By Brad Gagnon, Awful Announcing
This past weekend, Giants quarterback Eli Manning became the 35th sports figure to host NBC's "Saturday Night Live." Here's a breakdown of Eli's first performance, along with video and sketch-by-sketch performance ratings on a scale of 1-10.
The monologue: 5/10 -- Eli really struggled out of the gate. His first two jokes -- "After two Super Bowls, this is definitely the third most exciting night of my life" and "We had a big parade downtown where we took the Lombardi Trophy into the heart of the city, and now we have no idea where it is" -- were particularly weak. He was quite awkward and spoke over applause. He did, however, loosen up a bit during a self-deprecating Q&A session with cast members posing as members of the audience. This is the toughest part of hosting the show, and the Louisiana boy did a decent job poking fun at his own lack of New York knowledge.
In conclusion: The overall performance was pretty much what I expected from Eli. Nothing hilarious (I laughed out loud once or twice) and no memorable lines, but not a complete disaster either. In terms of rating Eli's overall performance, it was somewhere between Matt Cassel and Matt Hasselbeck. Overall: 5.5/10