Peter King over at Sports Illustrated (CNN) wrote a wonderful piece that gives insight as to why Peyton Manning’s Colts never seemed to have a problem handling the football, while the Bears had two mishandled snaps.
The reason? Both teams had access to the game balls in order to “prep” them for the Super Bowl. Manning spent hours working with a crew to prep the balls so that he could have a solid grip on them, and this paid off big time in the rainy conditions down in Miami.
From the article:
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The Colts’ staff got the official Super Bowl XLI balls at their Indianapolis facility 12 days ago, and the equipment staff began rubbing the waxy sheen off the balls. Most quarterbacks want to throw a worn-in football, so they can get the feel of leather, not wax. Now, two days before the Super Bowl, the staff thought they had enough good balls ready, and it was time for Manning to inspect them. He stood under the awning with two of the equipment guys, Sean Sullivan and Brian Seabrooks. A ball would be tossed to him, he’d palm it, rolls it in his hands. He’d nod and throw it to one side, or shake his head and throw it to another side — the bad side. On the good side were 26. “I can’t feel the difference in those,” Manning told the guys. “Those are fine. But now we need 28 more.”
So, beginning at 2 p.m., with practice in full swing, the equipment crew found as many hands as they could to break in 28 more balls. They had a batch of 36 to work with. They even got an Indianapolis police officer, assigned to do Super Bowl security for the team, to help. Sixteen men in all — equipment managers, ballboys, two scouts and the cop — went to the other Dolphins practice field. They paired off in eight groups of two, standing about 15 yards apart. And for the next 50 minutes, they played catch with the footballs, throwing them to each other on one hop, occasionally stopping to spit on, sweat on, and rub dirt on the footballs. It looked like a beehive of criss-crossed activity, and occasionally Manning would look over, making sure the 28 balls were getting conditioned to his liking. One guy kept taking the ball he was working with, putting it up his T-shirt, rolling it around to maximize the sweat on it, then rubbing the ball hard with his hands.
“So meticulous,” Sullivan said. “Incredibly meticulous. We were going to stay out there till he had 54 balls he liked, and it didn’t matter how long it took.”
After practice, Manning stayed late, throwing and tossing and feeling the balls. After 10 minutes, he had 28 he liked.
On Sunday, those 54 balls were rotated into the game, and Manning thanked his lucky stars he’d been so nerdy in getting them all right. It rained all night, one of the worst two or three weather games of his pro career, and the ballboys on the sidelines replaced the balls after nearly every play. Could you imagine, Manning thought, what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten 54 balls ready? What if he got 24 ready and thought, Well, that’s enough; we’ll never get to the bottom of the pile.
“Actually,” he said early this morning, “it was almost good that I had a little thumb problem. [He banged his thumb on a helmet two weeks ago and played with some pain in the Super Bowl.] I couldn’t grip the ball as tight as I normally might, so it didn’t slip out of my grip at all. And it was good the ball got replaced in and out of the game so much, so we could use dry balls all game.”
Luck, you might call it.
Obsessive compulsive hard-labor-rewarded good fortune, I’d call it.
During the week, Manning said something at one of those massive press conference that I couldn’t get out of my head Sunday night, watching him complete 25 of 38 for 247 yards with one touchdown and one interception. An MVP night, the Super Bowl MVP voters decreed. He explained: “Chuck Noll said, ‘Pressure is something you feel only when you don’t know what you are doing.’ That’s how I feel. I get prepared. I prepare as hard as I possibly can. Sure you feel nervous, you feel anxious, but I don’t feel pressure because I feel that I have done everything I could to be prepared for that game. There have been plenty of games where I have said that I wish that I could have this throw back or I wish that I would have seen that linebacker, but it just didn’t happen. But I have never left the field saying I could have done more to get ready for that game. That gives me peace of mind.”
Waiting for his brother after the game, Cooper Manning said, “I thought he played like it wasn’t raining.”
Champions play like it isn’t raining when it is.
