Rest assured, after logging an 83.1 passer rating, he'll absorb every X and O this game's film has to offer as the season progresses, hoping the Colts get another shot at the team it had beaten the last three times they met - including last year's AFC Championship. Manning's rating was 95 for those three wins.
Certainly, there is no guarantee either team makes it to the title game but, after yesterday, they appear to be the class of the league.
The Patriots' four-point win was 21 1/2 points shy of their average margin of victory, a pattern of poor sportsmanship that had the ethics police howling at Pats coach Bill Belichick - an arrogant, irritable sort whose cheating ways helped make the once-cuddly Patriots villainous, to a degree.
Even Dungy, the game's most elegant diplomat, shot barbs at the Pats coach during the league's investigation into Belichick being caught taping an opponent's defensive signals on the sideline. The pair exchanged a cursory, chilly handshake (hand-glance) after yesterday's game.
Ethics police be damned, said Belichick's players. Clearly, they said, he was preparing them for this sort of tilt: one in which the last 15 minutes mattered, one in which they needed to be well-conditioned – unlike, say, the Patriots of 2006, when they, not the Colts, faded down the stretch.
"Obviously, the situation last year, we ran out of gas," said Pats linebacker Rosevelt Colvin.
Not this time.
As they enter their bye week, the Pats won't speak of going undefeated, or of meeting the Colts again in the playoffs, or of anything, really, except how poorly they played for just over three quarters yesterday and how much "humble pie" – a catchphrase fostered the past month by Pats linebacker Adalius Thomas – they would eat at today's meetings.
That, and the win.
"Everybody in that stadium had written us off," said Pats left tackle Matt Light. "You play this game to win ones like that one."
And you watch the game to see games like that one played. *
