I wonder if Peyton Manning enjoys the musical styling of Alanis Morissette? Because if I had to fancy a guess as to what is playing on his iPod during his rehab workouts, this week especially, it has to be Morissette’s “Ironic.”
Because isn’t it ironic – a little too ironic – that the Indianapolis Colts host Super Bowl XLVI this Sunday, a game they never would have received without the shiny new Lucas Oil Stadium, a stadium that would never have been built without Manning transforming the Colts?
Yet when the game kicks off, it’s difficult to predict two things: 1) If Manning will ever play football again, and, 2) If he does get cleared to play football, will it be for the Colts?
It’s technically cosmic irony. It’s like rain on your wedding day, or a traffic jam when you’re already late.
And just to make sure Manning got this message, the football gods aligned the stars so that Peyton’s little brother, Eli, leads his team to the Super Bowl.
Against Peyton’s long-time arch-rivals, the New England Patriots.
Who are quarterbacked by the one man people debate could go down as better than Peyton: Tom Brady.
What are the odds of that?
Super Bowl XLVI also happens to be a rematch between the Patriots and the New York Giants, who four years ago, gave us a thrilling Super Bowl that saw the Giants come-from-behind in the final seconds to topple the then-unbeaten Patriots.
There’s hype and then there’s the Super Bowl. And then there’s a Super Bowl rematch of the Patriots and Giants. Of all the storylines this week, Peyton Manning and his neck are a mere footnote.
But Manning should be more than that to this city, especially now. This city should be kissing his Super Bowl ring. Instead of Tebow-ing, we should be, uh, Manning-ing.
He has transformed this city in ways only people from here can understand. None of this – and by this, I mean the event of the Super Bowl itself – would be possible without Peyton Manning. Cold weather cities do not get the Super Bowl without a new stadium. (For reasons why, see Detroit in 2006 and Dallas last year.) And teams like the Colts, pre-1998, don’t get new stadiums. You get new stadiums by winning – like a lot – because winning 10-plus games a year for a dozen years brings in a ton of fans.
Fans buy seats, food and merchandise. They create an atmosphere. They create a fan base that will sell out said new stadium, even in a year like 2011, when the team goes 2-14, fires it’s coaching staff and organizationally derails. They stay loyal when the owner acts out his life like a Saturday Night Live sketch on Twitter.
The success of the Manning-era Colts led to this moment. In turn, we’ve learned in the last six months that Manning is the Colts, literally, and frankly deserves all the credit for everything they did between 1998-2010.
Peyton Manning masked wild deficiencies of teammates and front office decision makers. He covered for mediocre coaching, less-than-mediocre defenses and a talent discrepancy that, looking back on it, was sometimes as wide as the Grand Canyon.
Think about this: since 2001, only four teams have represented the AFC in the Super Bowl: The Patriots (five times), the Pittsburgh Steelers (three times), the Colts (twice) and the Oakland Raiders (once, in 2002).
The Raiders, clearly, caught lightning in a bottle in 2002. They’ve been horrible ever since. But how on earth did the Colts hang in there with the Patriots and Steelers, perhaps the two most well-ran organizations in the NFL? How did they compete with those two franchises?
Simple: Peyton Manning.
Because it wasn’t the owner – Patriots owner Bob Kraft and the Rooney family that owns the Steelers, are vastly superior to Jim Irsay, his guitar and his tweets. It wasn’t the coaching – Bill Belicheck, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin are all vastly superior coaches that Jim Mora, Tony Dungy and Jim Caldwell. And it certainly wasn’t the general managers and decision makers. The Steelers and Patriots draft really well, sign the right players and do all the little things right. Meanwhile, Bill Polian was asleep at the wheel in the player personnel department for at least five years.
Peyton Manning is so good, so vastly superior that he basically was a one man show. In hindsight, it’s become a chicken and egg question with his teammates. Was Marvin Harrison good, or did Peyton make him good? Is Dallas Clark a great tight end, or did Peyton simply make him great? You get better by association on the Colts when No. 18 is under center.
So was it a good business decision to pay him $28 million in 2011 for not playing a single down of football? Of course not. It was, as I said before, quite stupid. But did the Colts, on behalf of the organization and this city, owe it to him? Hell yes. Consider it payment for services rendered.
Certainly Manning has long been well compensated for his talents as the highest paid quarterback in football for a number of years. But what he did in Indianapolis transcends just the game.
Indianapolis was Naptown. We hosted a few NCAA Final Fours and claim “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” the Indianapolis 500 – as if anyone still really cares about open-wheel racing outside of the month of May – and the Indiana Pacers had a good run in the late 1990s, but that’s been about it.
Since Peyton arrived, the NCAA moved its headquarters to Indianapolis and we’ve hosted more Final Fours than any other city. Other events have come to town, thanks to the hard working folks at the Indiana Sports Corporation. The economic boost and impact will be felt for years. A new stadium was built. To give you the mindset pre-Peyton, we were the middle sized town in the middle of the middle West. This city built a new minor league baseball park before it built a new football stadium.
To see the city this week, alive with a kind of energy and enthusiasm that is hard to even adequately describe, is frankly amazing. And none of this would be possible without Peyton Manning. And all this, coming from the most staunch Brady-backer.
Now that doesn’t make what is likely to happen in a few weeks any less difficult. The Colts have an incredibly difficult decision to make on Manning and the future of this franchise. And this has to be a business decision. They have a chance to start over with another franchise quarterback. Manning, despite his rosy outlook, might never play another down – and even if he does, he might never be what he once was.
But that conversation can happen after Sunday. After the city basks in the glow of the hosting the Super Bowl.
Thus far, Indy is nailing it. To the point I’m wondering if the NFL won’t come back again in five or six years for another Super Bowl. And in another turn of irony, the weather has been fantastic – leaving me to joke to a friend that people from out of town are going to go home thinking Indianapolis would be a great place to retire: warm winters, friendly people, tons of stuff to do…
Which makes me wonder if we can credit Peyton for the weather as well?
He’s pretty much responsible for everything else happening this week.
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