6th
Colts’ Jeff Saturday is missing a foot? - ESPN.com
MIAMI — Taped to the side of Ryan Lilja’s locker is a newspaper clipping that features the smiling mug of Indianapolis Colts center Jeff Saturday. It’s a bank ad with a Grizzly Adams-looking 295-pound pitchman, and the linemen think that’s kind of funny.
“We joke about him, that he’s kind of a media, uh … I don’t want to say the word,” Lilja said. “We’re offensive linemen. We don’t get a lot of attention, but Jeff seems to. So he’s kind of a playboy.”
Maybe it’s fitting that the man who has snapped the ball to Peyton Manning for the past 11 years should get his cut of the limelight. Saturday has his own action figure, which means some of the linemen had to buy it, just to tease him even more. (Lilja’s Saturday action figure, by the way, is missing a plastic foot). He’s featured in one of Manning’s latest commercials for MasterCard, and he signed a $13 million contract extension with the Colts last year.
And if you ask Manning, Lilja or anyone else on the Colts’ offense, he’s worth all the adulation. Manning might call the plays, but Saturday is clearly the boss of an offensive line that kept the quarterback virtually unscathed in 2009. Manning was sacked just 10 times, and, year after year, is one of the least-touched quarterbacks in the league.
“I’ll always be indebted to what Jeff has done for me, just protecting me as a quarterback,” Manning said. “I feel very comfortable with him right in front of me.
“Every time I make an audible, Jeff kind of has his own audibles after that. He makes those calls and then he has to go block a 320-pound noseguard. So I have never taken him for granted. I stay real close to him.”
So close that their lockers are right next to each other and they sit side by side on plane rides. Manning and Saturday are golf partners in the offseason and communicate constantly in-season. Asked earlier this week whether they’re kind of husband and wife, Saturday cracked, “If he’s the wife, that would be very accurate.”
Teammates say Saturday knows as much about defenses as Manning does, and that’s saying a lot, given the quarterback’s reputation for nonstop preparation. Saturday is the voice of the linemen in meetings, and he tells the coaches what works and what doesn’t. Saturday’s words hold a lot of clout, Lilja says.
And his chemistry with Manning is crucial. The center-and-quarterback relationship, New York Jets center Nick Mangold says, takes time and practice. They have to be in sync and, in Saturday’s case, be able to decipher Manning’s no-huddle shuffle, the flailing arms, the last-second adjustments.
Saturday and Manning have started 154 games together, which is just three shy of the NFL record set by Jim Kelly and Kent Hull of the Buffalo Bills.
“I think you’ve got to have a good relationship,” Mangold said of the center-quarterback relationship. “If you don’t like each other, I think it’d be a rough one. You spend so much time together, and the things you do are so crucial to every play.
“It just seems like [Saturday] has such a grasp of what they’re doing as an offense that he’s able to do things without having to check with anybody. He can just do it on his own.”
It seems funny, now, that Saturday almost ended up doing something else. He went undrafted out of North Carolina in 1998, got signed by the Baltimore Ravens, then cut that summer. He was out of the game that fall but lifted weights just in case a team called. The Colts rang in December.
For complete coverage of Super Bowl XLIV, go to ESPN’s Super Bowl Central.
