The Brady-Manning Effect

What the best sports rivalry?

This question may be the most heated topic in sports fan discussion. Quite honestly, I believe it depends on your favorite sports as to where your allegiances lie in this argument. Personally I would choose the Army- Navy football game as the greatest rivalry in sports. Why? Who is the one person you want to beat the most? Your brother. Add in the pageantry of the Midshipmen and Cadets entering the stadium and the singing of BOTH fight songs after the game has ended and that gets my vote.

Why do I bring this up? I call it the Brady-Manning Effect. In 2002 the NFL realigned the divisions with the addition of the Houston Texans. The Indianapolis Colts were moved to the AFC South, no longer residing in the same division as the New England Patriots. In 2001 a young QB named Tom Brady received a chance to finally start in the NFL and took the Patriots to a Super Bowl victory. In a perfect world, the Patriots and Colts would have stayed in the same division and we could have seen Brady v Manning twice a year until Peyton went to the Broncos. From 2001 until now, the Colts playing the Patriots was must-see television because they have been the model franchises in the AFC.

Luckily for us, the NFL used the scheduling rules to arrange the Patriots and Colts to play each other nearly every year. From a marketing standpoint this was brilliant. Who wouldn’t want to watch a match up of the two best quarterbacks in the NFL? The ratings for those games bore it out. So the NFL kept going to that well and from it created a rivalry. Not of teams, but of players. Living in Indianapolis I can guarantee you that Colts fans would call the Patriots their biggest rival. But how is that possible if they aren’t even in the same division? Because the NFL made it happen. Realistically it’s not a Colts v Patriots rivalry. It’s a Brady v Manning rivalry.

I’m an NHL nut. The older I get the more I love watching hockey. I’ll watch it over college basketball any day of the week. I am also an unabashed Chicago Blackhawks fan. We covered this in an earlier post so I’m not a bandwagon fan. Anyway, last week the Blackhawks were schedule to take on the Pittsburgh Penguins on NBC Sports Network. Initially, I didn't think anything of it until I went to watch it and realized it was the Wednesday Night Rivalry game. Huh? A team from the Western Conference versus a team from the Eastern Conference is a “rivalry”?

The Penguins entered the NHL for the 1967-68 season. They were placed in the West division and stayed there until the 1981-82 season when they were moved to the Eastern (Wales) Conference. They played the Blackhawks once in the playoffs before realignment of the divisions which put Chicago in the West and Pittsburgh in the East. In 1992 the two teams met in the Stanley Cup Finals where Mario Lemieux and the Penguins defeated my Blackhawks 4-0. Does this make a rivalry? Doesn't appear so. But alas, leave it to the NHL to try and turn Penguins v Blackhawks into a rivalry by using the Brady-Manning Effect. How so? Before the Wednesday Night Rivalry game NBCSN schedules a show called NHL Rivals. This episode lauded the rivalry that is the Penguins v Blackhawks. Looking back you can see that the two teams really don’t have a rivalry. So what did NBSCN do? They turned into a Crosby v Toews show. The two best players in the NHL featured in the show – one Stanley Cup and two Olympic gold medals (Crosby) vs TWO Stanley Cups and two Olympic gold medals (Toews).

Sounds a little like the Brady-Manning Effect, doesn't it? Smart move by the NHL.