When you look back at Peyton Manning’s recent career before 2015, you can really only pinpoint one nightmare season and it was pretty rough. Manning was forced to sit out all of 2011 with a neck injury, watched his little brother win another Super Bowl over a team that has owned him in his career and then listen to how the team he was on at the time, the Indianapolis Colts, should shove him out the door and draft Andrew Luck. Which they did.
So that 2011 season will be difficult to top in Peyton Manning’s mind, but the 2015-16 season is right on its heels. It’s been a particularly bad year for Peyton Manning.
Far be it for me to impugn the the journalistic integrity of Al Jazeera America. Certainly Osama Bin Laden’s favorite news station has done enough to earn my trust over the years. Certainly ISIS’s favorite cable network would never put out any report that hadn’t been vetted by the best, most loyal ex-Hamas members not currently on trial for crimes against humanity. So, no, don’t take this as a criticism of Al Jazeera America, Al Qaeda’s official PR department. I’m sure they did their best.
I mean, it’s not the usual western journalist getting decapitated by the Taliban kind of news Al Jazeera gets all sexually excited over, so you can forgive them for failing at this whole “news” thing. Not once during their HGH investigation did anyone shotu “Death to America.” They were kind of out of their element.
In Al Jazeera’s report, they alleged that Peyton Manning, and a few other NFL players, were supplied performance enhancing drugs. There was only one problem with the report, it was complete and total horse hockey. So false, in fact, that not long after it aired Al Jazeera had to pretend they actually didn’t allege Manning took HGH at all. Even though that was the only reason the report made national news to begin with.
The whole lie made Peyton Manning make this face.
“I rotate between being angry, furious… disgusted is really how I feel, sickened by it,” Manning said. “I’m not sure I understand how someone can make something up about somebody, admit that he made it up, and yet it somehow gets published in a story…. It’s complete trash, garbage and there’s more adjectives I’d like to use.”
Turns out the guy that pointed the finger at Manning during the report decided to retract that finger. He recanted any indication that Manning used HGH in a YouTube clip. I’m sure this has nothing at all to do with the fact that Manning could sue his ass off.
There’s of course plenty of problems for Al Jazeera over this report, including the fact that by putting Manning’s wife Ashley in the report, they’ve violated her medical privacy, as Manning states time and again in that video and there can be plenty of legal ramifications for that.
Manning healthy enough to back up Sunday. Then what?
I’m not exactly how healthy Manning is right now, but he’s feeling good enough to suit up for the Broncos Sunday against the San Diego Chargers and back up Brock Osweiler. He’s saying all the right things about it.
“I’ll do what I can to help the team, help Brock, so I’m happy to be more a part of it now than just being in street clothes and kind of quarantined in the indoor facility working out on my own,” Manning told reporters at the team’s weekly press conference. “To be more a part of the team is a positive step.”
Statistically Manning was in the midst of the worst season of his career, completing just 59.9 percent of his passes for 2,180 yards, nine touchdowns and 17 interceptions. At 39 years old his body was finally betraying his mind, but he could still sling it sometimes and he had the Broncos perfect for months.
Osweiler is unquestionably the future of the franchise and I was an advocate of Manning calling it a career last season after he suffered a late-season, injury riddled swoon. He came back, though, and he may come back again. Truthfully, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Manning in a Broncos uniform this season as Osweiler has dealt with some injury issues of his own.
There could still be a few twists and turns in the Peyton Manning story yet.
