Peyton Manning’s Final Test: The NFL’s Great Thinker at Super Bowl 50

Have you heard the one about the quarterback and the major surgeries? Guy goes into a doctor’s office, doctor says, “You’re headed for a hip replacement.” Guy says, “Doc, I didn’t ask you.”

Not much of a punch line, I know, but now imagine it being uttered by Peyton Manning, that doughy face crinkled into a meme-worthy sourpuss, the sitcom-dad haplessness sharpening his reply the way it does in that insurance ad, the one where he’s playing ping-pong against those kids in the garage and mutters, “Lucky shot.”

This actually happened to Peyton Manning not long ago. (The hip thing, not the ping-pong.) He admitted as much at one of his multiple Super Bowl press conferences this week, and it wasn’t intended to be a joke, because it attended a serious question about Ken Stabler and quarterbacks and potential brain damage. And yet Manning is so adept at self-deprecation at this point in his career that he turned it into a punch line anyway: New hip joint you sound so good. You can’t help it with this guy; we’ve gotten so accustomed to hearing him utter catchphrases on our television set that everything he says, even the serious stuff, feels lifted from an episode of Modern Family.

Peyton Manning’s body is in terrible shape. We know it, and he knows it, and he is beyond the point of attempting to deny it, and there’s something admirable about that, the way one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history is willing to concede (and even make jokes about) the fact that he’s on the verge of a post-retirement existence replete with doctor’s visits and potential surgeries. He knows that if the Broncos have any chance of winning this Super Bowl over the Panthers, it will almost certainly be because of what his defense is capable of doing and less about what he’s capable of doing, at least physically.

From a football standpoint, he has been stripped down to his essence, and that’s what this Super Bowl ultimately means for his legacy: He is just a brain in a largely concave body at this point, his helmet perpetually darkening his vast forehead to a vaguely embarrassed shade of crimson. And if he wends his way through this game without sabotaging the Broncos’ chances – if he just doesn’t do anything dumb, and the defense comes through – it will cement his place as the most intelligent quarterback to ever play football.

This has always been his dominant trait, the thing that sets him apart. It’s not like quarterbacks didn’t study film before him – it’s not like Johnny Unitas wasn’t a football genius, too – but Manning elevated film study into an academic pursuit. He was the overpreparer, the one who knew more and studied more and did it more intelligently than anyone had before him. Those vocal audibles at the offensive line, the endless misdirection, the finger-pointing, the no-huddle offense, the O-ma-has tumbling from his mouth like the coded missives from a le Carré novel: This will forever be the signature of Manning’s on-field presence. The way he micromanaged, the way he often drove his teammates and coaches to the brink with his insistence on precision and his historical curiosity and his overinsistence on the details of things: This will be Manning’s legacy among those who played with him and coached him. He is the Mark Zuckerberg of teammates, a brilliant Type-A nerd who fundamentally shifted the league’s balance of power, who enabled the trickle-down from coach to player.