MNF Preview: In the NFL, Quarterbacks Are King

Nothing gets an NFL coach fired faster than failure, and nothing delivers a coach to the brink faster than a bad quarterback. The highest level of American football demands that your team have great players on both sides of the ball, exceptional leadership among its coaches and, perhaps most importantly, a quarterback that embodies both of those qualities.

The quarterback is the central processing unit of any football team. Even the most mediocre “game managers” in the NFL have their playbooks memorized, their personnel coordinated, their throws timed with precision. Former New York Giants GM Jerry Reese said that quarterbacks “are playing a different sport” than the other 21 players on the field, and they are. The quarterback does not block or tackle or run downfield. He backpedals briefly and waits for someone to mash his brain into the turf. This is not a job listed on CareerBuilder, and there are no more than 32 openings for the position nationwide.

The Colts, in nearly every sense of the word, have no quarterback. Yes, Curtis Painter is listed as a “QB” on the Colts roster, and yeah, he will line up under center and he might even throw the ball on occasion, but he’s no more of a quarterback than Pacman Jones is a professional wrestler.

Peyton Manning’s neck injury was the splashed coffee on the motherboard of the Colts organization. Anyone that has dropped their cellphone in a toilet or pint of beer realizes that only two options exist. One: buy a new phone, and acknowledge that all of one’s contacts, voice notes, memos and special apps will have to be painstakingly replaced. Or two, dunk the phone in rice or napkins or leave it sitting on the windowsill for five days and pray to God on the sixth day that the sucker turns on. Sometimes it does, but the waiting can resemble folly if it doesn’t.

Peyton was drafted in 1999 and started in every game his team ever played, so the Colts should be forgiven if they believed him when he said he’d be ready for 2011. But Peyton never said that to his team, nor could he, as players were forbidden from contacting their respective teams in a collective bargaining showdown that devoured nearly all of the NFL’s offseason. The league’s elder Manning walked into the huddle on Sunday as surely as the sun crawled out of the eastern horizon each morning. And then one day he didn’t.

One is left to wonder what the Colts knew about Peyton’s status and when they knew it. Did Jim Irsay really think Peyton was going to play? Were they squatting on the news for a competitive advantage, in hopes that other teams thought that Peyton might play? Did Peyton think he could play? None of it matters now: He’s out for the year, and, from the looks of it, so are the Colts.

Former Buccanneers head coach Jon Gruden knows a thing or two about the value of quarterbacking. In his former life, Gruden was a self-proclaimed “ham and eggs” player at the non-scholarship football program at Dayton. He eventually followed his father into coaching, and in a bizarre set of events, he would become the first NFL coach to ever be traded like so many of the players in his charge. Gruden found himself in Tampa Bay, replacing Tony Dungy.

Gruden also had a solid quarterback in Brad Johnson, who had led the NFC in passer rating the previous year. With a team that also featured receiver Keyshawn Johnson in his prime, along with Derrick Brooks, John Lynch and Warren Sapp, Tampa Bay won a Super Bowl in Gruden’s first year.

But Johnson left the Bucs after the 2004 season, and it was all downhill from there. What followed was a revolving door under center that included Bruce Gradkowski, Chris Simms, Jeff Garcia, Luke McCown and Brian Griese.  After five years of uncertainty at the position, Gruden was relieved of his, free to induce groans from Monday Night Football audiences across America. Free from the demands of keeping a competent quarterback in his employ.

It makes sense then that Gruden’s successor would burn his first-ever draft pick to address the gaping hole in the Bucs offense, and anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that they haven’t done that with Josh Freeman. The Kansas State product threw 25 touchdown passes and led his team to 10 wins last season, just barely missing the postseason. As Freeman goes, so will the Buccaneers, and they seem ready to do some damage in the NFC yet again.

The value of the NFL quarterback has never been higher, and no team in the history of the league has been as well-versed in that notion as the Colts have been this year. It would stand to reason that the Colts wouldn’t be terribly averse to letting the slide continue, as the bottom of this year’s barrel contains an unlikely prize: dibs on Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck.