Retooled Pats face Denver air show
Showdown between NFL’s top QBs
Tom Brady and Peyton Manning have six MVP awards between them in the regular season. They have three more in the Super Bowl.
On Sunday night, two of the NFL’s greatest quarterbacks will meet for the 14th time. But there’s a new twist.
One of them is mired in the middle of the league’s passer ratings instead of being near the top.
Brady and his rebuilt receiving corps have suffered through growing pains while Manning’s deep group of pass catchers helped the Denver Broncos (9-1) become the NFL’s best offence going into the prime-time game against the New England Patriots (73).
So Brady must find a way to outscore a team averaging 39.8 points per game.
“Our offence right now is very different than it’s ever been,” he said. “Everything that we do has a different feel to it. We’ve had so many new players.”
Manning threw seven touchdown passes in the season-opener and is the league’s second highest rated passer. Brady didn’t reach that total until his fourth game and was tied for 18th in the rankings after Monday night’s 24-20 loss to the Carolina Panthers.
But those numbers don’t fool the Broncos.
“He’s definitely
one
of the best,” Denver safety Mike Adams said. “You can never count him out, whether they’re leading, whether they’re down. He’s one of the comeback kids. He always comes back in the fourth quarter.”
He didn’t have to do that in the first matchup of his career with Manning. In Brady’s second start as a pro, the Patriots beat the Indianapolis Colts 44-13 in the third game of 2001.
Now, 12 years later, Brady is 9-4 against Manning with 23 touchdown passes and 12 interceptions. Manning has thrown for 27 touchdowns and 19 interceptions in those games.
And he lost his first matchup with Brady after joining the Broncos, 31-21 in Week 5 last year. Both completed more than 70 per cent of their passes in that game.
“That was early in the season for kind of a new team, certainly a new offence,” Manning said.
Since then, he’s led the Broncos to a 20-1 regular-season record. MELBOURNE Representing the United States for the first time and making his first trip to Australia, Kevin Streelman wasn’t over-awed by a tough Royal Melbourne golf course on Thursday.
Streelman birdied five of the first six holes on the back nine before making bogey on two of the final three to share the first round lead at the World Cup with Thomas Bjorn of Denmark at 5-under 66.
K.J. Choi, Martin Laird and Stuart Manley were tied for third at 67, and Jason Day (68) was sixth place, two strokes behind the leaders.
Another American, Matt Kuchar, shot 71 after four bogeys on the back nine.
David Hearn of Brantford, Ont., is the top Canadian after the first round. He’s in a tie for ninth at 1-under 70. Manotick’s Brad Fritsch opened at even 71.
The Americans and Denmark were tied for the team lead, three strokes ahead of Portugal.
Traditionally a team event, an individual stroke-play competition was added to the tournament this year to mirror the format to be used at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Only 12 of the 60 players in the no-cut field broke par.
“I made some good birdie putts today and some par saves as well, so pretty happy,” Streelman said.
“On 18, the wind tricked us a little bit and it floated me on a hair and it came down in the middle of that bunker and plugged pretty deep. I had no shot. It’s going to happen out here, you expect it.”
Bjorn had a poor start to his day, four-putting the fourth hole.
“I thought, ‘Well, this could be a long day,’ but I just kind of kept my composure and made some good birdies and kept playing solid,” the Dane said.
“It is, in my eyes, probably the finest golf course you can ever play.”
Kuchar said he wasn’t disappointed with his score. He bogeyed 18, a hole he doublebogeyed at the Australian Masters on Sunday to give Adam Scott as two-stroke win.
“The back side today, certainly 16, 18, are really tough holes,” Kuchar said. “I was not able to finish those off as well as I would like to have today, but even par is not a bad score.”
Scott, who won the Australian PGA before his Australian Masters victory, had a quintuple-bogey 9 on the 12th hole and shot 75.
Trying to drive over a dogleg with his tee shot, Scott hit his first ball on the par-4, 440-yard 12th into the bushes in the right rough, then hit a provisional in the same area.
He didn’t find his first ball and his second was unplayable, so he returned to the tee and hit his fifth shot.