Every year, I dislike them a little bit more. I'm tired of seeing them, tired of reading about them, tired of hearing about them. Seeing their white and blue uniforms puts the same sneer on my face that Nicholson had when he saw Cruise's JAG outfit at Guantanamo Bay. Getting constantly bombarded by those insufferable Manning commercials makes me want to throw my remote against the wall. And after seeing him choke like Aurora Snow against Pittsburgh last January, I thought everyone would realize he was the A-Rod of football, someone who couldn't deliver in the clutch, someone who routinely shrunk from the pressure. How many more seasons of evidence did we need?
Of course, with the Colts undefeated through eight weeks, the same crap has started up again. Manning is the best quarterback ever. The Colts are unstoppable. On and on it goes. Nobody seems to care that their front seven can't stop anyone, or that January football is completely different that regular-season football. The whole thing gives me a headache. Even worse, everyone's lack of historical perspective has been more skewed than ever: Like Phil Simms remarking during the tail end of Indy's victory in Denver, "over on the sideline, you've got two of the best clutch players in NFL history in Adam Vinatieri and Peyton Manning." Um ... what?????? What planet is this? And to think, I used to defend Phil Simms. I don't even know how to react to a statement like that; Simms could have called Manning "one of the greatest African-American quarterbacks of all-time" and it wouldn't have been any less perplexing.
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