Peyton Manning Injury: Did the Indianapolis Colts Get a Stroke of Luck?

The news of Peyton Manning's neck surgery and his status for the first two months of the 2011 NFL season has been met with an appropriate reaction from Colts fans.

The primary reaction? "There goes the season."

Playing a home game in Super Bowl XLVI seems about as realistic as unicorns, dragons, werewolves and Frosty the Snowman.

Sure, there's always the chance that Manning could come back and rattle off eight straight wins to take the Colts to the playoffs. But according to AccuScore via Twitter, the Colts' chances of winning the AFC South if Manning misses the entire season are a slim 17.7 percent.

Considering their chances would theoretically be 25 percent if every team were on a level playing field, that's, um...bad.

But the Colts, and their fans, could have more luck than they even know or realize yet. In fact, it may be wise for them to let Manning sit the entire year. Why rush him back in what could be a lost season by the time he's ready to play?

Wait, really?

What good could possibly come of losing a franchise quarterback—and not just any franchise quarterback, the franchise quarterback—for the entire year?

How could any of this be construed as a stroke of luck? Well, luck just has to have the right name. Luck's name, for the Colts, may be Andrew.

Yep. The Colts may have just stumbled their way into the Andrew Luck sweepstakes. Yep. By losing their franchise quarterback of the past 13 years for the first two months of the season, it's now possible they could land their franchise quarterback for the next 13 years in the 2012 NFL Draft.

Bill Polian has been lauded as a draft-day genius, but his top picks have bottomed out over the past five years with names like Joseph Addai, Anthony Gonzalez, Donald Brown, Jerry Hughes and Tony Ugoh.

Luck, though, is about as surefire as they come in the draft at the quarterback position. So surefire, in fact, that the top pick of the draft may be the only one lucky enough to land Luck.

The Colts may be bad without Manning, but chances are they won't be that bad.

Not first-pick-of-the-draft bad, anyway.

At the very least, this lowers the ransom Polian would have to pay for the best quarterback to come out of the draft since the last quarterback the Colts drafted in the first round. 

What do we call that? Dumb luck.

Erik Frenz is the co-host of the PatsPropaganda and Frenz podcast. Follow Erik on Twitter @erikfrenz.