is it just me or does the video keep ending early??

is how Peyton seems like one of us. He doesn’t just give the rehearsed, stereotyped answer; he actually says what we Colts fans have been saying to ourselves and on this site.

A perfect example is when he talks about being 3-4, and says it wasn’t just being 3-4, but being 3-4 with games against the Patriots and the Steelers coming up that worried him. That was my concern at the time too. I think I wrote something in a post to the effect of “it’s not over but we’d better start winning in a hurry.” This interview shows that the team was thinking the same thing.

This is much better than the typical “well we take it one game at a time and if we do what we can do then we will be fine” drivel that characterizes most interviews.

Here is how King prefaced the ‘interview’ with Manning:

“The story of Manning’s 11th season is a good story, one he hasn’t told this season to anyone else in my business — to the best of my knowledge. As usually happens with Manning, the conversation was going to be 10 or 20 minutes, and then one thing led to another, and by the end, I had enough stuff for a couple of chapters of a book.”

Now, if those two lines don’t make someone think that Peter King actually, ya’ know, had a one-on-one, face-to-face interview with Manning, nothing could. He basically said it without actually saying it. Yet, on second thought, the fact that King never explicitly said that he interviewed Manning should make us question his legitimacy.

Take a look at some of the quotes that King uses. Not only are they obviously lifted from the Peyton-TJ interview, but King himself never poses any questions to Peyton. Rather, he interrupts Peyton’s ‘answers’ at various points with his own thoughts (which are, in reality, remarkably similar to TJ’s actual questions), and then continues the ‘interview.’

Someone needs to figure out when the TJ interview actually took place, if King was ever at the interview, and what the hell is going on inside Peter King’s shady head.

I’m not a Peter King lover, but he clearly didn’t steal this story.

First, some ‘circumstantial’ reasoning: Peter King, like him or not, has been around forever. You don’t stay around that long, become as popular and as published as he is by plagiarizing. He doesn’t write for some well hidden, seldom viewed website that is only visited by closet football fans in kazakstan, its out there for everyone to see. No matter how dumb he his, he has enough common sense to not do that.

Second, there are things in the PK article that aren’t in the TJ interview. The involvement of the Chargers’ trainers, for instance. Stuff about the Pro Bowl, etc..

Finally, and please, if you’ve read my posts, you know I love Peyton, I’m not a hater, I didn’t drink my hateraid, etc… Ever since the “We had protection problems” incident, Peyton is a different media beast. If you’ve read one interview, you’ve read the same one 6 times on all of the media outlets. He IS rehearsed to a degree now. I’m not saying he’s phony or fake or canned, but if you don’t believe to some extent that Peyton has gone to great lengths to know what he’s saying before he says it in order to prevent more media backlash from a misconstrued comment in the heat of the moment, you’re naive.

Also, let me say this: I want Peyton to win the MVP, not because he’s Peyton Manning and I cheer for the Colts, but because he deserves it, but this whole sequence of events seems aimed at doing two things: Once again preventing the Indystar from being able to do their jobs by blocking them at every turn and then making them look like fools by handing the story to every major media outlet around… and two, self-serving in that it was a last second MVP push. Now, you might not like Bob Kravitz, but Mike Chappell and Phil B. (Especially Phil, imo) are two good guys that seem to go above and beyond to try to bring Colts fans a little more. I don’t like that they are sorta slapped around like bitches just because the Colts (is this a Bill Polian thing?) like to toy with the local media.