re: Manning and his cap hit

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That starts with the NFL's continuing offensive transition into a pass-first, pass-second, run-if-you-must endeavor. When Manning entered the league, the defending champions were the Denver Broncos, who had handed the ball to Terrell Davis 369 times. The reigning league MVP was a running back, Barry Sanders, who was also for a brief period of time the league's highest-paid player. In a world before the current one that has Peyton featured in an ad during every commercial break, endorsements helped Emmitt Smith earn more money than any other football player.

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Manning would be part of a league in which that changed. The easiest way to measure that, very simply, is by how frequently teams chose to throw the football. During 1998, Manning's rookie season with the Indianapolis Colts, the average team threw the ball on 55.1 percent of its offensive snaps. With Manning struggling on a bad Indianapolis team, the Colts threw the ball in part to try to survive, passing on 60.9 percent of their offensive snaps. That was the third-highest rate in the league. In 2015, the average team was up to a pass frequency of 59.0 percent. That would have been the sixth-highest rate in football in 1998.

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Perhaps a better measure of how the Colts wanted to throw the ball was what they did on first-and-10. The average team threw the ball 46.7 percent of the time on first down in 1998, despite the fact that teams were averaging 4.1 yards on the ground and 7.2 yards in the air. Manning's Colts were far more pass-friendly -- they threw the ball 49.5 percent of the time on first-and-10, the ninth-highest rate in the league. In 2015, the NFL as a whole threw the ball a virtually identical 49.7 percent of the time on first down.

It's not just how frequently teams throw the football in 2015; it's where those throws come from too, which speaks to Manning's influence. More and more, the shotgun has become an irreplaceable component of NFL offenses. That wasn't the case in 1998. Under offensive coordinator Tom Moore, Manning became one of the first (if not the first) quarterbacks in league history to work out of the shotgun as his base offense.

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That would have been heretical in 1998. According to play-by-play data compiled by Football Outsiders, the average team put its quarterback into the shotgun on 9.4 percent of plays that year. Eight teams didn't even use the shotgun once all season. The Colts weren't as shotgun-intensive as they would later become, but even during that rookie season, Manning lined up there 22.7 percent of the time, which was the fifth-highest rate in the league. The Steelers, who had Kordell Stewart at quarterback, used the shotgun a league-high 26.6 percent of the time.

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