Sitting QBs: Peyton Manning Should Play, Brett Favre Should Not

Avid How To Watch Sports readers will have seen this one coming. Yep, a told-you-so article about how the Minnesota Vikings should have sat Brett Favre early in the season, so he wouldn’t disintegrate into a pile of arthritic bone dust by season’s end.

But what’s done is done, I suppose.

The bigger question that’s floating around the league, however, is whether or not the Indianapolis Colts’ brass will allow Peyton Manning and the rest of the Colts’ starters to play in the final two games of the season.

The rationale for sitting the team’s stars seems decent at first. Putting them on the pine saves them from freak injuries (think Tom Brady’s season-ender last year), allows any of those lingering pains to finally go away, and rests all muscles for the upcoming playoffs.

On top of that, the season-closing competition is anything but stiff: next Sunday’s game is at home against the 7-7 New York Jets, following which they head to Buffalo to take on the 5-9 Bills. It’s likely that the Colts could win both games, continuing their unbeaten streak—or at least put up a fight—with Curtis Painter taking snaps instead of Peyton Manning, and with Joseph Addai resting his feet on the sideline.

Momentum is at least as important as talent in the NFL—just ask the Tennessee Titans. It’s entirely possible for a mediocre team to get hot at the right time and advance all the way to the Super Bowl—just ask last year’s Arizona Cardinals. And when a quarterback sits long enough to get out of sync with his receivers, a team can exit the playoffs more quickly than expected—just ask last year’s Titans, who rested Kerry Collins for a couple weeks and then fell to the Baltimore Ravens in the first round, 13-10.

Remember that in this case sitting two games is more than just a two week rest—as the Colts have already lined up a first round bye, that’s three weeks of being removed from a game situation. While resting Peyton sounds nice, he’s a player in his prime—he’s in top physical condition, and doesn’t need rest because of his age (he’s only 33).

Which brings us back to Brett Favre.

It’s too early to say that the 40-year-old Favre is worn out, and that he’ll be ineffective in moving the Vikings through the playoffs. The point, rather, is that Minnesota signed him, in effect, FOR the playoffs—they made the playoffs last year, with Tarvaris Jackson taking the snaps, and so the acquisition of Favre was to take them to the next, Super Bowl-flavored level.

His 2008 collapse with the New York Jets, however, is so well-documented that it’s become colloquial. He threw seven picks over the last three games, and his passer rating dwindled down to the 40′s as the Jets lost four of their last five.

There are still two games to play in 2009, but the descent has begun. Favre’s passer rating, which peaked at a stellar 141.8 this season, has settled into the 70′s for the past three games (in which he’s thrown four picks). The Vikings’ next game, even more regrettably, is a cold-weather affair against the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field—and Favre’s performances in the cold in recent years have been hardly worth bragging about.

Bringing all this up makes me come across as a tremendous Favre nay-sayer, when the opposite is mostly true. I’d rather see Brett sit a few, so that when he’s on the field he can be the gunslinging, playmaking Brett who wins games with sheer will. If the only other alternative is the creaky-joints, game-bumbling Brett we’ve tended to see at the end of seasons, then I’m choosing the former.

And is it too late for Brett this season? It’s certainly not too late to have #4 on the bench for most of this week’s Monday Night Blizzard against the Bears. And since the Vikes have already clinched the division, it wouldn’t hurt to have him only play one half against the New York Giants in their season closer.

It seems that with Favre, the benefits of the rest outweigh the negatives. Sure, he might come out a little out of sync with his receiver corps, but having Brett at full strength to make plays is more important than his rhythm. Favre’s system has never been a west-coast, three-step-drop timing-based system, either—he seems to have much less to lose by resting than, say, Manning or Drew Brees.

In the end? Play Peyton and sit Brett as the season wraps up. I’d love for Brett to prove me wrong, but his track record doesn’t instill a lot of hope.