Charles Krupa / AP

Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are becoming even more desirable to advertisers as their rivalry grows, sports marketers say.

Sports marketers say Brady and Manning’s appeal beats back any whiff of any NFL scandal, too — helping minimize the impact of Michael Vick’s dogfighting scandal and Brady’s own Patriots and their coach, Bill Belichick, losing a first-round draft pick and paying hefty fines for illegally videotaping the New York Jets’ defensive coaches on the sideline.

The result is that even before Manning’s Colts won last season’s Super Bowl, he was ranked the NFL’s No. 1 endorser in a Sports Business Daily poll of sports marketers, with more than 50 percent of first-place votes. Brady, whose Patriots have won three Super Bowls, was second, with more than one-third of first-place votes. Marketers say that position is only strengthening.

One of the best and most continuous allies Brady and Manning have in their marketing quest is each other. The two quarterbacks not only bring the best out of the other on the field, marketers say, but their lack of off-the-field animus enhances each player’s image as a nice, admirable person.

Seligman said this week he and his colleagues were trying to figure the last regular-season game in any pro sport that had the level of anticipation of Sunday’s Colts-Patriots game. They determined it was the Christmas Day 2004 meeting between Shaquille O’Neal’s Miami Heat and Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers, their first since the two stars’ bitter rivalry led O’Neal to leave the Lakers.

That game showed why the Shaq-Kobe rivalry didn’t make the NBA a more popular and marketable league. It was the opposite of why the Brady-Manning rivalry makes the NFL more popular and marketable, especially among fans who might not otherwise know of anyone who plays quarterback.

“It was all about the negativity and anger between those two,” Seligman said. “Then you contrast this with the Brady-Manning lovefest, continually reinforcing the other. You rarely see stars work in concert like Brady and Manning do.

“Both are naturally this way, but they also don’t want to give each other any bulletin-board material. They also realize their bread is buttered out of this. They realize the success of the league overall translates into bigger success for its bigger stars.”

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