It was nice to finally see the top seeds in the American Football and National Football conferences advanced to the title games.

I was getting a little tired of watching the fifth and sixth seeds advance while the best teams were left sitting on their couches watching the game.

That means that we will finally get another installment of the Peyton Manning-Tom Brady saga.

These are two of the all-time greats and it will be a pleasure watching them one more time when the Denver Broncos host the New England Patriots Sunday.

We all know that Manning only has a year or two left in his amazing career, so getting one more match-up against Brady is like getting an extra present on Christmas day.

There will never be another quarterback like Manning. I don’t care what his playoff record is or even what his record is against Brady.

I don’t care that he has only won one Super Bowl.

This is a team sport and he quite often has been let down by the defense and the other players around him. He rarely plays poorly in those games.

Manning has done what no other quarterback had seemed to be able to do before he arrived in the NFL.

He is like a computer on the football field that instantly can tell what the defense is going to do and make the adjustments to get his team into the right play.

Quarterbacks since him have started to be able to do some of those same things, but none have done it to his level and I don’t expect we will ever see another one who can do that.

But more importantly, he is a quality person. I had the pleasure of meeting him at the Economic Club at Lake Michigan College a few years back. He is a delightful person to talk to and his ability to poke fun at himself is legendary.

The commercials he has produced by himself and with his brother are some of the best of all-time.

I will be pulling for the Broncos come Sunday and I would love to see Peyton win one more Super Bowl so that when he does step away from the game, he will no longer have that stigma hanging over his head.

 

Scott Novak is sports editor for Leader Publications. He can be reached at scott.novak@leaderpub.com