Help Me Out On This One...

The internet can be a wonderful thing. It is a massive junk drawer of articles, videos, goof-sites, facts, stats, box scores, and a jillion other things - all available, in theory, at the click of a Google search.

Well, that's the theory, at least.

In advance of next week's Super Bowl, I was desperately looking for an ESPN The Magazine article that chronicled in awesomely minute detail, all the pre-snap shit Peyton Manning goes through in order to make a routine TD pass, look, well, routine.

For him, at least.

I think - THINK - I have narrowed it down to the following....

"Trust Me On This"
By Seth Wickersham

it is allegedly in the December 20, 2004 issue of ESPN the Magazine with the "ESPN 100" on the cover.

I have found this link already, but every time I find it, I get a 404 File Not Found error message.

This is driving me NUTS!!!

The article was the best I have ever seen on the subject, and I was hoping you may remember it as well. If only ESPN did a good job of archiving and saving this stuff, we'd find it easier to ... um... find.

If I recall, they used a two-page photo spread of the Colts vs. Broncos at various points before and after the snap. Boxes of text described how Manning read the defense both pre-snap, and after, and how his receiver made the adjustments as well.

I am ringing a bell here? Anybody? Bueller?

Hell, maybe the article was in Sports Illustrated. Or Good Housekeeping. Maybe I have several other facts wrong.

But dammit, this article exists!!

If you know what I am talking about, and if you know where you can read it on the web, and if you want to help a brother out so I can then SHARE IT with everyone else, then I would be eternally grateful.

And collectively, we would be resurrecting a piece of "must read" sports intel just before the big game, just in case somebody says: "I think most of that crap Manning does it just for show."

Some of it, sure. But alot of it is not for show. It is the workings of a QB Super Computer whirring away, the likes of which we have never seen before in the modern NFL.