Seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady is grateful for Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning. He said that Manning’s competition was a “gift” to his career on Monday.
The Manning-Brady rivalry shaped the NFL in the 2000s and 2010s.
From 2002 to 2016, Manning and Brady’s teams combined to make up 10 of the AFC’s 15 Super Bowl representatives. The two battled it out both in the regular season and the playoffs. Brady’s teams were nearly twice as dominant in the regular season, 11 wins to six, but Manning’s teams held the 3-out-of-5 advantage in the playoffs. Brady has the Super Bowl advantage, seven to two, but Manning captured five MVP awards to Brady’s three.
Manning and Brady’s rivalry was equal parts awesome and historic. It’s something that football fans from that era will never forget. And while both made sure to keep up the aura of being fierce rivals during the season, which they were, Manning and Brady have been longtime friends. During Brady’s Patriots Hall of Fame celebration, Manning told stories of secret offseason workouts in Tennessee during the height of their careers.
Now, in his weekly Monday newsletter, Brady gives thanks to his longtime rival.
“Peyton Manning was a gift to my NFL career,” Brady penned. “I maybe didn’t fully know it at the time, but I needed someone to look up to, who inspired me to be better, and who gave me a target to aim for. Now when I see him, the only thing I can say is thank you. Thank you for challenging me to be the best I could be, to dig deep in March and April and May when nobody was watching, and to have expectations for myself that were above and beyond what others thought was possible.”
Brady’s gratitude came at the end of a long post where he detailed some of his story with Manning, even touching on the former Vol’s emergence out of the University of Tennessee in the SEC and using that as fuel for their battles. Brady goes into detail on what it took to play against Manning’s teams, the importance of having a strong rivalry and upholding that competitiveness, and more. It’s a touching post.
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Here’s a look at some of the highlights from Brady’s message on Manning from Monday:
“Then there was my rivalry with Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts, which developed over about fifteen years. From 2001 to 2015, we played each other every season but three. (In two of those three missed seasons our teams actually played but one of us was injured.) All told, my Pats teams won the regular season match-up and the overall head-to-head match-up, whiled around his teams won the AFC championship head-to-head match-up. Peyton won more regular season MVPs, but we won more Super Bowls. And over that whole time, we won a very similar number of games. Ours was a pretty even rivalry for a decade and a half—a rare thing.”
“I knew, for example that when I played Peyton Manning, I had to be locked in all week and laser focused all game. I couldn’t have a single bad play against him. I knew that one interception could cost me a game. I knew that game could cost me home field advantage. I knew that home field advantage could cost us a chance to go to the Super Bowl. That sounds like a hypothetical, but it’s the story of our week 8 match-up during the 2006 season, which they won. We both ended the season as division winners with identical 12-4 records, but the Colts got the higher seed, hosted the AFC championship game against us, and went on to win the Super Bowl.”
“When I look back on my relationship with Peyton Manning, my respect, admiration, and appreciation for him as a competitor has grown with each passing year. It was always there, don’t misunderstand, but while we were competing against each other I couldn’t let that get in the way of the fact that he was my enemy, that he didn’t respect me, that he thought he was better than me because he was a #1 pick from an SEC school—or at least that’s what I made myself believe. Convincing myself that those things were true created a sense of urgency within me to prove him wrong, and it provided the extra bit of energy and motivation necessary to lock in and focus and execute just that much more so that I could beat him more often than he beat me.”
Read through Brady’s entire Monday newsletter, “Every Champion Needs a Rival,” here.
