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There are a few comments about the Rams in this article but most are about relocation. Click the link below and scroll down to read those comments and the entire article.
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http://mmqb.si.com/monday-morning-qb-cris-carter-jordy-nelson-navorro-bowman-nfl
Fallout, Fall Guys and Fingertips: A Week in the NFL
The preseason claims two important players, Cris Carter's senseless advice and Peyton Manning's surprising admission about his throwing hand. It's all here, plus notes on a Niner's return and a new MMQBer
by Peter King
The Rams host Seattle on opening weekend. In the past three seasons, Seattle is 1-2 at the Edward Jones Dome and 41-12 in all other stadiums.
Perhaps more worrisome for this year’s offensive-line-challenged Seahawks: Wilson’s been sacked at a rate of 2.4 times per game in his career. In his past two games at St. Louis, he’s been sacked 10 times.
----------
This happened at Dallas camp, with the Cowboys' first-team offense driving down the field against the St. Louis first-team defense. The two teams had been fighting for much of the past 20 minutes, and when Tony Romo came to the line of scrimmage, the Rams’ 3-yard line, another skirmish broke out on the adjacent field, all the way at the other end.
Ten of the Rams on defense, across from Romo, began running to join the fight. Romo looked around. It was 11 Cowboys against one Ram now. “If they want to fight,” Romo said later, “let 'em fight. We’re gonna score.” He handed the ball to a back (didn’t see which one) and Dallas, indeed, scored an 11-on-1 touchdown.
**********
• Two Super Bowl contenders lost top-five players, perhaps for the season. The reigning first-team all-pro center, Maurkice Pouncey, broke his ankle in a preseason game against Green Bay; he’ll have surgery, and his timetable to return is uncertain, but he’s gone for a while. And though the Packers weren’t announcing anything, NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reported the initial diagnosis for wideout Jordy Nelson was a torn ACL, after the wideout landed awkwardly Sunday. Nelson last year set a Packer record with 1,519 receiving yards and is Aaron Rodgers’ favorite target, and his loss would make the Packers significantly less multiple in the deep-receiving game. No wonder Rodgers was downcast after the game. “It’s difficult to lose a guy like that in a meaningless game,” Rodgers said.
----------
• There has to be a common-sense approach to the preseason. It’s easy to say, “Just napalm the damn thing.” After days like Sunday—the two-injury debacle in Pittsburgh, the Cowboys worried about playing on a field with a terrible reputation in Santa Clara, the Giants reeling over losing six of the nine safeties on the roster in the first two preseason weeks—it makes sense to ask this question: When is the NFL going to come to its senses and reduce the preseason from four to two games? “Cut it down, maybe, to a couple of games,” Rodgers concurred.
The exhibition games are fan-cheaters; charging full price for the games is robbery, which is the most no-duh statement in the NFL today. The NFL in the 2011 CBA reduced the amount of padded full-contact practices teams can have, and eliminated two-a-days in the summer. They should now follow by cutting out two more chances of injury. Do the math: If Jordy Nelson suits up 17 or 18 times instead of 19 or 20, it follows that he’d have less exposure to the kind of injury that can kill a team’s season in a totally meaningless exercise.
-------------
• You are kidding me, Cris Carter—and you are kidding me, NFL. My first reaction to the story of Carter telling NFL rookies at the 2014 Rookie Symposium that they have to find a “fall guy” in a player’s “crew” who will take the blame when the player commits a crime: My jaw dropped.
Precisely. Carter apologized, and though the NFL tried to distance itself from Carter’s idiotic remarks, how could the league have placed the offending video of his talk on NFL.com until yanking it Sunday? This is so offensive it boggles the mind that some person with the NFL would say, Let’s show the world this great advice about obstructing justice from a Hall of Fame hero to impressionable rookies. Also: How could NFL VP Troy Vincent, who is in charge of the symposium, have allowed Carter to spew such venom? Carter, by the way, was in his yellow Pro Football Hall of Fame blazer. In all ways, this is the biggest example of inmates running the NFL asylum that I’ve seen in years.
-----------
The fallout over Terrell Suggs’ hit on Sam Bradford continued. I side with Suggs, who dove at Bradford because he wasn’t sure if Bradford was going to hand off or keep a read-option-appearing play in Saturday night’s Ravens-Eagles game. Suggs said if you’re going to call such a play for a quarterback with ACL reconstructions the past two seasons, you do it at your own peril. I absolutely agree with Suggs. Chip Kelly shouldn’t be putting Bradford in such a position to be hit violently anyway—and certainly not in a dumb preseason game.
