Last time I commented on the unctious lauding of Peyton's game I was called out by He Ban Me for reacting to the hubbub. This thread brings it back to the surface so I went back and did a little analysis on the stats (ie not my visual memory), and now I understand why I was so puzzled by the praise for PM.
Basically he lost it in the first quarter, he put the Colts in the hole as much as special teams if not worse. Here are his figures
Passes:8 Attempts:16 yards:42 TD:0 Int:3 for a passer rating of 16.7
luckily Philip Rivers was playing to his level and produced 1-4-5-0-1 for a passer rating of gulp-you-guessed-it 0.0
In the 2nd quarter Manning raised his level of play to 11-15-119-0-1 for a rating of 68.5 and he further improved to 9-13-99-1-1 for a rating of 85.1in the 3rs. Actually the 7yd TD occured 02 seconds into the 4th quarter but for the sake of this analysis I have parked it in the 3rd quarter to highlight how bad PM's 4th quarter was.
And this is the reason for my dismay, according to those in awe of PM battling all the way back, because in reality he was dreadful in the last 14 mins 28 seconds of the quarter. Yep you read it correctly the Chargers only had the ball less than 30 seconds after Peyton's TD strike, in which they managed to return the KO and fumble it in the endzone for the Colts to be within 2.
Peyton's amazing fourth quarter that so excited Dr Z and Clayton went 5-12-54-0-1 for a passer rating of 20.8 pretty close to his 1st quarter debacle. There is no way he can be credited for bringing the Colts all the way back to contention with such a poor 4th quarter.
As I said on my earlier post I am willing to give PM a mulligan on the 6 interceptions, after all everyone has on off day. However from memory at least 3 of those interceptions were bad decisions. More importanly after analysis I also discovered that 3 of those interceptions committed the cardinal sin of football of giving short yardage to the opposition. The Chargers started their series from these interception from the IND 32, 36 and 45 (though that could have been the 27 if Cromartie had not run backwards).
I hope the facts prove the point.