Ron Borges

They all know what it is and what it is not. Colts-Patriots. National TV. Sunday Night Smack Down

“Obviously it’s not just another game,” New England Patriots safety Rodney Harrison admitted this week.

“It’s such an important game, and it’s been an important game every time we’ve played those guys,” said Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning.

They all know. No sense denying it.

No one is wasting much time with the “It’s just one of 16” cliche in Foxborough or Indianapolis this week. This game between the undefeated Colts (7-0) and once beaten Patriots (6-1) is big. Not Big, like a playoff game, or B-I-G like the Super Bowl but big with a small "b" because it is the kind of game that will carry consequences far beyond one victory or defeat, although not the kind that cannot be overcome at a later date.

That is all that separates Sunday night’s showdown between two of the three best teams in the AFC — the nerve-wracking finality of a playoff game. Yet it is from such encounters as these that legendary rivalries are born.

No great team can exist without a foil who is almost its equal, and the Patriots and Colts have played that role now for five years, ever since Tom Brady took over as New England’s starting quarterback in 2001 and began outperforming Manning time after time. Not by a lot, but by enough. Just enough.

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Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick is 7-2 against Manning while Brady is 6-1, but both have tried hard to point out that is meaningless because nothing in the past will effect the outcome this time. While true, when you are the most prolific passer in football yet have seen your career quarterback rating of 93.9 tumble to 79.8 against the Patriots, you wonder.

When you’ve thrown nearly as many picks (11) as touchdowns (12) in head-to-head confrontations with Brady while he’s counter-punched your team with 13 touchdown passes and only four interceptions and a quarterback rating of 101.6 against you, you wonder all the more.

You wonder not if you’re good enough to beat Tom Brady and Bill Belichick but simply when that day will come because last year’s 40-21 pounding administered by the Colts was tainted by the fact New England’s defense was decimated at the time. It was playing not only without Pro Bowl defensive end Richard Seymour but with three defensive backs among its first five who are not on the roster this season and with inside linebacker Tedy Bruschi in only the second game back from a stroke seven months earlier.

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“I think what’s happened in year’s past is irrelevant,” Manning insisted. “It’s really what’s going on right now and during this season and the players that are playing and who plays better Sunday night. A guy like (rookie running back) Joe Addai on our team doesn’t care what happened in this series in year’s past.”

The weight of the contest, however, remains on Manning’s shoulders more than Brady’s in a growing rivalry that has become so intense Colts’ president Bill Polian demanded the league office order the Patriots to re-sod their field before they met because it was a danger to his players and New England countered by asking the league to look into Polian's being a danger to their employees after the hot-headed personnel guru got into a shoving match with a New York Jets employee several weeks earlier.

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The gamesmanship is so rampant that Belichick issued an injury report that included 17 names, or a third of the team, and the Colts countered back with a report of their own that included, surprise, 17 names. Such is the depth of the intensity between these two, who like the Giants and Redskins of the 1980s and Cowboys and 49ers of the early ‘90s know each must at some point get by the other if they are to realize their own goal of reaching the Super Bowl.

“I think what has generated the rivalry has been that we’re both playoff teams, have played a bunch of playoff games in the last five years,” Colts’ head coach Tony Dungy said.

It has become a two-pronged rivalry however. One is between two teams. The other between two quarterbacks. Manning is the much acclaimed ultimate passing machine, the BMW of quarterbacks. But Brady is the ultimate winner, the Cadillac of quarterbacks. That added dimension of two great leaders directing two great teams has intensified things between them to an obsessive point for even casual football fans, not to mention the more frenetic of them.