Sunday’s AFC championship game will be the 17th all-time meeting between Brady and Denver quarterback Peyton Manning with Brady’s teams holding an 11-5 edge. When asked if he tends to work the refs more than other quarterbacks do, he said: “I’m not sure”. Gostkowski contributed field goals from 40 and 32 yards in the fourth quarter last weekend to help push the Patriots past the Kanas City 27-20. Between Brock Osweiler starting over a third of the games and the entire team, really, riding the defense to this point, Manning, unlike Brady, has nearly been willed to this point by the rest of his squad.
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It didn’t seem to bother Tom Brady too much, either.
If football were a classroom, Manning would be a straight A student except in the subject of Belichick and Brady, where he can’t get better than a C-.
Tom Brady does not have to worry about declining play, at least not this year, but he does have to worry about health.
“I think all of them were big”, Denver receiver Demaryius Thomas said of McManus’ five field goals against Pittsburgh. Only one of those games came against Manning, a 26-16 defeat to the Broncos in the AFC championship game in January 2014.
“Peyton is a great player”, Patriots coach Bill Belichick said.
The next day, Broncos lineman Malik Jackson said on NBC Sports’ “Pro Football Talk Live” radio show that Brady “definitely threw some temper tantrums” November 29 in a 30-24 loss at Denver, the Pats’ first defeat of the season.
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Brady is attempting reach his seventh Super Bowl and win his fifth Super Bowl with the Patriots. While Peyton Manning has had an entirely different road to this point, as he dealt with a partially torn plantar fascia that caused him to miss several games in the second half of the regular season. He laughed and said he’d need a full two weeks of workouts to get them fully acclimated to the altitude. Wow. “That’s what good teams do and they did it”. With a high of 48, the Broncos will be thankful they are playing at home rather than in Foxborough, MA which has a high of 31 with snow showers expected on Sunday.
