Eli Manning is a teaching pro

Well, lookee here: 

It's another football column - about Eli Manning's evolving role with the Giants - as I continue to do occasional moonlighting from my primary job as our sports business and media writer.

Speaking of football . . . Interesting ratings data from Monday night's big game: The Vikings and Jets averaged a healthy 12.2 percent of homes in major markets on ESPN.

In the Minneapolis market, ESPN and the local broadcast station that carried the game averaged a whopping 45.8 percent of homes. In New York the combined average was 15.8 percent.

Why are New York ratings almost always much lower than other markets' in these situations?

One reason is there are two teams here, so not everyone who follows football follows the Jets.

Even more importantly: The New York area has a higher percentage of people who don't care than do most cities, especially those in Middle America.

One more football thing: It has been fascinating to observe the mainstream media go from initially ignoring Deadspin's Brett Favre/Jenn Sterger story to covering it and discussing it in a big way.

What happened? The same thing that happened with the Ines Sainz story last month, which also was initially ignored by most of the news media.

In both cases, as soon as the NFL said it would investigate the stories became newsworthy.

In both cases, the NFL didn't have much choice but to say it would.

How was chief spokesman Greg Aiello (Syosset's own!) supposed to answer inquiries?

By saying, "Yeah, we heard something about that but no biggee?"

Of course the league was obligated to look into both matters, at which point we all were obligated to convey that information.