The arrival of Manning should drastically change the outcome from last year. You're replacing a QB who couldn't throw the ball with one of the better QBs in football. If you think Tebow for Manning is insignificant, why is he still on the bench while the disaster of a QB that is Mark Sanchez is still starting?
Well, throwing what was the heart and soul of your football organization under the bus to bring in a quarterback-mercenary like Manning might impress and even scare the Kansas City Chiefs or the Oakland Raiders but that doesn't impress me. New England has a long, long history with Peyton Manning, and if you aren't familiar with it, Brady and Belichick have been handing him his ass back to him on a silver platter for a decade.
Unless I'm mistaken, Peyton Manning, with a much better Colts offense, is 4-7 against Tom Brady, with 2 of his wins coming at a time when we completely stripped our offense of all of its weapons before the reload that lead to our 16-0 season (of which Manning was a victim) and the other 2 wins came when Brady was rehabilitating his injured knee, not making practices, etc.
The combination of a quarterback we've regularly owned during the Patriots / Colts rivalry, with a greatly diminished arm, on a new team that we humiliated in the post season last year and defeated twice in the 2011 season, simply doesn't worry me.
We might not have Hernandez for this game (and man would it get ugly if we did) but we have a drastically improved defense from last season and a drastically improved running game.
I see Brady absolutely torching the Denver defense, just like last year.
And I see Manning throwing 3 interceptions.
Patriots win this game by at least 14 points with a decent chance at a complete one sided blow out.
Well that just reeks of bias, honestly. The Broncos have lost to the two best teams in football by 6 points each. They beat a good, not great, Steelers team at home, and crushed a bad team in the Raiders.
I don't care who the power rankings say are two of the best teams in football right now. The Patriots are the best team in football, even if the records don't reflect that yet. Two months from now the entire sports-media will be begrudgingly asking themselves "Who can stop the Patriots?"
Book it.
You're about to play the best team in football.