'What the hell is yellow, yellow?' Peyton Manning's Broncos career through the eyes of his centers (2024)

Will Montgomery spent the first half of the 2014 season as the second-team center for the Broncos. That meant for 10 minutes before each practice, he would snap balls to Brock Osweiler, the team’s No. 2 quarterback. It was a steady, familiar routine that eased both players into the workday.

But midway through that season, the Broncos made a switch, moving Montgomery, a veteran free-agent acquisition the prior offseason, into the starting role at center. That meant he was now snapping to Peyton Manning. And that meant there was no easing into a workday.

“The first day, he almost wants to quiz me on the Rolodex of cadences that were installed back in August,” Montgomery said. “Now, it’s two months later. He comes out with the, ‘Yellow, yellow, set, hut!’ and I was late to snap it. I’m like, ‘What the hell is yellow, yellow?’ I forgot about that one.

“‘Yellow, yellow’ says there is a receiver uncovered, so you’re supposed to snap it to him instantly. So I didn’t snap it and the equipment guy is looking at us. Peyton looks at the equipment guy, very Seinfeld-esque, and says, ‘You know, I said, “Set, hut,” and I didn’t have the ball yet. Why do you think that is?’ So I made sure to go back through my cadences and Day 1 installs to make sure I had all of the random obscure cadences covered, even the ones we hadn’t covered in the last four weeks. That’s how it was with Peyton.”

Manning, whose four unforgettable years in Denver included a Super Bowl victory, numerous broken records and a heap of winning memories, will be formally inducted into the Broncos Ring of Fame on Sunday. His path to that immortalized status, which comes just three months after he took his place inside the Pro Football Hall of Fame, was built on meticulous, hand-crafted details. Few know that process better than the men who snapped him the ball.

“One of the things that was most impressive to me with him is that he’s an amazing guy, right? He was very funny, always has a good sense of humor. But the second it was time to work, that switch was flipped and it was all business,” said Matt Paradis, who started at center for the Broncos during their Super Bowl season in 2015. “He was always locked in. And his leadership in that role not only made him locked in, but he was able to bring everyone else with him in that mindset.”

Manning played with one center for the bulk of his career in Indianapolis. Jeff Saturday snapped the ball to him during all but four games in the pair’s 11 seasons together with the Colts from 2000 to 2010. Theirs was a strong bond that lasts to this day — so much so that Manning felt comfortable enough during his “ManningCast” appearance on “Monday Night Football” this week to share this tidbit at his longtime teammate’s expense: “Jeff Saturday loved the double tap,” Manning said, mimicking the slap he would make to a center’s backside before a play. “He loved me constantly spanking him.”

In Denver, Manning played with five centers in four years. That meant squeezing in a lot of preparation — and the requisite busting of chops — into tight windows each season. It meant microwaving chemistry between one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game and a rotating cast of new teammates at that vital complementary position.

“It speaks to the fact he was the type of player that makes everyone around him better, no matter what the deal is,” said Dan Koppen, who was signed by the Broncos early in the 2012 season after spending the previous nine years with the Patriots and became Denver’s starting center in Week 5. “Going into the meeting room and the practice field, the expectation he has is more than what you have of yourself, and that constantly asks things of you to where you say, ‘What can I do to make this better?'”

Four of Manning’s five centers with the Broncos spoke to The Athletic this week and shared tales of their time with the Hall of Fame quarterback. The common threads included an attention to detail that uncovered new ground, a knack for team-building and a demand for accountability that was largely unparalleled.

J.D. Walton was Manning’s first center in Denver, in 2012. He had started all 32 regular-season games, plus two postseason contests, the prior two seasons. He had been a third-round pick of the Broncos in 2010. So he had pedigree and experience. But when he met Manning for the first time, he felt like a wide-eyed rookie all over again.

“It was kind of one of those deals when you met him where you were like, ‘OK, damn. This is for real. This is really going to happen,'” Walton said. “It was just awesome.”

The pinch-me moment quickly melted into intense work.

“Everything had to be the right way,” said Walton, who suffered a season-ending injury four games into the 2012 season, giving way to Koppen. “There was nothing that wasn’t about details, from where he grabbed it to where I let go of it to where his hand placement was. I can’t tell you how many hours we just spent sitting there, snapping and rotating the ball and getting it turned right to where it was hitting his hand in the right spot every time.”

It wasn’t just the muscle memory of snapping the ball that Manning’s centers were charged with mastering. They had to grasp the bushel of cadences, audibles and blitz checks Manning used at a cellular level.

“You hear the stuff on TV about the ‘Omaha’ stuff, but the list goes on and on,” Walton said. “It was a matter of always making sure you were on the same page and learning what the dummy colors were and what the live colors were. What meant we were changing the play and what meant we were keeping it, what meant we were going back to the original plays. There were a lot of hurdles on every play.”

Montgomery still vividly remembers two audible calls from the 2014 season: buffalo and badger.

“Buffalo has an L in it. Badger has an R in it,” he said. “They are both big, stout, little hearty animals. So buffalo equals inside zone left. Badger equals inside zone right.”

