The football hangs in the air for a beat longer than any pass thrown by a professional quarterback should. It’s mesmerizing. It almost looks underthrown, but of course it’s not. It’s deliberate misdirection — Justin Verlander taking 15 miles off his fastball; Pavel Datsyuk’s chip shot over a sprawled goaltender; a Floyd Mayweather feint that you’re meant to block before the other fist hammers your midsection.
It’s Peyton Manning playing with the minds of the Dallas Cowboys. The football drops gently into the only place it was ever going to drop, the arms of Knowshon Moreno, finding him in stride as he sprints into the soft spot in the coverage. The Cowboys tried to disguise a blitz. It didn’t work. More than that, they should have known it wasn’t going to work. They blitzed, Moreno abandoned his blocking assignment and released into the open field. Cowboys lineman Caeser Rayford had to abandon his rush to chase him.
Rayford is six-foot-seven and weighs 267 pounds, and ran a 4.86 40-yard dash five years ago at the combine, before going undrafted by the NFL and putting in some time in the CFL and the Arena Football League. He’s a pass-rushing specialist who’s played a total of 51 snaps in the 2013 season, this being the first one of those snaps on which he’s found himself in pass coverage.
Moreno is five-foot-11 and 220 pounds, and ran a “slow” 4.60 40-yard dash four years ago at the combine, before being selected by the Broncos with the 12th overall pick. He’s run close to 100 pass routes this year already, knows precisely where and when the football will arrive and how many steps he has to take to get there.
Now, take all the stuff in the last two paragraphs, and imagine reams of that kind of information flooding your mind in the seconds before you yell “set-HUT” and proceed to make use of it to devastating effect. That’s a small taste of what it’s like to be Peyton Manning right now.
An opponent shows you something, and you exploit it. They show you something they want you to try to exploit, and it doesn’t even trip you up for a second. They abuse your defence. You abuse theirs right back. They double-team your Pro Bowl receiver named Thomas. You throw nine balls for 122 yards and two touchdowns to your tight end, also named Thomas. You throw 20 touchdowns for every interception. You’re on pace to smash almost every single-season quarterback record.
In short, you’re untouchable. You call a naked bootleg on a goal-line play but don’t even tell your own teammates — you want your offence to sell the handoff hard, and they’ll sell it better if they believe it’s real — and it works to perfection for your first rushing touchdown in five years. You need to watch it when you handle that celebratory slice of Papa John’s pizza after the game lest it turn to gold on the way to your mouth and chip a tooth.
The Dallas Cowboys just hung 48 points on you and lost. You’re 5-0, on such a roll that you might briefly consider playing the lottery before that savant-like mind calculates the odds and realizes it’s a stupid idea. Besides, you’ve already won the lottery, really. You’ve got the best collection of weapons you’ve ever had, and you used to have quite the arsenal back in the day.
It’s sometimes hard to tell who makes who in football, when the best players and teams are finely honed machines with every part humming in concert. Did Arian Foster make the Texans’ offensive line, or vice versa? Did Belichick make Brady? Did Calvin Johnson make Matthew Stafford?
You can ask the same questions about the first five games of this season: Did Manning make these Broncos? Would he be this good, this utterly dominant, without Demaryius Thomas, Wes Welker, Eric Decker and Julius Thomas combining to make covering every Broncos receiver at once all but impossible? Without an offensive line that grades out as the best in the NFL by a country mile? Without the league’s best special-teams unit consistently winning the field-position battle?
Probably not, but he did make these Broncos. Not by throwing the football, though. He did it by dragging a relatively young team to maturity. By browbeating his teammates into greatness.
When Broncos backup quarterback Brock Osweiler speaks about learning from Manning it’s with an odd mix of terror and jubilation. He knows how lucky he is to have the chance, and he also knows how hard it is to learn from a teacher who expects perfect results on every test. You’ll never be as good as him, but he won’t let up on you until you are.
There’s a reason the football world collectively laughed and shook its head a few weeks ago when a Sports Illustrated profile of Wes Welker revealed that Manning tapes lists of the league leaders in dropped passes to his receivers’ lockers with their names highlighted. Had that story been told about, say, Stafford, it would have come off as sour grapes — quarterback blames receivers for his own failings — but it’s not hard to imagine Manning taping up a list of his interceptions (well, this year so far, it’s “interception,” singular) in his own locker. (He does, in fact, tape up the completion-percentage leaders in his locker, but does it count as self-criticism if your name is at the top of the list?)
Having an all-time great quarterback makes great receivers better, and vice versa. But having a teammate who acts, essentially, like a motivational-speaker-slash-second-offensive-coordinator provides the kind of extra kick that can turn a good season into a great one, or a great one into an assault on the record books. And it goes beyond motivational ploys.
What Manning provides with his encyclopedic knowledge of blitzes, zone reads and the strengths and weaknesses of individual defenders around the NFL is the antidote to the split-second panic that leads to bad decisions and game-changing errors — like the one Manning’s opposite number, Tony Romo, committed with the game on the line in the fourth quarter, throwing a pick that effectively gifted the Broncos the win.
Knowledge might not be power — in football, more often, power is power. But knowledge is the slow-motion button. It’s what allows you to remain calm in the eye of that powerful storm; to loft a soft-toss pass over the savage teeth of an oncoming rush and know that it will land exactly where it needs to. Knowledge is the key to perfection, and so naturally Manning’s Broncos are perfect.