Our Temporary Escape and Richard Sherman

By Charlie Scaturro

If most people are being honest, they would admit their everyday lives aren’t all that exciting. Whether you’re working a 9-5 or making a living by some other means, there aren’t many extraordinary things we come into contact with during a given week. Which is why it makes total sense that we turn to various forms of entertainment to help us escape from our everyday lives and feel like we’re a part of something big, important, and exciting for a couple of hours.

Few things have done a better job of helping us in our endeavor to vicariously pursue excitement than watching 300-pound men battle for 3-plus hours at a time during the months of September to February. The NFL provides this release and rush for millions of Americans every week, and most things in our culture simply can’t compete.

Our Peyton Manning Legacy Dilemma

By Charlie Scaturro

Wrapped up in the immense buzz surrounding this weekend’s AFC Championship game between the Patriots and Broncos is how much this game means for Peyton Manning’s legacy. It’s been pounded into our heads in recent weeks that one of the most highly decorated regular season quarterbacks in NFL history (perhaps the most decorated) owns a pedestrian, even below average, 10-11 record in the postseason. And naturally, we’ve been trying to make sense of why a player who has been so dominant in the regular season only has one Super Bowl title to his credit. Of course, it does go a bit further than the fact that his brother, Eli, has more rings than he does. Over the years, Peyton’s teams have endured a number of early playoff disappointments after extraordinary, sometimes record-setting, regular season play.

Trying to make sense of this entire exercise has certainly been a difficult thing for us to digest as a sports culture. You could argue that the majority of the blame falls on Peyton as the leader of of those teams, and the fact that his playoff performance hasn’t been up to the impossibly high standard he’s set for himself year in and year out. You could argue that many of those Indianapolis teams didn’t have a defense or running game that offered Manning much help. You could argue that Manning ran into some great teams in the playoffs (most notably, Tom Brady and the Patriots), and couldn't quite beat them.