Written by Bill Barnswell at ESPN.com
If Super Bowl 50 is really Peyton Manning’s last professional game, he’s going to leave behind a game that has been irreversibly changed by his career. That’s not a commentary on his legacy in terms of his statistics or success, although those are wildly valuable. And it’s not a talking point about the actual physical style with which he played quarterback, although Peyton can count Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck and Marcus Mariota among the future NFL quarterbacks who attended the Manning Passing Academy. And it’s not even about Manning’s ubiquitous presence as a pitchman, how he somehow transitioned to becoming the Dad Joke Michael Jordan.
More than anything, if Manning does leave after Sunday, he’ll have made his mark by the simple fact that the game itself looks and operates far more like Peyton Manning playing quarterback than it did before he arrived. The act of how the sport is played in the National Football League is fundamentally different today from the way it was in 1998. Our baselines for success and expectations of how teams will play are informed differently. And in many ways, those changes mirror the style of Peyton Manning and the teams on which he played.
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