Manning’s Interception

In Sunday night’s game between the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots Peyton Manning was credited with two interceptions, however, only one of the interceptions can be blamed on Manning. The deep ball to Pierre Garcon came out of Peyton’s hand incorrectly and the ball fluttered well short of his intended target, this can be put on Manning. The second interception was a bad read by Reggie Wayne. The original play call had Wayne running a post pattern, It looked something like this:

Here the Patriots are playing a man cover 1 and they have walked the strong safety down to play man coverage on tight end Dallas Clark. Manning sees this and sees that the free safety is cheating over to the two wide receiver side. He waves just before the snap to tell Wayne to run an outside release fade instead of his original post. This way Manning can keep Wayne away from the free safety. The play starts with a play fake so Manning has to trust that Wayne will be there when he comes out of the play fake. Manning lifts up from the play fake, releases the ball to outside of the numbers where he expects Wayne to be, instead Wayne runs his original post route and allows the corner to drift back and make the interception. Had Wayne run the route that Manning audibled to, the play would have most likely resulted in a big gain since Wayne would have been in a one-on-one situation with a very accurate quarterback. Because of Wayne’s misunderstanding Manning is credited with an interception.

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