.”

Adds Barber, “Yeah, especially when he knows from the jump that he doesn’t have anything. He’s kind of waiting for me to get open, which is smart.”

That’s the word Manning is focusing on this season.

“Part of being a quarterback is being smart,” Manning says. “Obviously you’ve got to be aggressive and you’ve got to make your throws when they’re there. But just because they call a play downfield doesn’t mean you have to throw it. You can be over-confident, but there’s confidence and then there’s ignorance. You can’t force things. Just because the play is called downfield doesn’t mean you have to throw it there.”