By JUDY BATTISTA
Published: September 18, 2010
INDIANAPOLIS — Peyton Manning used to tell his father that he would almost rather the Indianapolis Colts not make the playoffs if they were going to lose, preferring the hope for the future provided by finishing the regular season with a few consecutive victories than the crashing emptiness of losing the final game of the season.
Manning would surely have chosen a different ending to last season, when the Colts lost in the Super Bowl to the Saints. While New Orleans embarked on a six-month party, the Colts organization fell into an off-season funk so unpleasant that defensive end Dwight Freeney admitted he still became a bit nauseated whenever he heard the Saints called the Super Bowl champions.
“It hurt him bad,” Archie Manning said of his son Peyton. “But what are you going to do? He didn’t mope around. It made him more determined than he’s ever been.”
That is a startling thought for opponents of the Colts, who host the Giants on Sunday night. Manning won his fourth N.F.L. Most Valuable Player award last season with a computerlike command of his offense despite enduring pain. He had traction therapy three times a day for a pinched nerve in his neck simply so he could practice, his father said. That made his 68.8 percent completion rate, his career high, even more stunning.
But last week in the Colts’ locker room, it was clear Manning had a new pain in his neck. The Colts lost their season opener to the Houston Texans, 34-24, in an uncharacteristically disjointed performance that he said lacked flow.
The Colts fell behind early and never really put pressure on the Texans in the second half, even though Manning completed 40 of 57 passes for 433 yards and 3 touchdowns with no interceptions. Statistically, it was vintage Manning: 70.2 completion percentage and 109.8 quarterback rating. But the result was a marked contrast from the teams’ last meeting, in which Houston opened a 17-0 lead early in the second quarter, only to watch the Colts rally for a 35-27 victory that featured their most devastating threat, quick-strike scoring.
It was the third time in the Manning era that the Colts lost the opener. (The first was his rookie year, 1998, when the Colts went 3-13.) And it was the first time since early 2008 that the Colts lost consecutive games that they were actually trying to win.
Questions about bouncing back and must wins are rare in Indianapolis. This is, after all, the franchise whose success has driven the leaguewide debate about resting starters late in the season. But even all the happy talk about playing against his brother Eli and wondering whether the former Colts backup Jim Sorgi might have taken some insider knowledge to the Giants — “I would just say be careful of what you think you know,” Manning replied — could not ease his grumpiness over starting a season in such unfamiliar fashion.
“This is 2010, and what’s happened in the past is past,” Manning said. “We’ve got to be careful saying we always win the next one after a loss. There are no guarantees.”
More worrisome for the Colts is the way Manning, the sturdiest of quarterbacks this side of Brett Favre — whom Archie Manning calls a freak of nature — was tossed around. In an unofficial tally by The Indianapolis Star, Manning was knocked down 10 times last Sunday, including on the first two Colts plays, which were the short, quick passes that have been the equivalent of Bubble Wrap for Manning for more than a decade. The Texans sacked him twice. Last season, Manning was sacked a career-low 10 times.
He sometimes taps Freeney on the helmet before a game and tells him to go after the opposing quarterback. Last Sunday, Manning knew what it was like to be on the other side.
The Colts’ offensive linemen, riddled with injuries, did not play any preseason games together, and Manning was quick to deflect the blame from them. The Texans generated most of their pass rush without blitzing, a payoff from the 2006 decision to make defensive end Mario Williams the first overall draft pick with the sole intent to defeat the Colts.
The Giants also present a defense that can apply pressure without blitzing, although they focused on stopping the run in the first half last week against Carolina. The Panthers have a serious running game. Last week, the Colts rushed for 44 yards; last season, they had the league’s lowest-ranked rushing offense.
“We have pretty high standards in terms of what we believe in terms of the way pass protection should be handled,” Colts Coach Jim Caldwell said. “One time is too many. He got hit a few more times than normal.”
Across the locker room from Manning, Freeney said that wondering how the Colts would respond was for fans. In the team’s mind, he said, everything is fixable. Freeney said he would tell the younger players that the team was not always going to play its best game. But Manning, his brow furrowed and his disappointment brimming, tilted toward tough love.
“Over all, nobody did good enough,” he said. “We played decent at times. Decent at times doesn’t win a game for you.”
How many more of the biggest games Manning will win is a question that will hover over him this season — and his career. At 34, Manning is the dominant quarterback of his generation, but it is repeatedly noted that he does not have the most rings.
Manning joked that he hoped to still be around when the Giants and the Colts play again in four years but that he would probably be “out of eligibility” by the time they play in 2018, when he will be 42. Manning has been relatively injury free, but even his father said it was impossible to tell how his body and skills would deteriorate as time marched on, and what that could do to his Super Bowl prospects.
Archie Manning has trouble relating to that. He played on dismal Saints teams and never got close to a Super Bowl. (A 2011 Super Bowl trip is part of the grand prize for Canon’s “Why Do You Love Football” amateur photography contest, for which he is a judge.) But he is good friends with the Dallas Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach, and he is struck by the way it still gnaws at Staubach that the Cowboys lost the Super Bowl to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1978 season. He also saw that kind of agony in his family this off-season. Like everyone in the N.F.L., he is watching the fallout closely.
“I don’t know if any of us think enough about the losing coach, the losing team, the losing quarterback in the Super Bowl,” Archie Manning said.
“You don’t know how many shots you’re going to get. He had one there and they didn’t get it. But I don’t think it’s kept him from thinking they can get another one or two.”
(Source: A version of this article appeared in print on September 19, 2010, on page SP1 of the New York edition.)