I must’ve been the only per­son out­side of Indi­anapo­lis who was root­ing for the Colts in the Super Bowl. I was prob­a­bly the only jazz musi­cian any­where root­ing against the Saints, seein’ that they’re jazz’s offi­cial home­town team. Cer­tainly I don’t begrudge New Orlean­sians their hap­pi­ness. God knows they deserve it.

But as a guy for whom impro­vi­sa­tion is a way of life, I espe­cially admire Colts’ QB Pey­ton Man­ning, whose game I believe resem­bles jazz more than that of any other NFL quar­ter­back. Whereas most quar­ter­backs have their plays called by a coach in the side­line or a pressbox-perched eye in the sky, Man­ning calls most of his own — plays are “sug­gested” by his offen­sive coor­di­na­tor, but Man­ning has the final word. Of course, that’s not such a big deal, when you con­sider that back in the old days, all quar­ter­backs called their own plays. What makes Man­ning spe­cial is that he calls many of his own plays at the line of scrim­mage after sur­vey­ing the defen­sive align­ment. In other words, he impro­vises a call on the spot, using an inter­nal­ized lan­guage and vocab­u­lary. Like a mas­ter jazz sax­o­phon­ist who knows just what note or rhythm will fit a given set of cir­cum­stances, Man­ning has the extra­or­di­nary abil­ity — a gift honed by intense prac­tice — to make the best of all pos­si­ble choices more often than not. It’s been esti­mated that Man­ning will change his orig­i­nal call at the line of scrim­mage some­thing like 96% of the time, mak­ing him a mas­ter of con­tin­gency on the level of a John Coltrane or Miles Davis.

Of course, it doesn’t always work, and like a Coltrane or Davis, his seat-of-the-pants ethos is liable to fail him on occa­sion. That hap­pened yes­ter­day, yet even on the heels of the inter­cep­tion that effec­tively ended his sea­son, he kept after it, blow­ing with guts and guile right up to the last note. Hats off to the Saints, and all the best to New Orleans, but to me the guy on that field yes­ter­day who best exem­pli­fies the jazz aes­thetic was the quar­ter­back with the horse­shoe logo on his helmet.