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It has been 17 years since the Indianapolis Colts drafted Peyton Manning as the first pick of the 1998 draft, and 15 since the New England Patriots picked up Tom Brady in the sixth round of the 2000 draft. Since then, they've won a combined five Super Bowls, have been to 9 of the last 14 Super Bowls, set records, dominated multiple offseason news cycles, and had careers that put them both among the best to ever play the game. As their careers wind down, they represent the last of a generation of football players from the years after Elway, Young, and Marino, inspiring all of the young quarterbacks entering the league today. Brady, of course, has spent his entire career as the face of the New England Patriots, coached by arguably the best coach in the league today, and Manning spent a great deal of his career in Indianapolis, carrying the Colts to multiple Super Bowls on his back, before being replaced by Manning 2.0, and going to Denver to prove he's still got it. But what if an accident happened, and the entire fabric of their careers changed? September 10th, 1997, a few days after the second game of the NFL season, a terrible tragedy occurs. Drew Bledsoe, starting quarterback for the New England Patriots, is killed in a car crash on his way home from practice. The upcoming week's game against the New York Jets, led by Bill Belichick (and Bill Parsells, who was coaching the Patriots just one year prior), is pushed back to Thursday to give the players and coaches time to grieve, recover, and get back up to playing fit, and the game that night sets a regular season record for TV ratings as people tune in to see how the Patriots will cope with the tragic loss of their leader. They lose that game, and the rest in that season, falling to 2-14, the worst record in the NFL. Immediately after the season ends, speculation begins about the draft, where the Patriots and Indianapolis Colts are drafting first and second, respectively. Both teams are in desperate need of a quarterback, and as luck would have it, two of the greatest prospects the league has seen in quite a while at the position are entering the draft that year. After months of speculation, the Patriots draft Peyton Manning, quarterback out of Tennessee, to lead their team in Bledsoe's absence. The Colts, in turn, select Ryan Leaf, from Washington State University. Manning is stepping into a unique situation, will he lead the team to a Super Bowl? Will he bomb out under the pressure? One thing is for certain, however: Ryan Leaf is a fuckup in any timeline. Two years after drafting the highly touted QB, the Colts are starting to look for an out. So, in a late round of the 2000 draft, they select Tom Brady, of the University of Michigan, to provide some competition for Leaf. Brady impresses in training camp, and by the end of the season, has locked in a starting spot. Without the coaching of Belichick, will Brady become the multiple Super Bowl winning quarterback we know and yell at? Or will the pressure of being the quarterback for a team in far more need of fixing than any one player can bring be too much for him? TFF, what happens next? Are they both still HoF shoo-ins? Do the Pats become the team that they are today, or does someone else fill that hole? What player replaces Drew Bledsoe as "ex-NFL QB with a vineyard"? In 2015, in this alternate dimension, does Brady still deflate a bunch of balls to win a game? Is he even around to deflate them? Does Luck replace Manning or Brady, or go to some other sad sack team in need of a QB? How much better off are the Chargers, not having to deal with Ryan Leaf and his bullshit? How much does the league we watch today change with one little player switch?
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Sep 6, 2015 21:32
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 07:02 |
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