Why it’s Bye Bye Peyton & Hello Luck

Yeah it’s crazy to think Peyton Manning will be wearing another NFL team’s jersey. To many experts, he’s arguable the greatest QB of all time. Last year he showed why he’s a 4-time MVP winner. Without Peyton on the field the Colts were an embarrassing 2 – 14 and they were painful to watch with their QB by committee approach. Bringing Collins off the couch and out of retirement to play for the team was a desperation hail mary that wobbled out the Colts hands and fell about 30 yards short of the nearest receiver…it never had a chance of being complete.

Even with all that said I still don’t blame Jim Irsay for not resigning him at all. Remember people, the NFL is a business first and foremost! It’s a business that happens to play a sport not a sport that happens to be a business. The NFL is more then a just an ordinary flourishing business it’s an exploding sports oligopoly, yeah look up oligopoly it’s like a legal cash cow monopoly. I pulled that one out of a spelling bee I watched on ESPN! Okay back to my point. Imagine you were the owner of the Colts and you had to commit $XX million dollars and likely a multi-year contract with XX millions guaranteed to a XX year old player that’s had 3 serious neck surgeries (to manage his degenerative disc disease of the cervical spine) in the last 16 months and your team is about to draft the first can’t miss quarterback prospect since John Elway.

From a pure numbers game, this is as smart a business decision as it gets. This is a QB league with superstar rookie QB’s making more of an impact then ever before (Cam Newton, Andy Dalton) and players like Andrew Luck only come around every 10 or 20 years. Heck, even the Colts fans have been quietly wishing for the next Peyton behind the scenes and that might just be how their Luck goes come April!

You get the point! C’mon what would you do?

I know you might be saying “If I was the owner” I would sign Peyton for two years and have him groom Luck like the Favre-Rogers scenario in Green Bay. Yeah in an ideal world where money didn’t matter and Peyton wasn’t dealing with a potentially career ending disease of the spine and Andrew Luck actually needed two years of learning and purple horseshoes and green leprechauns existed that would all make sense.

That’s not the case here. So I’m 100% in support of the Colts decision and I hope Peyton returns, is 100% healthy and has a hell of year for a new team. I’ll leave you with one final picture to think about. Can you see it now…Peyton playing for the Redskins with Shannahan; or with Rex running the D and Peyton running the O with Jets; or how bout with Regis Philbin…er, Joe Philbin with the Dolphins.

Wherever Peyton ends up, one thing is for sure. Stories and drama like this is why we love the NFL; the storylines never take an off-season!