End of An Era: Peyton Manning Parts From The Colts After 14 Seasons

This time last year I would have laughed in someone’s face  if they had told me that Peyton Manning would be released by the  Indianapolis Colts this off-season. It would have seemed like a completely unrealistic idea for such an event to occur. Manning is a sure-fire Hall of Famer, with a record setting four MVP awards and some of the most prodigious and gaudy passing statistics of anyone who has ever played the game. In his career he also led the Colts to a Super Bowl victory in 2006. It was their first appearance in the big game since days of  legendary quarterback Johnny Unitas. Manning had clearly become the face of the franchise so it would have come as a real shock to me for any such releasing to take place, but that is exactly what happened last week, the long-standing relationship came to an end and I found myself feeling a bit dazed. A teary-eyed Peyton delivered the news in a press conference and the story immediately took the sporting world by storm.

Yeah Manning is getting up there in age (he turns 36 in two weeks), and yeah he was out all last season with a neck injury that essentially left the Colts without a quarterback, but still the relationship between the “Midwest Mustangs” (my own little nickname I’ve coined for them in order to not say Colts over and over again) and Manning seemed like a bond too thick to sever. Apparently no union is too strong to be broken, even if you increased the worth of the very franchise releasing you by 366%. That’s right, Manning and the success he brought to “Hoosier Ponies” (second nickname, both are most certainly copyrighted, so don’t try to steal them) increased the team’s worth by $233 million dollars over his 14-year tenure in Indy. These ridiculous facts are not something that I heard from an unreliable source like my Sicilian uncle Mickie, no these were based on a Forbes Magazine study that was done on all 32 NFL teams. In 1998 when Manning was drafted first overall out of University of Tennessee to the “I-Town Pre-Pubescent Horses” (Yeah I did it again, I’m pretty sure I could go all day) their worth was last in the league a whopping $47 million below the league median team value.  Although the entire NFL has seen an increase in the same timespan (the average increase was about a 263%) however, the Colts surge was over 100% more than that and most of the upswing can attributed to Manning and his awesomeness.

So now the entire league is at a bit of a loss for words. I would guess that most of the NFL teams in the league were just as shocked as I was to see this story unfold but that does not mean that they are not chomping at the bit to claim the highly-touted free agent for themselves. Manning has the skill to take a below-par franchise to the playoffs or a mid-level team to the Super Bowl, he is truly that good. More than a dozen teams have already contacted the 11-time Pro Bowler since last week in hopes of landing him in their cities. Peyton is like the Moby Dick of free agency, the great white whale. So far however, most teams are looking a bit like Captain Ahab, as none have seemed to catch (pun intended) his eye. Surely sometime in the near future a team will win the Manning sweepstakes and be far better off for it. His time is Indy is over but it is clear that his career is not, now I just need to get used to the idea of seeing his name on a jersey without a horseshoe on it.