Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota can always say they did something Peyton Manning never would have done as a player: Appear in his Quarterback series.
For the first season of Netflix’s Quarterback in conjunction with NFL Films and Omaha Production, Manning was able to recruit Mahomes, Cousins, and Mariota for the docuseries. The series was deemed a success, but not successful enough for Manning to secure three subjects worthy of being featured in a second season of Quarterback .
It begs the question of whether Manning, who was always hyper-focused on preparation as a quarterback, would have agreed to let cameras follow him around for a season. And on the first episode of John Ourand’s The Varsity podcast for Puck , he asked Manning that question. Manning recalled Mahomes asking him the same question when he was attempting to sell the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback on doing the Netflix series.
“The answer is probably no,” Manning admitted. “Because I wouldn’t have known who was in charge and I wouldn’t have felt like somebody was gonna necessarily do it right by the quarterback as opposed to just doing whatever it took to have a great TV show. So I just probably wouldn’t have trusted anybody.”
But Manning also noted he probably would have felt differently if he was being pitched the idea by a former quarterback, rather than a TV executive.
“Nobody ever approached me about it,” Manning noted. “But if Dan Marino or Troy Aikman had told me, ‘Hey, we’re doing this show, I know how hard it is to play quarterback, we just want to show what it’s like behind the ropes,’ I probably would have done it. And I wish I had done something like that when I was 26 years old as a quarterback for the Colts. So, I think that kind of resonated with Mahomes.”
While the pitch may have resonated with the Chiefs quarterback, Mahomes still told Manning he had to ask for Andy Reid’s permission before agreeing to do the series.
“That tells you a lot about Patrick Mahomes,” Manning continued. “He easily could have said, ‘No, I’m doing this, I’m the man, I don’t need your permission,’ but he wanted to take the chain of command on that. I don’t know why I had to ask Andy Reid, but I did, and Andy was good about it.”
Manning said Reid placed certain boundaries and restrictions on the taping of Quarterback , which Netflix and Omaha respected. But considering his own desire to eliminate off-field distractions, it’s very hard to imagine Manning being in the prime of his career and agreeing to give anyone the type of access a documentary like Quarterback required. And while the media landscape is undoubtedly different today than it was in the early 2000s, current quarterbacks were still seemingly reluctant enough to sign up for the series that it prompted the sequel Receiver .
[ The Varsity ]
The post Peyton Manning admits he would’ve declined ‘Quarterback’ series as a player appeared first on Awful Announcing .
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