------------
Lots of reasons to say ‘Wow’ about NaVorro Bowman this morning.
Question to Bowman on Friday: “How long does it take you to get ready to practice or play right now?”
Bowman: “About two hours. The massaging and the bending, the flexing of the knee. Once I do that I have a five-minute period where it just needs to relax and then I’m ready to go.”
Question: “Before the injury, how long would it take you to be ready?”
Bowman: “Nothing. No time.”
What a story. And what a factor he needs to be. You might say it’s almost as important for Bowman to be great for the Niners to win this season as it is for Colin Kaepernick to have a bounce-back year. Look what happened to San Francisco’s D this off-season. No Justin Smith; retired. No Patrick Willis; retired. No Aldon Smith; cut. No Chris Borland to train as the next great inside ‘backer; retired, shockingly.
So the heat’s on Bowman, and from watching him at practice Friday (he was a traffic cop at practice, very mobile, and more vocal than I recall) and talking to him afterward, he likes the idea of the pressure.
Bowman sure knows how to make an entrance. Until Sunday night against Dallas, Bowman hadn’t played in a game since shredding multiple left knee ligaments on the ugly goal-line play in the NFC Championship Game in Seattle in January 2014. He played three plays against the Cowboys. From his spot in the nerve center of the Niner defense, Bowman stoned Darren McFadden up the middle for a one-yard gain on first down. He stoned McFadden over right tackle on second down; loss of one. He stopped running back Lance Dunbar on a dumpoff pass from Tony Romo on third down; loss of one. Three plays, three tackles, two of them for losses. That was an impressive three minutes of football right there.
He attributed his strong series to the mental work he did in his year off. “You just try to better yourself,” Bowman told reporters after the game. “I think that’s what the greats do. They find ways to learn in different ways, not just as a player. That’s what the year off gave me. I just want to show that I’m a student of game and not just player.”
On Friday, Bowman didn’t have much trepidation talking about the fateful day, or fateful play, when his left knee got torqued to the side and collapsed by 550 pounds of football player late in the loss at Seattle.
“I thought I ended my career,” Bowman said Friday afternoon in the bowels of Levi’s Stadium. There was no emotion about it. Very clinical. “I knew how my leg was, and how my knee was going off to the side, and you don’t want to see that. Then Dr. [James] Andrews told me there was a possibility I wouldn’t get back to the way I was. So anytime I felt pain going through the rehab, I just thought of that and fought through that.”
Two hours of prep work, daily. Just to be able to practice. Seventeen months of arduous, painful work to try to be NaVorro Bowman, all-pro linebacker, again … while so much of the team is crashing and burning around him.
Has it been worth it?
Pause. Three, four seconds.
“I don’t play this game for money,” he said. “I play it for respect and ultimately to make it to the Hall of Fame. That’s what drives me. In order to be the best, this work comes with it, and I’m willing to fight through it.”
He said he wants to eventually play pain-free, and he wants to feel like he did two years ago, when he was at the top of his game—and at the top of the game for any inside linebacker playing. He and Willis, together, were state of the art, and no combination was close for second place at inside ‘backer among 3-4 teams. He said he doesn’t think he’ll feel that way all season, and he’s not sure exactly how to describe the difference in the knee; he just knows it’s not the same as it was two summers ago.
“I see it coming now,” Bowman said. “I can see the light and that’s what’s driving me. When camp first started I was able to hit a spin move and that didn’t hurt so now it’s, Can I run through a person? Or get fallen on? Or be able to get up off the ground and not say Ahhhh! [In discomfort.] Those are the things I am still worried about, but it’s going to come one day. But right now, the knee’s on my mind.”
He’s getting used to a lot of new faces. The team’s been blown up, from the coaching staff to the defense, since he last played. Clinical Bowman voice again. “I embrace change,” he said. “We all have to adapt to change. The coaches have jobs, we have jobs. The fact that they need me as a player and as a leader, that’s what drives me also.”
I find one thing about the Niner dynamic fascinating right now. Bowman and Borland, health permitting, were set to be the next great combo platter of inside linebacker for the next three or four years. Bowman’s injury was one of the factors that made Borland play so much last year—and, it turns out, he played very well.
