Which Episode of ‘Seinfeld’ Should Eli Watch Before He Loses to the Packers?

We don’t really know how a pro football player spends the night before a big game; we figured it probably includes studying a playbook and taking horse steroids or something. But WLUK-TV in Green Bay apparently knows: With the hometown Packers preparing to play the Giants in Sunday’s NFC Championship game, they’ve pulled their scheduled rerun of Seinfeld from its Saturday-night time slot so Giants quarterback Eli Manning can’t relax by watching his favorite show. But fear not, Giants fans! Jerry Seinfeld himself has stepped up and sent a complete DVD collection of the show to Manning. But with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line, which episode should Eli watch?

We would have suggested “The Label Maker� (Season Six), in which Jerry gives Tim Whatley his Super Bowl tickets, but the moral of this one is bad: After a couple of rounds of re-gifting, Jerry ends up at the game with arch-nemesis Newman. The lesson: When a trip to the big game is on the line, you’re bound to get screwed.

But Eli could find inspiration in a subplot of “The Bizarro Jerry� (Season Eight). After years and years of being stepped on by women, perpetual underdog George finally gets into what he calls “the forbidden city,� a nightclub of gorgeous women who find him attractive when he shows them a photo of his late fiancée, Susan. Similarly, the suddenly heralded Manning surely knows a thing or two about being put down (by fans and the media, at least), plus we bet he still has to use the line “I’m Peyton Manning’s brother� to get into clubs.

And with temperatures expected to hover around four degrees in Green Bay on Sunday, it couldn’t hurt to take a look at “The Betrayal� (Season Nine), in which Kramer gleefully chucks an icy snowball at his pal Franklin Delano Romanowski. Not that we’d condone anything of the sort, but we’re just sayin’ — a well-placed chunk of ice aimed at Brett Favre’s head could do wonders.

But maybe in the end the most apropos episode is “The Race� (Season Six), in which Jerry wins a footrace against a former classmate. Because — as our Wisconsin-born Vulture editor is requiring us to say — the Giants don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to win unless, like Jerry, they blatantly cheat. —Joe DeLessio