Peyton Manning’s a fake?
Absolutely.
And that’s a compliment.
A lasting image of the Colts quarterback will be an animated Manning directing 10 stationary Colts lined up for a play. He’s hollering and pointing, looking for all the world like he’s on the playground making up a play as he goes along, telling Marvin Harrison to run to the Buick and cut around the telephone pole to get open.
Audibles?
Don’t believe it. The Bears don’t.
“It’s sometimes just to find out what we’re doing,” defensive end Adewale Ogunleye said. “But nine times out of 10, he probably knows what he’s going to do anyway and that’s just to play around with us and have fun with the game.”
Manning’s idea of fun with the game, however, may be dramatically different than that of the Bears.
Sometimes he’s having so much fun he decides just to line up and go no-huddle. Whoever the defense has on the field at the time, regardless of down and distance, must stay.
Because the Bears leave linebacker Lance Briggs on the field for his abilities against runs and passes, they won’t be as affected as much as some defenses.
“[But] it will make it harder than your typical team that doesn’t get to the line of scrimmage,” coach Lovie Smith said. “We have played a couple of up-tempo teams. We don’t substitute a lot. We don’t feel like it will cause us major trouble.”
But Manning is nothing if not about causing major trouble. Standard defensive philosophy dictates stopping a team’s running game and forcing it to become one-dimensional.
That would be fine–if the one dimension wasn’t Manning.
“It’s hard to get away from that [run-stop] philosophy because if the Colts do run effectively, it’s going to be a long day,” Ogunleye said. “But with this game you have to go maybe 60-40 [run-stopping] because [of Manning].”
Said linebacker Brian Urlacher: “He knows what he’s doing. He knows what we’re doing, probably before we do it.”
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jmullin@tribune.com