So here’s Bowman, who stones people, playing. And Borland isn’t. Bowman, a Harry Carson block-of-granite type, and Willis keyed a defense that went 14 straight games in 2011 without allowing a rushing touchdown. Three times he was first-team all-pro, the classic kind of run-stuffer who also had the ability to turn and run with tight ends. Bowman's fought through it all, and Borland chose another path. Concerned about the impact of football on his long-term health—a rising tide among current players—Borland walked away from the game after one starry season.
“I was shocked,” Bowman said. “I was shocked because he is so young and he’s put so much time into the game and to walk away from it after your first successful year in the NFL, that was mind-boggling to me. We are all grown men and he’s done his research and made his choice so, but … well, for me, you’re going to have to carry me off the field.”
They’ve already done that once. In Seattle. That’s one of the things that makes this comeback compelling. There’s nothing dramatic about the way Bowman says this. It’s simply his ethos. He’s a man making a choice, the way Borland made his. And the 49ers, in this seismic season, need Bowman desperately, and he knows it.
---------
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Six things you need to know about Peyton Manning, at 39.
1. He still doesn’t have feeling in the fingertips on his right hand. “I can’t feel anything in my fingertips,” Manning said Thursday. “It’s crazy. I’ve talked to a doctor recently who said, Don’t count on the feeling coming back. It was hard for me for about two years, because one doctor told me I could wake up any morning and it might come back. So you wake up every day thinking, Today’s the day! Then it’s not.” I find his production all the more impressive since four neck procedures caused him to miss the 2011 season, and caused him to lose—maybe forever—the comfortable grip on the football. At 36, 37 and 38, his combined completion percentage is 2.8 percentage points higher than in his career before the neck problems; in Indy, he averaged 28.5 touchdown passes per season; in Denver, it’s 43.7. He may play games this year without wearing the glove he used last year, but anytime there’s weather or wind, expect the glove to be worn.
2. He traces the physically crummy end to last season not to age but to a vomitous December night in San Diego. Before the Broncos’ 14th game, in San Diego, Manning says a bug he caught from his sick daughter made him violently ill. “I threw up all night,” he said. “Then, in the game, I moved to the right on a simple scramble and my quad cramped on me. It lingered. I couldn’t shake it the rest of the year. I really studied it hard this off-season, whether it could linger into this year or whether it was isolated. I just think I got dehydrated, and that caused it. I don’t think you can blame it on my age. It was just an isolated thing. I’ve made it through every other season, and this off-season I went through a state of the union physically, if you will, and I started training earlier and made some dietary changes.” He’s confident about his health, to be sure. But he also knows there’s no insurance for 39-year-old quarterbacks.
3. John Elway The Boss feels bad about not being able to be John Elway Of The Fraternity of Quarterbacks. The Broncos were looking for some Manning insurance, in case he came up hobbling again this year, and were looking for some cap savings, too. So Elway, the Broncos’ GM, cut Manning’s salary by $4 million; he can make it up in incentives, but the cut was awkward for both sides. “That was really hard,” Elway said on the side of the practice field at camp. “The conversation was hard. A lot of times, as much as you like to say you want those things to stay business, they always end up being a little personal. That’s the hard part, because I have a great deal of respect for Peyton. I think, hopefully, Peyton will be able to look back in a few years, especially if we have a really good year, and see that, ultimately, the decision was made to give us the best chance to go out and win a Super Bowl this year. That, ultimately, is the best thing for Peyton Manning—even though, of course, it was $4 million.”
• PEYTON HAS A LOT MORE ZIP: Greg Bishop's report from the Broncos final day of training camp, where players are raving about Peyton Manning's arm. Peyton's pay cut might be a motivating factor for him this season, and the 39-year-old quarterback returns with more "zip" than ever before
4. Manning got advice from Derek Jeter on the contract thing. His wife Ashley weighed in too, importantly. “I talked about it with Ashley, about what I wanted to do, and I wanted to be here,” he said. And Jeter told him: “Do what you want—not what they want.” Basically, with who knows how much time left in his career, he didn’t want to start over, and he knew he had a chance to win a title if he stayed in Denver.
5. There are offensive line concerns in front of Manning—major ones. When has this happened: All three starters on the left side of the line have never played an NFL regular-season or playoff snap. “We’re still working on it,” Elway said. “We’re looking at all options. If we can find a player who can help us there as the season approaches, we’ll look at it.” Rookie left tackle Ty Sambrailo (second round), left guard Max Garcia (fourth round), and center Matt Paradis (sixth round, 2014, practice squad all last year) are the men under the microscope. Expect the Broncos to deal a low-round pick for someone’s line depth, or to pick up a lineman—probably a guard—on waivers.
