When Saint Tommy comes marching in to Eli Manning’s old hometown, mesmerized Giants fans will be gazing at him as their Saint Tommy … the patron saint of cutlets.
Tommy DeVito turned MetLife Stadium into the Mardi Gras this past Monday night, and come Sunday against the Saints, he will try to turn the Superdome silent.
Somehow, he has breathed life, faint as it is, into a godforsaken season with three consecutive wins.
Somehow, he has been adopted by Giants fans no longer obsessed with losing enough games to earn the opportunity to draft one of the so-called can’t-miss college quarterbacks.
Everyone missed on Tommy DeVito.
What everyone missed is the “It” Factor.
“You either have it or you don’t,” DeVito told The Post. “I don’t know if there’s a definition for it. It’s like that dog in you that everyone talks about, that reference, kind of the same thing, like you either just have that stuff about you or you don’t. I think that’s just the It Factor, that’s it.”
Everyone forgot that you don’t have to be 6-foot-4 or 6-foot-5 with a rocket arm and be a dual threat to have the It Factor.
You can be 6-foot-2 and 209 pounds if you don’t listen to the doubters and the naysayers and you believe in yourself. You can be Tommy Cutlets.
“He has that swag, the charisma that you want in your quarterback,” Wan’Dale Robinson said. “He comes in to work and does everything that you want him to do day in and day out.”
It.
“He has a level of confidence that he carries himself with, a level of … flair, I guess you say he carries himself with,” Darius Slayton told The Post. “People like that. It’s just something that attracts people. You can respect it.”
At least 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy was drafted with the last pick of the seventh round as Mr. Irrelevant.
Tommy DeVito was more irrelevant than Mr. Irrelevant.
But he is Mr. Relevant now largely because he has It.
“His It Factor is just his ability to be a gamer … some guys, they’re just gamers,” rookie Eric Gray said.
Though DeVito has not been here before, he sure acts as though he has been here before. No moment has been too big for him, and with the game on the line against the Packers and MetLife all but genuflecting in prayer, you could have called Tommy DeVito “The Big Easy” with the way he marched his team down the field in position for Randy Bullock’s decisive field goal as time expired.
“He just doesn’t seem like he’s too rattled, whether it’s like a three-and-out, whether it’s a big game, whether it’s a bad game, whatever it is,” Isaiah Hodgins told The Post, “like he’s just never really rattled. You can’t really teach that in a quarterback, you either got it or you don’t. And he’s got that.”
Football is a game of flinches, and this kid doesn’t flinch.
“At this point,” Micah McFadden said, “nobody’s surprised.”
Rocky? Rudy? Vince Papale in “Invincible”? The Karate Kid? Tommy DeVito has taken the underdog torch and run with it, with underdogs everywhere cheering him on.
“He’s just one of the guys,” Robinson said. “He’s just a cool dude, funny. … I mean, he’s just another one of us.”
Don’t bother telling the Italian-American community in and around Cedar Grove, N.J., who can’t stop mangiare (Italian for eating up) this fairytale, that Rome wasn’t built in a day.
“It ain’t no Cinderella story, “ Slayton said. “We expect him to play well, he expects to play well. We expect to win.”
If he’s Saint Tommy on Sunday, break out the chef’s kiss.
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