No business passing Tom

FOXBORO - Eli Manning may look like Opie, but he's no Goober. The New York Giants quarterback didn't take the hometown discount or the ``take one for the team'' discount, which is another way of saying he didn't take one for the owner, either. What he took was the money, which in a game as dangerous as pro Football is a wise course of action. That left Manning with a six-year extension worth a reported $97.5 million, with $35 million guaranteed - but according to sources with knowledge of the contract it actually will all but guarantee him $49 million during the next three years. In three years he will have earned nearly as much as Tom Brady did in the past six. The new deal makes Manning, for the moment, the highest-paid player in Football. More importantly to the Patriots , it lifts the bar well over the head of Brady, whose salary when combined with his position as one of the game's two premier quarterbacks is now a joke. What the Patriots have to hope is that Brady, and perhaps more importantly his new wife, see some humor in it because if they do not the accountants will have to go to work in a hurry at Patriots Place. Brady took a discounted deal in 2005 when he signed a six-year, $60 million extension that included a $14.5 million signing bonus and $12 million roster bonus in 2006 that was later believed to have been converted into a second signing bonus to allow it to be prorated favorably to the team over the life of the contract. His base salary this season is only $2.3 million, with an additional $3 million roster bonus. In 2010, that base package rises to $3.5 million plus another $3 million roster bonus. That is far from chump change but also far from Eli Manning money, and Manning is a guy who is far from Brady when it comes to job performance. What is interesting is the contracts of both Brady and Eli's big brother, the Indianapolis Colts' Peyton Manning, run out after 2010. By that time it's likely young arms like Philip Rivers (San Diego Chargers) and Jay Cutler (Chicago Bears) will already have come close to matching, if not exceeding, Eli's average of $15.3 million a year through 2015. The Patriots would be unwise in the extreme to allow Brady to drift into the final year of his contract as they've done with so many in the past because there is no guarantee he will be as acquiescent in his fiscal dealings as in the past. There are several reasons. First, he is smart enough to know his next contract will be the last big one of his career. Second, having a wife looking over your shoulder who makes about $30 million a year changes the dynamics of negotiations. One should remember this was a woman fiscally wise enough to demand being paid in Euros for a time when the U.S. dollar was on the decline. She obviously knows a thing or two about a market-driven economy and when it comes to hometown discounts, well, Gisele Bundchen is from Brazil, so you can forget about that. The elder Manning will surely be looking to top his brother's $97.3 million extension and Rivers' agent, Jimmy Sexton, had been running a four-corners style negotiation with the Chargers on an extension for some time to see what Manning would come away with from the Giants. The outcome was the kind of deal that alters the negotiating landscape, turning a guy who was close to be running out of New York on a rail barely two years ago into the high-water mark for salary in the league. What will make Brady's situation intriguing is that he'll be nearly 34 by the end of his contract. By that point even the best of quarterbacks have begun a slow decline. Is his past willingness to accept less than top dollar rewarded? Or are the statistics for over-34 QBs trotted out to make clear a Manning-like deal would run the risk of paying for past performance, something the Patriots work to avoid? These are questions that must be explored at a time when uncertainty reigns because of the muddled labor situation and the possibility of an uncapped year in 2010 if the present CBA is not extended, thereby compounding what Eli Manning has already just made a difficult negotiation for both Brady and the Patriots . - rborges@bostonherald.com