6. The Broncos will likely do the Romo thing this year, and give Manning every Wednesday off. Just for insurance—and so the Broncos can see a little more of Brock Osweiler getting quality time with the first unit. “I think that’s the plan right now,” Elway said. “I think he’d feel better right now if he takes Wednesday off. His health is not a concern. His freshness is a concern.”
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I think if you wanted to tell me that San Diego pass-rusher Melvin Ingram will lead the NFL in sacks this year, I would not argue with you. What a get-off—as coaches say—Ingram has. He showed it Saturday night with two sacks early against Arizona. Ingram’s had a star-crossed injury history since being the Chargers’ top pick in 2012, missing 19 games, but he looked like Justin Houston around the edge on one sack Saturday night.
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I think it feels very much like you can see the end for Robert Griffin III in Washington. It started last year, with the blunt criticism of Griffin from his head coach, and it continues with subpar play this summer, and another mini-controversy last week, when he said he thought he was the best quarterback in the NFL. Which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so ridiculous. Then, former Washington return man Brian Mitchell, now with CSN Mid-Atlantic, went off in an epic rant addressed to Griffin.
“You need to shut the hell up and start playing football,” Mitchell said on air, via Pro Football Talk. “That will make you important. Win football games in this city, and you would have this city at the palm of your hands. You had it, and you’re starting to lose it because you talk. And there a lot of people that were supporting him that are now starting to turn their back, because they see a guy who seems to be so full of himself and not doing what he’s supposed to be doing. You came here to be a football player, not a damn philosopher.”
Mitchell capped it by saying the team has enabled Griffin too much, and not told him the harsh truth when he needs to hear it: “He does a lot of stupid stuff, and it’s about time he hears it instead of people kissing his tail all the damn time.” It’s compounded by the fact that Colt McCoy has had a good camp and is highly respected by the coaching staff. Especially after Griffin was knocked out of the team’s second preseason game. Seems like this has been said a lot, at the beginning of many weeks in the past year, but this is a big week for Griffin’s immediate and long-term future in Washington.
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http://mmqb.si.com/monday-morning-qb-cris-carter-jordy-nelson-navorro-bowman-nfl
Fallout, Fall Guys and Fingertips: A Week in the NFL
The preseason claims two important players, Cris Carter's senseless advice and Peyton Manning's surprising admission about his throwing hand. It's all here, plus notes on a Niner's return and a new MMQBer
by Peter King
The Rams host Seattle on opening weekend. In the past three seasons, Seattle is 1-2 at the Edward Jones Dome and 41-12 in all other stadiums.
Perhaps more worrisome for this year’s offensive-line-challenged Seahawks: Wilson’s been sacked at a rate of 2.4 times per game in his career. In his past two games at St. Louis, he’s been sacked 10 times.
----------
This happened at Dallas camp, with the Cowboys' first-team offense driving down the field against the St. Louis first-team defense. The two teams had been fighting for much of the past 20 minutes, and when Tony Romo came to the line of scrimmage, the Rams’ 3-yard line, another skirmish broke out on the adjacent field, all the way at the other end.
Ten of the Rams on defense, across from Romo, began running to join the fight. Romo looked around. It was 11 Cowboys against one Ram now. “If they want to fight,” Romo said later, “let 'em fight. We’re gonna score.” He handed the ball to a back (didn’t see which one) and Dallas, indeed, scored an 11-on-1 touchdown.
**********
• Two Super Bowl contenders lost top-five players, perhaps for the season. The reigning first-team all-pro center, Maurkice Pouncey, broke his ankle in a preseason game against Green Bay; he’ll have surgery, and his timetable to return is uncertain, but he’s gone for a while. And though the Packers weren’t announcing anything, NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reported the initial diagnosis for wideout Jordy Nelson was a torn ACL, after the wideout landed awkwardly Sunday. Nelson last year set a Packer record with 1,519 receiving yards and is Aaron Rodgers’ favorite target, and his loss would make the Packers significantly less multiple in the deep-receiving game. No wonder Rodgers was downcast after the game. “It’s difficult to lose a guy like that in a meaningless game,” Rodgers said.
