If Eli Manning is to draw any encouragement from his first rough day at the office, it is that it can’t get much worse for him than it was yesterday at Giants Stadium.

The bad news, of course, is that things could stay the same, at least for the foreseeable future.

The Philadelphia Eagles gave Manning a rude welcome to the league, defeating the Giants, 27-6 in the Meadowlands and destroying any illusion that the $54 million baby quarterback could cure what ails Tom Coughlin’s rapidly plummeting team. In fact, after the game, it was unclear if Manning even will be the Giants’ quarterback next week when they travel to Washington to face the inept Redskins.

“Right now, Eli’s the starting quarterback,” Coughlin said, with emphasis on the “right now.”

Who could blame Coughlin, who handed the ball to Manning for last week’s game against the Atlanta Falcons, for now thinking about yanking it back? Manning, the no. 1 pick of the 2004 draft, is undoubtedly the Giants’ quarterback of the future. But he is not yet the quarterback of the present, unless Coughlin has resigned himself to playing out the string on a season that, incredibly, is not over for any NFC team playing .500 ball.

The question is, does Coughlin reverse himself and yank Manning now, when the Giants still have a shot, albeit slim, to steal the second NFC wild-card berth? The answer, of course, is why not? Better coaches than Coughlin have second-guessed themselves.

Three days ago, Bill Parcells yanked his quarterback of the future, Drew Henson, in favor of 41-year-old Vinny Testaverde in order to pull out a Thanksgiving Day win over the Bears. That left Dallas at 4-7, third in the NFC East and realistically out of the playoff hunt. Henson’s sin was terminal first-half ineffectiveness, and there was still a football game to be won.

Coughlin, conceivably, could have done the same with Manning, who had a first half worthy of a walk-on. The Giants, at 5-6, can still hope to squeeze into the playoffs, and there was nothing stopping Coughlin from pulling the plug on the Eli Manning experiment and handing the offense back over to Kurt Warner in an effort to give his team its best chance to win.

As promising as Manning looked last week in the second half of the Giants’ 14-10 loss to the Falcons (who made things easy on him by rarely blitzing), that was how pathetic he looked yesterday. Faced for the first time by a defense that blitzes first and asks questions later, Manning quickly became even more rattled and unsure than even Warner ever did. For every flash of brilliance – and there were a total of three in the whole game – there was a devastating mistake.

Manning followed one beauty of a pass to Jamaar Taylor, a 50-yard gain, with two badly-thrown passes in the red zone and the Giants had to settle for a first-quarter field goal. In the second quarter, he hit Taylor for 52 yards to give the Giants a first-and-goal at the 3; on the very next play, he under threw a fade for Jeremy Shockey that was intercepted in the end zone.

But Manning’s worst moment of all came in the third quarter when, shaken by the relentless Philly blitz, he threw the ball up for grabs over the middle of the field. It came down in the hands of Eagles safety Brian Dawkins, an embarrassingly amateurish mistake.

“You just cannot make that kind of an error,” Coughlin said. “You cannot throw the ball away like that in the middle of the field. If you’re gonna throw it away, then throw it away. The game just deteriorated from there.”

Manning, of course, was not the only culprit, only the highest-paid and most visible. The Giants’ offensive line was overrun all day by Jevon Kearse, Hugh Douglas, & Co. The special teams broke down on punt coverage, allowing Kearse to block a Jeff Feagles punt when the game was still within reach. And the play-calling of offensive coordinator John Hufnagel, which had seemed fresh a few weeks ago, is starting to look stale and predictable. The fade to Shockey, once a fearsome weapon, has become an opportunity for the defense to make a big play, as it did yesterday.

“It seems like every time I line up out there,” Shockey said, “they know what’s coming.”

But the worst of it is that Eli Manning, $54 million rookie, is just that: a rookie, susceptible to the blitz, prone to mistakes, simply not yet ready for Sunday afternoon.

“It was not a good performance,” Coughlin said. “The two interceptions, they were definitely setbacks. I don’t entirely blame him, because a lot of time he was running for his life, and he didn’t have a lot of time to set and throw. I just think in the areas of throwing the ball and understanding what the concept is, I don’t expect him to make any errors that way.”

He made them yesterday, and he will make them next week, and the week after.

“They did some things different, brought a lot of pressure, gave a lot of different looks,” Manning said.

He better get used to it, because this is what life in the NFL is really like. There are five more games to go, and the Giants’ season is not yet over. That is, unless Tom Coughlin says it is – by staying with Eli Manning.

Mr. Matthews is the host of the “Wally and the Keeg” sports talk show heard Monday-Friday from 4-7 p.m. on 1050 AM ESPN radio.