Canal Street Chronicles: The Truth About Peyton Manning

We all know Peyton Manning is a Football God, right? Manning is celebrated as one of the best QBs of this generation and even thought of as among the best to ever play the game. There’s no debating it, and it’s one of the reasons the Colts are thought of as favorites in the big game. So that much is settled. Wait a minute, we’ve get a last-second point of disagreement.

Saints blog Canal Street Chronicles is taking the negative on this debate, and while praising Manning as one of the most dangerous players in the game, he does have a small chink in the armor.

Manning actually plays worse, statistically, in the playoffs than he does in the regular season.

CSC has put together a table of Manning’s regular season stats and post-season stats since 2003 and found that the arrow points down in every major category. Some stats go down a little, some go down quite a bit. Manning’s interception to TD ratio is not as sterling come playoff time.

Conversely, Drew Brees’ playoff performances have been better than his average regular-season games. Of course, Brees has a much smaller sample size in the comparison (5 games to 14 for Manning), but at least it’s something for Saints fans to hang their hat on.

To view all the stats and analysis, head over to Canal Street Chronicles. For a summary, we’ll go with this:

So, what can we expect from Manning and the Colts? Well, 25 points, for starters. But also, consider this: Manning has won a Super Bowl ring. One ring. Only one ring. That means that in eight postseason campaigns, only once has he managed to avoid having that one bad game that was sufficient to knock his team out of the playoffs. That exception came, ironically, in 2006—by far his worst offseason statistically, other than the lone disaster in 2002. That year, the Colts’ defense carried the team into and through the Super Bowl—even though Peyton picked up the MVP for his 81.8-rated game. Had the defense not played so well, the Colts might have lost in the opening round to Kansas City, when Peyton had a 71.9 rating. More likely, it would have been the following week against Baltimore, when his rating was 39.6! Manning’s worst game since his playoff debut came in his Super Bowl year!