Late last year, when Peyton Manning started struggling, I looked past it. He was hurt. He was asked to throw too much. He was struggling with deep balls and nothing else. They were saving him for the playoffs. He was playing some good defenses. All of it.
Then he went out and played terribly in a sullen playoff loss to the Colts. The initial drive was vintage Peyton, but the last 55 minutes of the game showed a QB that was far below anyone's normal expectations of what Peyton Manning is. I felt he may retire. I thought he would retire. I didn't want him to retire. I didn't want him to go out that bad, go out with that pitiful performance in a game and an atmosphere that was about as depressing as any I had ever witnessed.
And he didn't. He decided to come back. I continued to make rationalizations for why it wouldn't matter that he had to switch coaches and schemes, and play with three new lineman. I thought it would all come together, that his play late in 2014 was a factor of an injury, that an offseason of rest would heal him weakened body. Instead, he's somehow worse. All everyone's pessimistic hopes of seeing Peyton fail have come true... my worst nightmare has come true. Yet, the Broncos are 6-0.
It is hard to say Peyton Manning should not have come back. For one, it isn't like he is playing any worse now than he was in the Colts playoff game. He wasn't really going out on top then. He's been able to add a few more wins to his record - on a team that started 6-0 for a ridiculous 6th time (2005-07, 2009, 2013). He's on a team that has the best defense he's ever gotten a chance to play on. He's on a team that is finally carrying him, after years of him having to do the opposite. He's finally getting to enjoy what so many QBs have: but he's been really bad.
He was bad in Week 1, but that was against a team we all expected to have a really good defense. He was respectable in back-to-back road primetime games, which aren't the easiest things in the world. But then he was average against Minnesota, bad against Oakland, and erratic against Cleveland. It isn't even that noodle arm right now. He's making mental mistakes we last saw from Peyton in 2001. He's missing easy throws, not seeing dropping linebackers, and overall just playing like a guy who has no real confidence in what he is doing.
But again, his team is 6-0. People say that 'age is undefeated', but so what? We are not trying to project his career out to 2017, we are looking at the guy right now, and what we have is a QB, with incredibly limited physical tools, basically just two weapons of note - one of which who drops every other pass - and his mind. And his team is undefeated.
Seeing athletes age is never fun (quick tangent, seeing Tom Brady not age is also not fun). I'm watching it with Rafael Nadal. I had to watch it with Roy Oswalt and Martin Brodeur, but with Manning, who seemed to figure out how to play with a weakened arm pretty damn well, the end has come really fast. Through 7 games of 2014, the Broncos were 6-1, were the best team in football, and Peyton Manning was the best QB in football. Through 7 games, Manning was completing 69% of his passes, with an 8.5 y/a, 22 TDs and 3 INTs, with a passer rating of 119.0. I'm not kidding. That was his stat-line through seven games in 2014. We're not even 365 days since then.
People always say the end comes quickly, but that quick? I guess so, but it is then somewhat admirable that he's still fighting. Maybe if the NFL didn't care so much about Super Bowls, he wouldn't want to come back, but he does. He wants to play. He wants to win. He really can't anymore, but he's trying. The end is near, but he's fighting as hard as he can to make that end come in 2016.
Peyton Manning is one of the smartest QBs of all time, somehow who, after accomplishing maybe a Top-5 career through 2010, had a nerve degeneration issue so bad he still hasn't recovered feeling in his fingertips. He had four neck surgeries. He got cut by the team he basically put on the map - and saw that team basically cut him and choose a replacement. He had to go to a new team, a new city, with a new coaching staff and city - and then put up one of the best three year runs of QB play in NFL history. And yet people weren't satisfied.
Well, I am. Every game I get to watch Peyton play in now is one to treasure, even if he has no idea what will happen once he releases the ball. I won't get to watch these for long. In a way, I'm already watching a different player, not the guy who was so, otherworldly good from 2003-2013 (he won 5 MVPs in his 10 healthy seasons). That guy is gone, but his near lifeless husk of a career is still here, fighting strong.
Peyton has carried teams, carried franchises like few QBs ever. He's had two different teams, five different head coaches (he's gone at least 13-3 for the first four). He's had so many different receivers, been saddled with at best average running games and defenses for 7 straight years now. He's been everything for all his teams - and now it is his talented teammates who need to carry him.
When India won the Cricket World Cup in 2011, the team carried Sachin Tendulkar around the field. Here was a guy who had done everything in his career. He built up cricket in India like no player ever. He had already become the most statistucally accomplished cricket player in the modern era. He was the best - but he never won a World Cup. And now, with a tournament played on home soil, his talented teammates carried an average Tendulkar to the World Cup.
After the match, the future star of Indian Cricket, Virat Kohli, a man who was barely born when Sachin Tendulkar first played for India, said it best about his older, fading star, "Sachin carried the burden of a nation for 21 years; it was time we carried him." There's really no better to way to state what we are currently seeing with Manning.
His career has been burdened with bad coaches, flukey playoff losses, terrible moments (and one triumph... no matter how much people try to discredit it, it still counts). He carried the burden of Indianapolis football, and then Denver football, for nearly 20 years. It maybe is just time his better teammates carry him.