----------
• There has to be a common-sense approach to the preseason. It’s easy to say, “Just napalm the damn thing.” After days like Sunday—the two-injury debacle in Pittsburgh, the Cowboys worried about playing on a field with a terrible reputation in Santa Clara, the Giants reeling over losing six of the nine safeties on the roster in the first two preseason weeks—it makes sense to ask this question: When is the NFL going to come to its senses and reduce the preseason from four to two games? “Cut it down, maybe, to a couple of games,” Rodgers concurred.
The exhibition games are fan-cheaters; charging full price for the games is robbery, which is the most no-duh statement in the NFL today. The NFL in the 2011 CBA reduced the amount of padded full-contact practices teams can have, and eliminated two-a-days in the summer. They should now follow by cutting out two more chances of injury. Do the math: If Jordy Nelson suits up 17 or 18 times instead of 19 or 20, it follows that he’d have less exposure to the kind of injury that can kill a team’s season in a totally meaningless exercise.
-------------
• You are kidding me, Cris Carter—and you are kidding me, NFL. My first reaction to the story of Carter telling NFL rookies at the 2014 Rookie Symposium that they have to find a “fall guy” in a player’s “crew” who will take the blame when the player commits a crime: My jaw dropped.
Precisely. Carter apologized, and though the NFL tried to distance itself from Carter’s idiotic remarks, how could the league have placed the offending video of his talk on NFL.com until yanking it Sunday? This is so offensive it boggles the mind that some person with the NFL would say, Let’s show the world this great advice about obstructing justice from a Hall of Fame hero to impressionable rookies. Also: How could NFL VP Troy Vincent, who is in charge of the symposium, have allowed Carter to spew such venom? Carter, by the way, was in his yellow Pro Football Hall of Fame blazer. In all ways, this is the biggest example of inmates running the NFL asylum that I’ve seen in years.
-----------
The fallout over Terrell Suggs’ hit on Sam Bradford continued. I side with Suggs, who dove at Bradford because he wasn’t sure if Bradford was going to hand off or keep a read-option-appearing play in Saturday night’s Ravens-Eagles game. Suggs said if you’re going to call such a play for a quarterback with ACL reconstructions the past two seasons, you do it at your own peril. I absolutely agree with Suggs. Chip Kelly shouldn’t be putting Bradford in such a position to be hit violently anyway—and certainly not in a dumb preseason game.
------------
Lots of reasons to say ‘Wow’ about NaVorro Bowman this morning.
Question to Bowman on Friday: “How long does it take you to get ready to practice or play right now?”
Bowman: “About two hours. The massaging and the bending, the flexing of the knee. Once I do that I have a five-minute period where it just needs to relax and then I’m ready to go.”
Question: “Before the injury, how long would it take you to be ready?”
Bowman: “Nothing. No time.”
What a story. And what a factor he needs to be. You might say it’s almost as important for Bowman to be great for the Niners to win this season as it is for Colin Kaepernick to have a bounce-back year. Look what happened to San Francisco’s D this off-season. No Justin Smith; retired. No Patrick Willis; retired. No Aldon Smith; cut. No Chris Borland to train as the next great inside ‘backer; retired, shockingly.
So the heat’s on Bowman, and from watching him at practice Friday (he was a traffic cop at practice, very mobile, and more vocal than I recall) and talking to him afterward, he likes the idea of the pressure.
Bowman sure knows how to make an entrance. Until Sunday night against Dallas, Bowman hadn’t played in a game since shredding multiple left knee ligaments on the ugly goal-line play in the NFC Championship Game in Seattle in January 2014. He played three plays against the Cowboys. From his spot in the nerve center of the Niner defense, Bowman stoned Darren McFadden up the middle for a one-yard gain on first down. He stoned McFadden over right tackle on second down; loss of one. He stopped running back Lance Dunbar on a dumpoff pass from Tony Romo on third down; loss of one. Three plays, three tackles, two of them for losses. That was an impressive three minutes of football right there.
He attributed his strong series to the mental work he did in his year off. “You just try to better yourself,” Bowman told reporters after the game. “I think that’s what the greats do. They find ways to learn in different ways, not just as a player. That’s what the year off gave me. I just want to show that I’m a student of game and not just player.”
On Friday, Bowman didn’t have much trepidation talking about the fateful day, or fateful play, when his left knee got torqued to the side and collapsed by 550 pounds of football player late in the loss at Seattle.
