Peyton's Last Dance?

Brett Favre will be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday.  His career ended on a Monday night in Minnesota in December 2010, when he was pile driven into the frozen ground by Bears defensive end Corey Wootton and suffered the last of his many concussions.

John Elway's Hall of Fame career ended a little differently.  He went out on top.  At the end of Super Bowl XXXIII in n January 1999, he took a knee and then was carried off the field after being named MVP, as the Broncos won their second straight title.  Seventeen years later, another Broncos quarterback has a chance to write a similar script.

Super Bowl 50 will most likely be Peyton Manning's final game.  While he hasn't come out and said it, Peyton has given all indications that this is it.  He even went so far as to tell Bill Belichick that this was his "last rodeo" at the end of the AFC Championship Game.  If that's not an indication he's leaning towards retirement, I don't know what is.  Win or lose, but especially if the Broncos win, Sunday's game will probably be the last time we see Peyton Manning on the field as an NFL quarterback.  Will his Hall of Fame career end the same way Elway's and Michael Strahan's and Jerome Bettis's and Ray Lewis's did?

I don't think this news (keep in mind, none of this is official, it's all purely speculation) surprises anyone.  There are a lot of people, myself included, who figured this would be Peyton's last year.  When he got hurt and benched in Week 10, some wondered if that was already the last time we'd ever see him on a football field in uniform.  Personally, I never thought Peyton Manning would go out that way.  If his season had ended against the Chiefs in Week 10, I bet Peyton Manning would've come back for another year.  After all, he's still under contract for 2016.  But the Football Gods had other ideas.

It's been clear for a while that Peyton's career has been nearing its end.  Some wondered if he'd ever be able to come back from the neck surgery that forced him to miss the entire 2011 season, which led to his being fired by the Colts.  Denver took a chance that he wasn't done, and the Broncos were rewarded for it.  He wasn't the Peyton Manning of old, but he was close.  Their offense put up points at a historic pace.  They went to a Super Bowl in his second year with the team (only to get humiliated by Seattle).  Last season he didn't look like himself in a playoff loss to, of all teams, Indianapolis.  As it turns out, he was playing through an injury for the final two months of last season.

The 2015 edition of Peyton Manning was nothing like past vintages.  He's no longer the best player on his team.  Instead of trying to outscore you, the Broncos were asking Manning to do just enough to win the game while the best defense in the league took care of the rest.  It was unlike anything we'd ever seen.  He'd turned into "Peyton Manning: Game Manager."  But the results were the same.  And there were still glimpses of the old Peyton (like that game-winning drive against the Steelers in the Divisional playoff).

Will his legacy be defined by Super Bowl 50?  Absolutely not!  Manning's not going to match Brady's four titles and three Super Bowl MVPs.  Hell, even his little brother has two rings and was Super Bowl MVP both times.  Yes, a 1-3 Super Bowl record looks a lot worse than 2-2.  But how many quarterbacks have started four Super Bowls?  (For the record, there are six others: Tom Brady, John Elway, Terry Bradshaw, Joe Montana, Roger Staubach and Jim Kelly.)  And, don't forget, Peyton has already led his team to a championship.  Only 30 other quarterbacks in the Super Bowl era can make that claim.

So, no, Peyton Manning doesn't "need" to win Super Bowl 50.  But wouldn't it be the perfect ending of the story?  He gets benched, misses five games, returns as a backup only to enter in relief in the second half of the last regular season game, which his team wins to clinch home field advantage in the playoffs.  He leads a comeback win in the first playoff game, then gets back to the Super Bowl by winning the final matchup in a rivalry that defined a generation.  There's only one possible way for it to end.  Right?  Riding off into the sunset (I'm assuming on a white bronco) as a Super Bowl champion.

Manning could write the same ending as Elway, which would be only fitting.  Because there are so many parallels between them, and not just because they're both Broncos.  Elway lost his first three trips to the Super Bowl before rewriting the story with two wins at the end.  The last of those wins was 17 seasons ago, which just happened to be the rookie year of the No. 1 pick out of Tennessee.  Now Elway is Manning's boss.  He brought Peyton to Denver with one goal in mind--winning a Super Bowl.

When the Broncos upset the Packers in Super Bowl XXXII, Pat Bowlen famously said after he was handed the Vince Lombardi Trophy, "This one's for John."  Just picture the scene on Sunday night.  Orange and blue confetti is streaming down, and Elway says on the victory podium, "This one's for Peyton."