In a historic first week of NFL football that saw 14 passers eclipse the 300-yard mark, the most valuable quarterback of all was one who didn't even take the field.
I'm talking, of course, about Indianapolis Colts quarterback and TV commercial mega-star Peyton Manning – a player that demonstrated his status as the league's most valuable player by not playing at all last Sunday.
This may seem like a totally backwards, fallacious argument, but I'm being totally serious.
Indianapolis put up 54 points against the Texans between their two meetings last year. The first game this year? The Manning-less Colts barely managed to get on the scoreboard at all, scoring a meaningless garbage time touchdown against a Texans defense that seemed almost bored with harassing Kerry Collins by the time the score happened in the fourth quarter.
Doubters will say that it's only natural for a team to struggle without its starting quarterback. This might seem like common sense, but recent NFL history begs to differ.
Remember when the Pats lost Tom Brady half a game into the 2008 season? Bill Belichick and the Patriots were so daunted by the loss of their reigning-MVP quarterback that they went on to win 11 games and just miss out on a playoff berth.
Or how about the beginning of last season? The Steelers were without Ben Roethlisburger for the first month of play due to a league-imposed suspension for the quarterback's offseason sexual misadventures. The disastrous result? Pittsburgh went 3-1 over that span.
Of course, the 2008 Patriots and the 2010 Steelers were teams made up of more than just their quarterbacks: New England had what was probably the league's most talented roster at that point, while last year's Steelers boasted the best defense in all of football. The same can't be said about the Colts of late.
Last year, Peyton Manning took a Colts team with no defense, no offensive line, no running game, and a depleted receiving corps to the playoffs, setting a career mark in passing yards in the process. He wasn't just the most important player on the team – he was the team. Manning didn't have – and, evidently, doesn't need – an elite defense, an impenetrable offensive line, or a squad of game-breaking big-play receivers to win football games.
No offense to Bill Polian and company, but they haven't exactly done a good job of giving Manning those things in recent years, and now it shows.
Manning's absence has been felt in a big way just one week into the season. (Two weeks, actually – Indianapolis lost to Cleveland while I wrote this.)
While you may not agree with me now, 15 weeks – and, at absolute most, three or four wins for a Colts team without Peyton Manning – from now, it'll be hard to disagree.
Email: edward.benoit@ubspectrum.com