“I thought I ended my career,” Bowman said Friday afternoon in the bowels of Levi’s Stadium. There was no emotion about it. Very clinical. “I knew how my leg was, and how my knee was going off to the side, and you don’t want to see that. Then Dr. [James] Andrews told me there was a possibility I wouldn’t get back to the way I was. So anytime I felt pain going through the rehab, I just thought of that and fought through that.”
Two hours of prep work, daily. Just to be able to practice. Seventeen months of arduous, painful work to try to be NaVorro Bowman, all-pro linebacker, again … while so much of the team is crashing and burning around him.
Has it been worth it?
Pause. Three, four seconds.
“I don’t play this game for money,” he said. “I play it for respect and ultimately to make it to the Hall of Fame. That’s what drives me. In order to be the best, this work comes with it, and I’m willing to fight through it.”
He said he wants to eventually play pain-free, and he wants to feel like he did two years ago, when he was at the top of his game—and at the top of the game for any inside linebacker playing. He and Willis, together, were state of the art, and no combination was close for second place at inside ‘backer among 3-4 teams. He said he doesn’t think he’ll feel that way all season, and he’s not sure exactly how to describe the difference in the knee; he just knows it’s not the same as it was two summers ago.
“I see it coming now,” Bowman said. “I can see the light and that’s what’s driving me. When camp first started I was able to hit a spin move and that didn’t hurt so now it’s, Can I run through a person? Or get fallen on? Or be able to get up off the ground and not say Ahhhh! [In discomfort.] Those are the things I am still worried about, but it’s going to come one day. But right now, the knee’s on my mind.”
He’s getting used to a lot of new faces. The team’s been blown up, from the coaching staff to the defense, since he last played. Clinical Bowman voice again. “I embrace change,” he said. “We all have to adapt to change. The coaches have jobs, we have jobs. The fact that they need me as a player and as a leader, that’s what drives me also.”
I find one thing about the Niner dynamic fascinating right now. Bowman and Borland, health permitting, were set to be the next great combo platter of inside linebacker for the next three or four years. Bowman’s injury was one of the factors that made Borland play so much last year—and, it turns out, he played very well.
So here’s Bowman, who stones people, playing. And Borland isn’t. Bowman, a Harry Carson block-of-granite type, and Willis keyed a defense that went 14 straight games in 2011 without allowing a rushing touchdown. Three times he was first-team all-pro, the classic kind of run-stuffer who also had the ability to turn and run with tight ends. Bowman's fought through it all, and Borland chose another path. Concerned about the impact of football on his long-term health—a rising tide among current players—Borland walked away from the game after one starry season.
“I was shocked,” Bowman said. “I was shocked because he is so young and he’s put so much time into the game and to walk away from it after your first successful year in the NFL, that was mind-boggling to me. We are all grown men and he’s done his research and made his choice so, but … well, for me, you’re going to have to carry me off the field.”
They’ve already done that once. In Seattle. That’s one of the things that makes this comeback compelling. There’s nothing dramatic about the way Bowman says this. It’s simply his ethos. He’s a man making a choice, the way Borland made his. And the 49ers, in this seismic season, need Bowman desperately, and he knows it.
---------
ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Six things you need to know about Peyton Manning, at 39.
1. He still doesn’t have feeling in the fingertips on his right hand. “I can’t feel anything in my fingertips,” Manning said Thursday. “It’s crazy. I’ve talked to a doctor recently who said, Don’t count on the feeling coming back. It was hard for me for about two years, because one doctor told me I could wake up any morning and it might come back. So you wake up every day thinking, Today’s the day! Then it’s not.” I find his production all the more impressive since four neck procedures caused him to miss the 2011 season, and caused him to lose—maybe forever—the comfortable grip on the football. At 36, 37 and 38, his combined completion percentage is 2.8 percentage points higher than in his career before the neck problems; in Indy, he averaged 28.5 touchdown passes per season; in Denver, it’s 43.7. He may play games this year without wearing the glove he used last year, but anytime there’s weather or wind, expect the glove to be worn.
2. He traces the physically crummy end to last season not to age but to a vomitous December night in San Diego. Before the Broncos’ 14th game, in San Diego, Manning says a bug he caught from his sick daughter made him violently ill. “I threw up all night,” he said. “Then, in the game, I moved to the right on a simple scramble and my quad cramped on me. It lingered. I couldn’t shake it the rest of the year. I really studied it hard this off-season, whether it could linger into this year or whether it was isolated. I just think I got dehydrated, and that caused it. I don’t think you can blame it on my age. It was just an isolated thing. I’ve made it through every other season, and this off-season I went through a state of the union physically, if you will, and I started training earlier and made some dietary changes.” He’s confident about his health, to be sure. But he also knows there’s no insurance for 39-year-old quarterbacks.
