Jersey City, N.J. – Peyton Manning isn't just a great pitcher, he's also a great pitchman, so you wonder why he hasn't channeled his inner entrepreneur and capitalized on all that prime real estate he's carried around with him all week.
That is, his forehead. His brain isn't just famous. It's protruding. His forehead is a mobile Times Square billboard, which is fitting, because Manning is a square for our times.
If Tom Brady is George Clooney in cleats, Manning is what you would get if Bill Gates could throw a fluttering forward pass.
When you looked at Brett Favre up close, you noticed the meathook hands and dockworker's forearms, the jutting, grizzled chin. Brady is glamour incarnate. What you notice about Manning up close is that he hikes his sweats high on his waist like a septuagenarian mall-walker, and that, despite his prototypical height and weight, he exudes the aura of a stats geek.
With a victory Sunday, Manning will gild a résumé that might be the greatest in the history of quarterbacks, if not football at large, and yet he's more famous for his film study and extemporaneous play calling than his arm.
Teammates say he has a photographic memory, which is something he shares with Super Bowl viewers. Already the owner of the greatest statistical résumé of any quarterback in history, Manning knows that what he does Sunday will become the latest and thus most prominent stamp on his passport.
If he wins, he will become the first quarterback ever to win Super Bowls with two teams. He will have won in his prime with his original franchise, and at 37 following four neck surgeries; with a dome team that beat the Bears in the rain in Miami, and with a high-altitude franchise that will have survived the cold and wind on a February Sunday in New Jersey.
The son of an NFL quarterback (Archie) and brother of another (Eli), Manning studies league history almost as much as he studies game tapes.