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Manning vs. Newton: A supersized clash of eras, styles and SEC bragging rights

Cory Nightingale

By Cory Nightingale

Published:

Their stardom was born out of the rugged Southeastern Conference, seemingly a generation apart, playing styles, attitudes and attributes so different that they really are a case study in Quarterback A and Quarterback B.

Peyton Manning, the older man with the Tennessee tenacity and the receding hairline, and Cam Newton, the new-school, dual-threat, wide-smiling maestro who it feels like just took his last victory lap at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

A 39-year-old on the way out and a 26-year-old on his way up, maybe way, way up, and it just wouldn’t feel right if they only shared the field for possibly one last time in a mundane regular-season game in mid-October.

Luckily and thankfully, fate has made sure the stakes will be slightly higher.

In a world-wide showcase that should make college football fans in the South smile with pride at the wide reach the SEC has on the NFL and its star power, Manning and Newton will collide with a Super Bowl trophy at stake.

It might be Manning’s last game.

It might be the game that launches Newton’s career into the stratosphere.

Manning, still with that deep Southern drawl thanks to his Louisiana upbringing, and Newton, Atlanta-bred and stamped for success at Auburn, where he led the Tigers to one of the few national titles Alabama didn’t win over the past seven years.

For historical purposes, and this Manning-Newton meeting is nothing but historical with its wide-ranging contrasts and subplots, this will be the third time that quarterbacks from SEC schools will meet on the Super Bowl stage.

The first time came in the 1976 season when Alabama southpaw Ken Stabler led the Oakland Raiders past Georgia’s Fran Tarkenton and his Minnesota Vikings 32-14 in Super Bowl XI.

Fast-forward 30 years and the SEC dynamic was on display again at the end of the 2006 season, at rainy Sun Life Stadium in Miami, where Florida’s Rex Grossman and his Chicago Bears fell 29-17 to the Indianapolis Colts and Manning, who finally had his signature professional moment when he pressed his lips together at the postgame podium and lifted the Lombardi Trophy aloft, soft rain drops decorating the silver prize that at last gave Peyton the one thing he did not have.

Now nine years later, the SEC again has its claim to both signal-callers, who are the proverbial two ships passing in the night, never to see each other at sea again.

Manning’s smile is an awe-shucks kind of a deal, an incredibly humble glance despite years of excellence and Hall of Fame worthy achievements.

Newton’s smile is a gigantic, perfect-teeth confirmation that he just beat you down and enjoyed doing it and, watch your head, because he’s going to do it again. It’s worked wonderfully well. He’s in the Super Bowl at age 26, destined for more trips to the Big Game like Manning, who is in his fourth showcase.

Don’t forget Newton has a little Gainesville in him, too, playing for Florida in 2007 and 2008 before off-field problems took hold of him. Three days before the Gators beat Oklahoma in the national title game in early 2009, Newton announced he was going to transfer.

He turned life’s hard lesson about doing right and avoiding wrong, and turned into a champion the following two years, leading Blinn College in tiny Brenham, Texas, to a NJCAA national title the next fall. Back in the SEC pressure-cooker the following year, Newton turned the title trick at Auburn, winning all of the big individual awards, including the Heisman, and the one they give to the last team standing.

Now, just five years later, he is in position to do something only one other player in NFL history has done. Newton is a lock to win the regular-season MVP Award, of which Peyton Manning has won five. Should Newton then beat Manning and win the Super Bowl, he would join Marcus Allen as the only players to win a college football national championship, the Heisman, the NFL MVP and a Super Bowl.

If that all happens, all by his mid-20s, then the guy who’s been called Superman the past few years really will be.

But Auburn’s Finest really is trying to get in the way of the Hollywood script, not that that’s his problem. Tennessee orange to Broncos orange, spanning two incredible decades of football prowess, Manning is attempting to ride off a champion, as he was heard telling Patriots coach Bill Belichick after the AFC title game that “this might be my last rodeo.”

It no doubt feels like Manning is owed this storybook exit. All of America will surely be pulling for him, save for the good folks in the Carolinas and maybe a chunk of people in the state of Alabama whom Newton graced with a national title five Januarys ago.

But, see, that’s where the SEC dynamic really kicks in. While SEC fans are unlike any other in that they will cheer for their conference brothers to beat up on teams outside the league, when it comes to “in-house fighting,” it is every man, or school, for himself.

So on Feb. 7, miles from the Southern comfort that Manning and Newton built for themselves with unforgettable college careers, they will wrestle for professional football’s most prestigious prize in Santa Clara, California.

Newton, directed by Panthers offensive coordinator Mike Shula, who knows a thing or two about red-blooded SEC passion, and Manning, at this point directed by destiny, will square off with a soon-to-be departing legend trying not to lose hold of the game and a burgeoning talent trying not to leap completely over Levi’s Stadium.

A Southeastern Conference apologist would brag that only “our” conference could give America this movie-like phenomenon.

And they would be absolutely right.

Yes, it has happened twice before, this Super sort of SEC tug-of-war. But never like this, with the MVP-laden hero trying like heck to stiff-arm the soon-to-be MVP for one last evening.

The beauty will be watching Manning try. The former Tennessee rifleman with the tender arm on life support will need every bit of those around him to see to it that the man-child from Auburn doesn’t crush his storybook dreams, and make history doing it.

Only one generation will win out, old and fading or new and here.

Only one style of getting it done will indeed get it done in the end.

Only one SEC alum can raise that trophy.

All the while, knowing the winner’s fans will be reminding the loser’s fans of the outcome at Auburn-Tennessee showdowns for years to come.

https://twitter.com/LaGambetaDeOro/status/691462838401904642

Cory Nightingale

Cory Nightingale, a sports copy editor at the Miami Herald, lives for Saturdays. He especially enjoys the pageantry, tradition and history of SEC football.

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