"The past is never dead. It’s not even past."
-- from Requiem for a Nun, by William Faulkner

"It’s not everybody who has brothers quarterbacking on Saturdays and Sundays; I just choose where’s the best party."
-- Cooper Manning

Just now, early on Saturday morning, Cooper’s folks, Archie and Olivia, are dressed down -- holding court among the ancient oak trees lining The Grove in Oxford, Miss., as the Ole Miss Rebels parade through their worshipful fans on the way to Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. The still-trim, red-haired and freckled All-America QB-next-door and the still-gorgeous homecoming queen (Costner and Pfeiffer get the parts) are waiting to greet their youngest, Eli, who barely glances over as he wards off his mother’s attempted clutch-and-kiss. That’s the way the weekend starts. It will end some 300 miles to the south -- an hour as the Gulf Stream flies -- with Archie and Olivia strolling across the darkened Louisiana Superdome field practically arm-in-arm with their middle son, Peyton, who, broken jaw and all, does not spurn his parents’ postgame hugs or kisses.

The 30 intervening hours would seem particularly glorious for football’s first family -- to Cooper, the parties were awesome -- except for one thing. Despite combining to complete 53 of 75 passes for 495 yards and 3 TDs, the brothers got their butts blasted: Ole Miss losing to Georgia, 35-15, costing the team any chance at the SEC West title, and the Indianapolis Colts losing to the Saints, 34-20, to drop below .500 in their injury-plagued descent from atop the AFC East.

On the other hand, through his first 10 games this season, Eli, 20, a redshirt sophomore, has thrown 236 passes for a school-record 27 TDs with just six interceptions -- one of the best ratios in the land, which also happens to include an impressive pass-efficiency rating in the fourth quarter (151.36). And, Peyton, 25, has become a regular in the Pro Bowl and, over the past four seasons, leads the NFL in passing with 14,996 yards and 103 TDs -- the third-fastest QB to 100 behind Dan Marino and John Unitas.

That the Nov. 17-18 weekend became the first over which the Manning parents had to watch both sons lose at their current levels would seem a paradox. But it is not. As skilled and popular as the progenitor has been, Archie Manning was always best known for losing. At Ole Miss (1967-70) he lost a legendary 33-32 game to Alabama despite a personal 540 yards of total offense, and as the signal-caller for the pathetic Saints (1971-82) he lost at least eight games every year, never winning more than he lost.

Sure enough, the sins of the father... At Tennessee, Peyton may always be recalled as the star who never beat Florida -- a failure that cost him at least one Heisman Trophy -- while Eli has already carved his own signature in Rebel lore by throwing 6 TD passes in (again) a loss, that 58-56 seven-overtime epic with Arkansas on Nov. 3.

"People say how unbelievable and enjoyable this whole thing must be," says Archie. "But watching your children play quarterback, putting themselves on the line every game, getting smacked around and bloodied up ... it’s very, very hard."

The past is never dead.

Picked to finish last in their division, the Ole Miss Rebs are currently 6–4, soon to be 7–4 (if they can handle Vanderbilt Dec. 1) and a good bet for some bowl that wants to draw half the population of the Mason-Dixon nation. But to understand how significant another Manning becoming another savior in the Deep South really is, you must realize how important to Mississippi Archie really was.

Not long after he slouched onto the Oxford campus from tiny Drew, Miss., seeming like some Tom Sawyer in cleats, he was an instant star of both heroic and tragic proportions. In his sophomore year Archie returned home to find his father dead of suicide. He went back to Oxford, where his exploits for Ole Miss reclaimed the gridiron limelight and the graces of civilization itself. A half-dozen years before, federal troops had to take over the campus to get a black man named James Meredith enrolled. For all its leafy beauty, its historic Courtyard Square and literary tradition (Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, John Grisham et al.), Oxford became synonymous with racism -- until Archie singlehandedly soothed the national feeling against the place.

Any community that spawned this kind, polite fellow who could cross over all cultures, woo the beauteous Olivia Williams, and both rocket and run the bejeezus out of the football, couldn’t be all nasty. In fact, Archie was carried into fraternity parties on the shoulders of his linemen. Invitations to his wedding were scalped. A song, "The Ballad of Archie Who," was written about him. Wil-Faulk may have passed away and Morris may have migrated to New York, but there were others among Oxford’s literati to keep the legend alive -- Grisham names characters in his books after Archie.

Imagine then, how mortified Mississippians felt when the offspring didn’t measure up. First, Cooper’s promising career as a wide receiver at Oxford was halted by a congenital spinal condition. (The wittiest and most charismatic of the boys, Cooper, now 27, became a BMOC anyway.) Then Peyton jilted the school for Tennessee. Mississippi was way down then, rumored to be under NCAA investigation, and though he loved Ole Miss probably more than either of his brothers, the middle Manning had a plan, a journey to success already plotted out. He marched off to Knoxville, made All-America and Phi Beta Kappa and didn’t look back at the hate mail that flooded the Mannings’ antebellum manse in N’Awlins.

"Like my dad could force Peyton to go here just because he did," says Eli. "Oxford wasn’t the right place for Peyton, but it is for me," he says.

