Pre-injury, Peyton was phenomenal. Who knows how much he would have won with our early 2000s defenses and BB.
He played in a dome, had high draft capital regularly invested into his offensive skill positions and lineman... had the same O-Coordinator for the majority of his stint in Indy, and ran an offense specifically designed for him and his high level talent skill position players.
The Patriots went through multiple offensive coordinators and completely changed their offense multiple times, completely changed their key offensive personnel multiple times.. Brady would adapt to the new offense and master it..
Manning had to take his entire offensive system with him to Denver, where he had Demarius Thomas, Emmanual Sanders, Wes Welker and Julius Thomas with an All-Decade defense backing him up that Tim Tebow was able to take to the divisional round of the playoffs... only to get eliminated in divisional round, then the following year lay a clunker in the Superbowl against the Seahawks defense.. the same defense that Brady the following year lead what was at the time the greatest 4th qtr SB comeback of all time (only bested by his greatest comeback of all time against the Falcons years later)
Brady is the better player, there is no evidence to suggest Manning would have done as well or flourished in this system and this teams way of doing things. You think Manning would have been ok losing some of his key WRs on multiple occasions and brought the 2006 team to an AFCCG with Rache Caldwell and Jabar Gaffney as his #1/#2?
Lets forget the countless times he would audible down at the goal line and pad his touchdown numbers with passes. Or how he would regularly lay out his receivers and turn their brains into scrambled eggs...
and lets also forget the fact that he's committed sexual assault, used PEDs in his record breaking season and sent a goon squad after the trainer's family that outed his PED use on hidden camera
Manning is a piece of human garbage, as is most of his entire family... They were crowned as NFL royalty, and therefor untouchable.. they completely swept all of that stuff under the rug with their private investigation without a peep from the league for nearly 4 months while people forgot all about it... meanwhile they literally created a scandal out of nothing and tried to completely ruin Brady's legacy over air pressure changing in a ball.
There aren't enough terrible things I can say about Manning, but at least i can get some solace in knowing that his name will be virtually erased from the NFL record books within a few years and won't hold a candle to Tom Brady's legacy... someone who is a man of character, hard work, perseverance and oozes charisma. Everyone who has played with Brady, even those who previously hated him, all became believers and said that he is the truth.. that he genuinely cares about other people, treats them with respect even if they're a "lowly" equipment manager, ball boy or whoever...
Brady is a superior quarterback and a superior man.