re: Manning and his cap hit

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Esiason's high football IQ and absolute command of the offense as a quintessential field general stood in contrast to other high-level quarterbacks of the era. Wyche, Wilcots and Lapham all point out that Esiason was making all of the pre-snap reads in 1988 that Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are celebrated for orchestrating today.

Wyche explained to The MMQB in January that the teams with true field generals and players smart enough to follow instructions increase their odds of winning by 2 or 3 percent.

"If their tempo is good, and they don't make mistakes, they can go up another couple of percentage points," Wyche told the site. "Pretty soon you're up to where you've got about a 5 to an 8 percent edge on your opponent by the end of the game."

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"There's been nothing new in this game for a long, long time. Because we coaches are the biggest thieves in the world. We'll see something, we'll analyze it, we'll implement it and then we'll take credit for it. That's the evolution of the game. But it still doesn't belie the genius of Bill Walsh and what that offense was about. And just the fact that everybody's running some element of it."

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