***

Over the two seasons Eli sat the bench and studied the same system that Ole Miss coach David Cutcliffe used when he was Peyton’s offensive coordinator at Tennessee, headline writers had a field day with "Eli’s Coming," the old rock hit popularized by Three Dog Night. But though the three-dogged Mannings are all 6'4" to 6'5" and almost identical facially -- Cooper dined out on his Peyton impersonation in Knoxville: What the hell are you doing here tonight, Peyt? Oh, just hitting the scotch! -- everybody is bewildered by how different Peyton and Eli have become.

The former is his father’s clone -- intense, focused, fuddy-duddy, severely anal-retentive, or as Archie puts it, "a neat freak." Eli, on the other hand, is loose, laid-back, uninhibited, characterized by a subtle insouciance. "I can’t figure him out -- Eli just doesn’t stress," Archie says of the son whose real first name, like Archie’s, is Elisha. (Cooper is named for Olivia’s father; Peyton for Archie’s uncle.) "He’s a mama’s boy. I always called Olivia the Great Equalizer because she has the ability to stay calm in a crisis. That’s how Eli is."

Well, the third son was supposed to be the first daughter, anyway. "Cooper came in at 12.3 [pounds]," says Archie. "Peyton came along at 12.1. Eli was 10-even -- we thought something was wrong with him." At age 10, Eli came up with a weird personal rule: Among a family of affectionates, he declared he could be kissed only once a week. Whereas Archie was mostly home for the older boys’ formative years, he was traveling for Eli’s. "That killed me," Archie says. "I missed those times just strolling with him." Says Eli, "I went to dinner and the movies a lot with my mom." When they were in grade school, both Cooper and Peyton were football trivia buffs; both told Archie they wanted to be big-time college players. (Probably it was right then that Peyton intellectualized that tricky, fake-spike play with which he bamboozled the Saints, the zebras and most of the NFL.) Eli, though, was bored with the subject. "Peyton used to pound on me unless I could name all the SEC schools," Eli says. "He’d torture me. I used to run to Cooper to hide from Peyton. I guess Cooper terrorized him, so he took it out on me."

After succeeding his brothers as the star gridder at the tony, private Newman School, Eli continued to confound the family purists. One Thursday he called home from the high school training room an hour before game time. Recalls Eli, "I told my mom, ‘Be sure to tape Seinfeld.’ My dad and Peyton were like, ‘What’s up with that?’"

Such a personality style undoubtedly has served Baby Manning well in the pressure-filled moments of fulfilling the family legacy at Ole Miss. The ante was upped last December when Eli entered the Music City Bowl with Ole Miss helplessly behind West Virginia and threw 3 TD passes in the fourth quarter of a 49-38 loss. This fall, in his debut as a starter against Murray State, he threw a then-school-record 5 TDs, at one point completing 18 passes in a row. The next day, naturally, he didn’t even buy a newspaper.

"The kid has no ego," Cutcliffe says. "About all our tradition and his dad’s history here, he couldn’t care less." Indeed, after Eli wore Archie’s No.18 in high school -- it is no coincidence that 18 is the posted speed limit in Oxford -- he chose not to have it unretired and instead settled for No.10. He pledged Sigma Nu -- "without, I guarantee you, knowing it was my fraternity," says Archie. And he doesn’t even glance at the surrounding memorabilia when chatting in the athletic department’s "Manning Room," a mini Hall-of-Archie.

"I didn’t understand how important my dad was here until I got on campus and had to sign autographs long before I took a snap," says Eli. "The attention, I can take it or leave it. But I don’t think that’s pressure. Pressure is passing Accounting 202. I take it all as a positive; I have two older people who’ve been through everything before."

Indeed, the signal-barking brothers make it a point to speak on the phone every Thursday night -- and then celebrate/commiserate with each other after their weekend games. "I’ve never been one to plug my family," mumbled Peyton through his jambalaya’d jaw the other day. "But every time we worked out last summer, Eli got stronger, quicker, better -- his arm, his mechanics, the thought processes. I knew he’d have a great year, he was starting to believe in himself. The kid can play. I can tell he’s much more confident. Usually we’ll talk about upcoming opponents, game plans, school, family stuff, what’s going on in our lives. It’s really a good mix. Then I find myself getting jacked up on Saturdays about his game, which I shouldn’t be. I should be concerned about mine."

When Peyton had a break earlier this season, he made a beeline to Baton Rouge to catch Eli and Ole Miss against LSU -- a game the younger Manning pulled out with a fourth-quarter rally in which he threw the winning TD pass to his apartment mate, tight end Doug Zeigler. Actually, it was a rare Eli mistake, a throwaway laser that Zeigler had to lay out and dive to catch. Peyton couldn’t wait to drop some sarcasm: "Uh, Eli, nice throw to Zeigler."

But Peyton also knows well the stakes Eli faces in a hallowed, holy place he himself chose to avoid. "The teams I played on at Tennessee," says Peyton, "we had talent everywhere. My brother is under different pressure. Ole Miss needs him to play well every week. Right now, at this point in history, they need him to bring them all the way back. For him to be facing up to that the way he is ... it says something special about Eli."

And about the Mannings.

This article appears in the December 10 issue of ESPN The Magazine.