3. John Elway The Boss feels bad about not being able to be John Elway Of The Fraternity of Quarterbacks. The Broncos were looking for some Manning insurance, in case he came up hobbling again this year, and were looking for some cap savings, too. So Elway, the Broncos’ GM, cut Manning’s salary by $4 million; he can make it up in incentives, but the cut was awkward for both sides. “That was really hard,” Elway said on the side of the practice field at camp. “The conversation was hard. A lot of times, as much as you like to say you want those things to stay business, they always end up being a little personal. That’s the hard part, because I have a great deal of respect for Peyton. I think, hopefully, Peyton will be able to look back in a few years, especially if we have a really good year, and see that, ultimately, the decision was made to give us the best chance to go out and win a Super Bowl this year. That, ultimately, is the best thing for Peyton Manning—even though, of course, it was $4 million.”
• PEYTON HAS A LOT MORE ZIP: Greg Bishop's report from the Broncos final day of training camp, where players are raving about Peyton Manning's arm. Peyton's pay cut might be a motivating factor for him this season, and the 39-year-old quarterback returns with more "zip" than ever before
4. Manning got advice from Derek Jeter on the contract thing. His wife Ashley weighed in too, importantly. “I talked about it with Ashley, about what I wanted to do, and I wanted to be here,” he said. And Jeter told him: “Do what you want—not what they want.” Basically, with who knows how much time left in his career, he didn’t want to start over, and he knew he had a chance to win a title if he stayed in Denver.
5. There are offensive line concerns in front of Manning—major ones. When has this happened: All three starters on the left side of the line have never played an NFL regular-season or playoff snap. “We’re still working on it,” Elway said. “We’re looking at all options. If we can find a player who can help us there as the season approaches, we’ll look at it.” Rookie left tackle Ty Sambrailo (second round), left guard Max Garcia (fourth round), and center Matt Paradis (sixth round, 2014, practice squad all last year) are the men under the microscope. Expect the Broncos to deal a low-round pick for someone’s line depth, or to pick up a lineman—probably a guard—on waivers.
6. The Broncos will likely do the Romo thing this year, and give Manning every Wednesday off. Just for insurance—and so the Broncos can see a little more of Brock Osweiler getting quality time with the first unit. “I think that’s the plan right now,” Elway said. “I think he’d feel better right now if he takes Wednesday off. His health is not a concern. His freshness is a concern.”
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I think if you wanted to tell me that San Diego pass-rusher Melvin Ingram will lead the NFL in sacks this year, I would not argue with you. What a get-off—as coaches say—Ingram has. He showed it Saturday night with two sacks early against Arizona. Ingram’s had a star-crossed injury history since being the Chargers’ top pick in 2012, missing 19 games, but he looked like Justin Houston around the edge on one sack Saturday night.
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I think it feels very much like you can see the end for Robert Griffin III in Washington. It started last year, with the blunt criticism of Griffin from his head coach, and it continues with subpar play this summer, and another mini-controversy last week, when he said he thought he was the best quarterback in the NFL. Which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so ridiculous. Then, former Washington return man Brian Mitchell, now with CSN Mid-Atlantic, went off in an epic rant addressed to Griffin.
“You need to shut the hell up and start playing football,” Mitchell said on air, via Pro Football Talk. “That will make you important. Win football games in this city, and you would have this city at the palm of your hands. You had it, and you’re starting to lose it because you talk. And there a lot of people that were supporting him that are now starting to turn their back, because they see a guy who seems to be so full of himself and not doing what he’s supposed to be doing. You came here to be a football player, not a damn philosopher.”
Mitchell capped it by saying the team has enabled Griffin too much, and not told him the harsh truth when he needs to hear it: “He does a lot of stupid stuff, and it’s about time he hears it instead of people kissing his tail all the damn time.” It’s compounded by the fact that Colt McCoy has had a good camp and is highly respected by the coaching staff. Especially after Griffin was knocked out of the team’s second preseason game. Seems like this has been said a lot, at the beginning of many weeks in the past year, but this is a big week for Griffin’s immediate and long-term future in Washington.