On ABC before the game, John Madden compared the Bucs’ defense to two historically great units: Pittsburgh’s famed Steel Curtain of the 1970s and the ‘85 Bears. That season, opposing QBs had slogged to a passer rating of just 29.7 against them. The Bucs’ D had allowed only one touchdown in their first three games and were leading the league in fewest total yards allowed, fewest passing yards allowed and fewest points allowed. In the starting lineup that night for Tampa Bay: Derrick Brooks, Warren Sapp, Simeon Rice, Anthony “Booger” McFarland, Ronde Barber and John Lynch. Up next: the best defense in football, a unit featuring six Pro Bowl players and two future Hall of Famers. The Colts were 4-0, and Manning was coming off the best start of his career, a sizzling six-touchdown day against the Saints. I remember having to hold back some tears.” “When I jogged out of the tunnel, I got a little cheer from the fans. “I didn’t know how I was going to handle it emotionally,” the Hall of Famer admits now. Making it all the more awkward, the man the Bucs had hired to replace him, Gruden, had finished the job Dungy had started, leading Tampa Bay to a Super Bowl triumph that February. He’d spent six years lifting Tampa Bay from league laughingstock into a legitimate contender and then earned a pink slip because he couldn’t get them over the hump. ![]() The Colts’ second-year coach would be returning to Raymond James Stadium for the first time since the Bucs fired him 22 months prior. This one’s gonna be big.Īnd, wouldn’t you know it, the game happened to fall on Dungy’s 48th birthday. He felt them bubbling up the minute he got a peek at the Colts’ 2003 regular-season schedule, earlier that spring, when he saw what was on tap for Week 5. Everyone below is identified by their title on the day of the game: The scene This story includes interviews conducted both then and now. No team before and no team since has matched what Manning and the Colts pulled off that night. This is the story of the most impossible comeback in NFL history, a game that, 16 years later, still defies football logic. “But from the Tampa game forward, everything was just different.” “Before then, he was very good,” the exec said. It also was, in the words of one high-ranking Colts’ executive, the night Manning took the next step. It was Manning and the Colts, an offensive juggernaut inching into its prime, squaring off with the reigning Super Bowl champs, Jon Gruden’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a team led by a historic defense at the peak of its powers.īy night’s end, it was one of the most memorable Monday Night Football games ever played - not to mention one of the most controversial. 6, 2003, the fifth game of Manning’s sixth season, stacked in storylines and set to play out on the national stage. We won the game, and in a few months when it’s playoff time and y’all are asking me for tickets, I’m gonna remember who went to bed and gave up on us.” ![]() “I wanted to tell them my head’s just fine. All my friends are telling me, ‘Really sorry you guys lost. “Since we played on Monday night, we got back really late, and I remember checking the recorder around 4 a.m. “This was way before texting, so you’d get home and have a bunch of voicemails on your home phone,” Manning explains. ![]() Then everyone woke up the next morning - half the city of Indianapolis, the players’ parents, team employees, even the head coach’s mother-in-law - and they read the score, and they read it again, and again, and they still didn’t believe it. Who could blame them? It was Buccaneers 35, Colts 14 with four minutes left in the game. In fairness, so had the rest of the country. They’d gone to bed, every last one of them, thinking the Colts had lost. Waiting for Manning when he returned home that night: a handful of voicemails on his home phone, friends telling him to keep his head up. He remembers Marvin’s magic and Dungy’s cool. He remembers the name of the play they added to the game plan that week, and how it paid off with everything on the line. He remembers feeling like they could do nothing right, then feeling like they could do nothing wrong. He remembers the buildup, the early mistakes, the doubt creeping in. Colts quarterback Peyton Manning helped engineer an amazing comeback vs.
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