PHILADELPHIA – For one afternoon at least, things worked out just fine for Sean McDermott and the Eagles’ defense. That isn’t an easy outcome when Peyton Manning is the opposing quarterback, and, fresh off being picked apart by Kerry Collins, it isn’t any easy outcome for them in any game.
This time, however, there was teetering but no collapse, bend but no break. This time was a 26-24 win for the Eagles over the Indianapolis Colts and an extension of Andy Reid’s perfect post-bye record. He’s better after a good rest than anyone since Lazarus.
The game proved nothing about the direction of the season. The Eagles have shaken wins among the losses on their way to 5-3, and there’s no reason to believe that will stop any time soon. The game did prove that the smartest people in the country work in windowless rooms in Las Vegas setting the NFL betting lines. They missed this one by a whole point. Not bad.
Intelligence rises and falls with the tides of success, though, and, if you didn’t know better, Manning looked like just another lunk out there trying to force ill-advised passes into tight coverage. He did his usual wild pantomimes, pointing here and there, running around the backfield like a clown passing out candy at a parade. He did everything but an homage to Marcel Marceau trapped in a box. This time, it didn’t seem to matter. This time.
“It’s sweet,” McDermott said. “This is a guy we’ve had a hard time beating over the years.”
Manning was 3-0 versus the Eagles in his career before Sunday. He had thrown seven touchdowns and just one interception in those three games. All the waving and the pointing worked on those occasions, but Manning also had a healthy running game at his disposal on those occasions, and an offense that was clicking.
On Sunday, the Colts didn’t have running back Joseph Addai or tight end Brody Eldridge, and his receiving corps has been a revolving cast this season. The Colts dressed 324-pound right guard Jacques McClendon as a tight end, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, it was still Manning, and the Eagles’ defense wasn’t tip-top, either. Dimitri Patterson started at cornerback in place of Ellis Hobbs, who is either injured or benched, and the Eagles lost rookie safety Nate Allen to injury early in the game.
It would be easy to make the game into a quarterback comparison between Manning and Michael Vick, who was just back from a rib injury. Manning is obviously the right guy for the Colts, but Vick got the win on Sunday, and he increasingly looks like the right guy for the Eagles. Even though the offense kept making stupid penalties, he kept it going. There was a nagging abundance of field goals where there should have been touchdowns, but there were also the scrambles and invented plays that added up to the win.
When Vick converted three straight first downs on third-down plays during a fourth-quarter drive that ate up nearly seven minutes, that could have been the difference right there. Manning still had time for one drive to a touchdown, but not enough to engineer the second one.
“Let me tell you something about Peyton Manning,” Vick said. “Any time he’s on the field, I think he’s going to score a touchdown. So we wanted to keep him off the field.”
They won the time-of-possession battle as well as the game, and they also won the coveted “Who Confused Who?” trophy. The Eagles showed a lot of different looks on defense to keep Manning from reading them like a poster on the side of a bus. They switched up to keep him from getting comfortable and hoped for the best.
“We had to play around and try to never let him figure out what defense you’re in,” said Asante Samuel, who intercepted Manning on the Colts’ first and last possessions of the game. “Once he figures you out, he dissects you.”
It was like beating Manning at his own game, but instead of waving their arms and pointing around the field, the Eagles moved the pieces on the chess board when the quarterback wasn’t looking.
“We wanted to get him a little frustrated,” Patterson said. “He likes to check and read and we didn’t want to keep giving him the same things to look at. Mostly, we didn’t want to beat ourselves. We knew what we were getting into against the guy, but we wanted to compete and we did that.”
Yes, they did. Granted, it was by just two points and, yes, it came down to Peyton Manning needing only to drive for a field goal to get the win. Those aren’t necessarily the odds they would have preferred, but for one afternoon, it worked well enough.
“It wasn’t the Super Bowl, but it was a win,” McDermott said.
For those keeping track, the Eagles have never won a Super Bowl. Of course, they had never beaten Peyton Manning, either, before Sunday. The key is to keep trying and don’t pay attention when the man waves his arms around.