Manning used to give his backup quarterbacks an assignment each week: Go through the TV copy of the previous week’s game and find any instances where field mics caught the audio of Manning’s audible calls. During preparation for a game midway through the season, Manning was alerted that his “badger” call had come across clearly on the game broadcast the prior week.

“So he says, ‘We’re going to make that a dummy audible this week,'” Montgomery recalled. “So the next week, whoever we’re playing, we get down there to, like, the 2-yard line. Peyton gets in the huddle and says, ‘OK, guys, we’re going to run the bootleg pass here. So disregard the audible.’ We get to the line and we have our bootleg pass on, and Peyton says, ‘Badger, badger!’ The defense, I’m sure, studied the tape for audio. So you can literally see the linebackers and defensive linemen say, ‘Run right! Run right! Let’s go!’ So he fakes the handoff, linebackers are biting hard, he boots out and throws a wide-open bootleg pass to Julius Thomas. It came just from him using the dummy audible you could hear in the TV copy from the week before.”

Paradis, who is now the starting center for the Panthers, said spending a season as Manning’s center expedited his NFL education. The quarterback was like a football version of prescription glasses, making crystal clear for his teammates previously unseen aspects of the game. Paradis, who spent the 2014 season on Denver’s practice squad before winning the starting center job ahead of the 2015 season, came from an offense at Boise State that put some responsibility on centers to identify blitzes. That gave him a solid foundation to work with Manning, but snapping for No. 18 was like taking a master’s course in recognizing defenses.

“He kind of pioneered that role of a quarterback trying to pick up all those pressures,” Paradis said. “Anything I could do to help take something off his plate — obviously, I was a young player still trying to learn the ropes — I just tried to be a sponge and learn from him.”

Before Super Bowl 50, Manning told reporters Paradis had come to remind him of Saturday in the way he served as an extra set of knowing eyes at the line of scrimmage. In 2016, Paradis was rated as the top center in the league by Pro Football Focus, and his ability to control the line of scrimmage pre-snap was a major factor in helping first-year starter Trevor Siemian take over the offense and nearly lead the Broncos back to the playoffs.

“I feel like (playing with Manning) had fast-tracked that recognition I had with defenses to where I was able to see pressures even faster,” Paradis said.

The former centers who played with Manning in Denver still marvel at the ways he was able to win games in the film room. Montgomery recalls preparation for another game midway through the 2014 season. Manning had been poring through the opponent’s defensive play calls on third-and-long throughout the season and spotted a unique formation that popped up only a handful of times.

“They gave other teams this one look where they had three down linemen and everybody else was super deep on third-and-long,” Montgomery said. “No matter what play you called, there was no way you were going to pass for a first down because there are three down linemen and everyone else is basically playing prevent. It’s impossible to throw on that. They only ran that three times in the first eight games, so it was a very obscure defense. But Peyton wanted to have a check for that.

“On Thursdays we would practice third downs. Peyton said, ‘OK, they have run this play three times, but if we get into a third-and-long against it, we’re not going to throw the ball. Everyone is going to expect throw, but we’re going to run power to the left. That means the right guard is going to pull around to the left and be the lead blocker up the field. Because everyone else is in coverage, we’re going to get that third-and-15, no problem.’ So I’ll be damned, we come to a third-and-15, they are running the defense, we check to a power run left, and guess what? We get the first down on a running play on third-and-15 because they were in the one coverage they had executed three times in the previous eight games.”

There is a photo Paradis still looks at from time to time. It is toward the end of Super Bowl 50. The game is in hand for the Broncos with their defense on the field, and the celebration is largely underway. Paradis spots Manning sitting on the bench, still locked into the game.

“I just walked over, shook his hand and just said, ‘Congrats and thank you,'” Paradis said. “Someone took a photo of it, and that’s always been special to me. It’s a photo that might not seem that cool unless you know the backstory. Just to be able to do that with him, man, it was a special year.”

There was a bittersweet element to that Super Bowl victory for Montgomery. After the Broncos lost to the Colts in the playoffs following the 2014 season, head coach John Fox and his staff were fired. Fox was hired by the Bears, and offensive coordinator Adam Gase went with him. They brought along Montgomery, who started four games for Chicago in what would ultimately be his final season. Montgomery wasn’t a member of the Broncos in 2015, but he couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride as he watched Manning lift the Lombardi Trophy on the field in Santa Clara, Calif.

Montgomery fired off a congratulatory text to his former teammate, not expecting to hear back anytime soon from a player who was sure to be inundated with texts from “probably a thousand other people.” But when Montgomery awoke the next morning, he saw a text from Manning, received at 4 a.m.

“Thanks, Will. I appreciate you,” it read.

“He probably hadn’t been asleep yet, and here he is taking the time to text me and probably hundreds of other people back,” Montgomery said.

It was that level of connection that made their stints as Manning’s center so memorable for the men who played that role in Denver.

“It’s something I’ll be able to tell my kids about,” Walton said. “And they’ll believe me if they ever see a picture.”

(Top photo: Dustin Bradford / Getty Images)