Peyton Manning was a rookie for the Indianapolis Colts playing in his first preseason game in Seattle.
It was 1998, on the second play of his exhibition career, when the headsets went on the fritz.
Uh-oh. Manning couldn’t hear the play from the coaches.
A huddle of men looked at Manning. All right, kid, what’s the call?
“I didn’t think it was going to happen quite that fast,” Manning said during a conference call Wednesday. “Just called a little draw play to Marshall Faulk. Got about 3 yards.”
And a play-calling monster was created. As the Broncos’ Jay Cutler said Wednesday, there are many reasons Manning is considered the best quarterback in the game, if not the best ever. Manning has a strong, accurate arm. He has quick feet, great mechanics.
But a lot of quarterbacks can throw. Only Manning cerebrally commands his offense on every single play. Not even in the old days did quarterbacks make play calls and audibles on the fly the way Manning has the past several seasons for the Colts.
Can Cutler envision the day when he is given such play-calling control with the Broncos?
“I don’t know, we’ve got Mike Shanahan here. He does a great job and has for a long time,” Cutler said. “I mean that’s Peyton Manning. That’s his thing. He started off doing that stuff. Any quarterback wants some freedom, but with a guy like Shanahan behind you, it’s fine.”
Shanahan called the plays for John Elway and Steve Young and won three Super Bowls. Manning won the most recent one.
When the Broncos play the defending champion Colts on Sunday at the RCA Dome, the game will feature two of the league’s best passers in Manning and Cutler. And it will pit two of the league’s most renowned play callers in Shanahan and Manning.
“I don’t think there’s another quarterback, especially in today’s era, who can run an offense like Peyton does,” Shanahan said. “Where he’s in charge of the checkoffs and protection. He’s got complete freedom.”
Cutler would seem to be intelligent enough to call his own plays. He scored a 29 on his Wonderlic test coming out of Vanderbilt while Manning got a 28 after leaving Tennessee.
“Without a question, Jay has the smarts and poise to do it,” Shana- han said. “We run a little different style offense than they do. A lot of quarterbacks don’t want to call plays. But Jay could do it.”
When it comes to the subject of football, though, there has never been a student whiz like Manning. The second son of Archie, a former college and NFL star quarterback, Manning comprehends blitzes and coverages with the correctness of Einstein attacking relativity. Only Einstein didn’t have to think knowing 11 large, athletic defenders would in the next instant attempt to stop him.
“Overtly, he’s the most cerebral,” Broncos defensive end Simeon Rice said of Manning. “There are a lot of cerebral quarterbacks, but he’s so overtly in control.”
As it appears to those observing Colts games, Manning gets his team to the line, quickly scans the defense, checks the plays written on his wristband, picks one out, then shouts it out to teammates positioned to either side of him, gyrating his arms and hands and legs as he yells. Next thing you know, Manning is throwing a bomb to a wide-open Reggie Wayne in the Super Bowl.
“To the untrained eye it seems like he’s the coach and nobody tells him what to do,” Rice said.
“It’s kind of like that,” Broncos and former Colts receiver Brandon Stokley said. “He has the leeway to do anything he wants, really. That’s what comes with being in that system for so long and being with the offensive coordinator for so long. He has the latitude to do what he wants if he sees something, and he won’t be second-guessed.”
The full story is Manning and offensive coordinator Tom Moore spend the week going over plays they want to implement into their game plan. What fans may not realize is many plays used in a game were called back on Tuesday. They are written on a coaches’ sheet, with another copy taped to the quarterback’s wrist and consulted when needed, which is every play.
Still, every other quarterback hears the game-day call come in from the coach through his helmet speaker. Manning sometimes will get that, too. Only Moore is making more of a suggestion than command.
“The coordinator and I, this is our 10th year together so that part has helped the trust factor,” Manning said. “I think each year you feel a little more comfortable and you learn a little bit more. We’ve expanded things we’ve done each year.”
It also helps that Colts coach Tony Dungy is secure enough to delegate final play-calling responsibility to his quarterback. The money is so large, and the pressure to win so immense, most head coaches feel they must control their own destiny.
Dungy indicated he might have been that way, too, had he not played quarterback in the mid-1970s for the University of Minnesota and an offensive coordinator named Tom Moore.
“I guess because I played in the system and understood it, I didn’t have a problem with it,” Dungy said Wednesday.
Staff writer Mike Klis can be reached at 303-954-1055 or mklis@denverpost.com.
