Legacy on the line for Manning and Brady
The Super Bowl winner may well come out of the hammers-of-gods fight that will go on in Seattle between the Seahawks and the 49ers, and the game-related earthquakes that are traditionally measured by local seismologists may just be the result of the way the teams collide. That game will probably look like football in Valhalla Penitentiary.
But Tom Brady-Peyton Manning will look like Hollywood football, with quarterbacks who will be played by Matt Damon and Brad Pitt in the movie, respectively. And media overkill and all, it deserves the attention. It’s the greatest rivalry in the NFL, it really is. Two generational quarterbacks, 14 years of competition, seven Super Bowl appearances, four Super Bowl wins, Saturday Night Live appearances.
They last met in 2007. That was Roger Goodell’s first season as commissioner, back when the league was still REALLY trying to pretend concussions weren’t a thing. The second-best QB rating, behind Manning, belonged to Damon Huard. Vince Young was the rookie of the year. Bill Parcells was coaching the Dallas Cowboys.
It’s also jarring to think that Manning has won a Super Bowl more recently than Brady has. If Brady wins this weekend, though, he breaks a tie with John Elway for the most Super Bowl appearances in history, with six; if Manning wins, he gets there for a third time, and could tie his brother Eli with a second championship.
Brady and Manning meet almost every year, and this season Brady brought the Patriots back from 24 points down to win in overtime back when Rob Gronkowski was still able-bodied. It wasn’t Manning’s fault, though he threw for a season-low 150 yards; no, a New England punt to Wes Welker — the man whose key drop in Super Bowl XLVI made Gisele screech “My husband cannot f------ throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time” — bounced off a backup cornerback and was recovered by the Patriots, and bam, ball game.
What Brady-Manning should remind us is that Gisele Bündchen may be a Brazilian supermodel, but she understands the basic tenet of quarterbacking that we sometimes forget.
She only watches when Brady is playing, but she has grasped that even if you’re one of the two or three or four greatest quarterbacks of all time, in an era which has encouraged passing like crazy, on teams with great weapons or all-time coaches, you can only control so much. We treat quarterbacks like they alone determine victory or defeat, like Brady beats Manning or Manning beats Brady (and Bill Belichick, Manning’s truest rival, always Belichick, scheming in his hoodie, oh yes, scheming on the inside).
Last week, this space went 2-2, but picked all four winners correctly. This space always aims for a complicated legacy.
THE PICKS
San Francisco (+3.5) at Seattle
Regarding quarterbacks: Russell Wilson’s passing yards in Seattle’s last five games: 199, 206, 108, 172, 103, with a total of four touchdowns and three interceptions. The first of those was in that 19-17 loss in San Francisco. And in Seattle’s first game against the 49ers this year, Wilson threw for 142 yards and Seattle won 29-3, because the 49ers turned the ball over five times, and committed about 700 penalties. No, this game will probably ride on defences and mistakes and the badass running competition between Marshawn Lynch and Frank Gore. The 49ers haven’t lost since Nov. 17, and that includes beating Seattle 19-17, and beating the only team that beat Seattle in Seattle (the Arizona Cardinals), and of course winning two playoff games. Can they win in Seattle, where the Seahawks have turned them into hamburger in their last two meetings? I dunno, why not?
Pick: San Francisco 17, Seattle 16
New England (+5.5) at Denver
Denver’s offence this season was just a wrecking machine; the Broncos scored 10.1 points per game more than the second-place teams, Chicago and New England, which is the biggest gap since at least 1950; I stopped looking after that, since they stopped letting offensive linemen catch passes in 1951. The nexthighest gap? The Patriots when they went 16-0, and outscored the nearest team by 8.4 points per. They didn’t stop until they met a hammerpunching defence, and New England doesn’t have one. The Patriots do, however, have this brutish new running game with LeGarrette Blount, but their receivers are basically Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola and ... Austin Collie? Michael Hoomanawanui? You? Basically, unless Blount runs like a freight train again, and unless Belichick finds a way to confound the most powerful Manning-led offence he has ever faced, by a lot ... and unless Manning screws it up and Brady almost singlehandedly creates magic again, thereby potentially undermining the thesis of this column ...
Pick: Denver 34, New England 30
Last week: 2-2
Season: 123-132-8