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Rams set to combat Manning's wizardry
• By Jim Thomas
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/foot...cle_5366c659-b3c1-5cf2-bef8-5ea6587124c6.html
New Rams safety Mark Barron has faced Peyton Manning only once, two years ago as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer.
It wasn’t the most monstrous of Manning performances: three touchdown passes, 242 yards in a 31-23 Denver victory. Even so, in the minds of Barron and his teammates, it was as if Manning knew every call by the Tampa defense. It’s like he knew what was coming.
“We came away from the game thinking he had cheated or something, the way he was calling it out,” Barron said. “Seriously. He’s a smart guy, man. He knows the game.”
Prof. Manning brings his act to St. Louis — along with the rest of the Denver Broncos — for a noon kickoff Sunday at the Edward Jones Dome. Of course, the show comes complete with all the gestures, gyrations and verbal signals that have become part and parcel of Manning’s game over these many years.
“Omaha! Omaha!”
“I did hear ‘Omaha,’” Barron said of that 2012 game. “He’s been doing that for years. He has a lot of terminology that he uses. It’s like he really has his own language.”
But is it real? Or fake?
“You don’t really know,” Barron said. “You don’t know if something he’s saying is actually real or if it’s a dummy call.”
Since Manning won’t be supplying decoder rings Sunday, it’s up to the Rams to figure that all out. Or ... just ignore it.
“You try not to think about that at all,” linebacker Jo-Lonn Dunbar said. “I think he has way too many code words.”
Nothing personal Peyton, but Dunbar doesn’t plan on listening.
“You don’t want to play that cat-and-mouse game with him,” Dunbar said.
Defensive tackle Kendall Langford agrees.
“It’s crowd noise,” Langford. “You can’t get caught up in listening to that because it’ll slow you down. Just go out there and play your game. Do your job. Do your 1/11th, and hopefully we can get it done.”
Teams have tried just about everything in an effort to slow Manning down over the years. Blitzing like crazy. Dropping eight men in coverage. Distracting him with circus clowns. Not much seems to work, unless you have Seattle’s defensive personnel or Bill Belichick’s brain.
Make no mistake, the Rams have studied those tapes, looking to beg, borrow or steal anything they can to slow Manning.
But even for a defensive coordinator as creative as Gregg Williams, you don’t reinvent the wheel 10 games into the season. Especially when you’re facing Manning.
“Really, you don’t change a lot of things you’re doing,” Williams said. “When people start doing that type of stuff is when big accidents happen. We’ve just got to be who we are. We’ve got to be a lot more focused in a couple of situations, in a couple of formations, that they’ll present.”
So at its most basic level, the Rams will try to change looks as much as possible in an effort to keep Manning from zeroing in on what they’re doing — or decipher any pattern to what they’re doing.
Hard as it may seem, if they can take away Manning’s first read, that might give the Rams’ pass-rush — which has been coming on lately — an extra split-second to get in Manning’s face.
Manning doesn’t like getting hit. He has been known to get angry at his blockers when that happens. But he doesn’t get hit much, in large part because he almost always knows where he’s going with the ball and gets the ball out so quickly.
And of course, give the Broncos’ offensive line, re-shuffled as it has been lately, a healthy share of the credit. Manning has been sacked only nine times, a league low, and has been hit only 24 times this season, again a league low.
It’s that way almost every year, which has allowed him to keep upright and keep firing over his 17 NFL seasons in an amazingly consistent and productive fashion.
He enters the Dome on Sunday having thrown at least two touchdown passes in an NFL record 15 consecutive games.
He has thrown at least one TD pass in 48 straight contests, the third-longest such streak in league history.
The only player in NFL history to win five MVP awards, Manning set the NFL all-time record for career TD passes earlier this season. That mark is at 520 TD passes and counting. Should the game somehow be close in the fourth quarter, well, the 13-time Pro Bowler has led a game-winning drive in the fourth quarter or overtime 50 times.
(Yes, that’s also a league record.)
There are few head coaches this side of Belichick who know Manning as well as Rams coach Jeff Fisher. Since Manning entered the league as the No. 1 overall draft pick in 1998, Fisher faced him 19 times as head coach of the Tennessee Titans.
Fisher went 6-13 in those games, with one of those victories coming in a 1999 divisional playoff game the season the Titans advanced to the Super Bowl against Dick Vermeil’s Rams. That’s a winning percentage of just .316, but it’s slightly above the career winning percentage of all opponents against Manning in the regular season: .301, on 75 wins and 174 losses.
“I’ve said this before, it’s like playing a computer,” Fisher said. “That’s what he is. He runs that offense. He’s going to put them in the best possible position. He’s nearly impossible to fool and is hard to get down.”
There were years when Fisher had his entire defense wear wristbands with numbers on them signifying various defensive calls. Not only that, Fisher had the Titans’ defense switch to different wristbands every quarter.
“We couldn’t talk (on the field) because he recognizes your terminology and your calls and things like that,” Fisher said.
So they’d play defense by numbers. Numbers that changed every quarter. If the call was ”Three!” in the second quarter, it would signal something entirely different than what ”Three!” meant in the first quarter.
Did that work?
“No,” Fisher said, laughing. “It may have for a quarter. I don’t know.”
Over the years, Fisher has tried just about every way imaginable to defend Manning.
“Yeah, and we’ve had some success,” Fisher said. “And we’re expecting to again. That’s the way you go into it.”
