Love for College Football Kept Manning With Vols

Three hours before home games, Tennessee fans line up several deep on each side of Yale Avenue to cheer their Volunteers as they walk the quarter-mile from the football practice facility to Neyland Stadium. It never fails to raise goosebumps.

Picture the parking lot at Giants Stadium before a Jets game, where fans behave in a way that lends itself to raising bail money. Contrast the two and you begin to understand why Peyton Manning wants to play football on Saturdays for one more season.

“I love the SEC,” Manning said one day last summer. “I love Saturday afternoon before the game. The walk before the game is the best thing I’ve ever heard of. To see all that orange, the band playing. I love that. I get excited.”

Manning has a truckload of skills, yet none of them has ever been elusiveness. Until Wednesday, anyway, when the Tennessee quarterback flushed out of the NFL pocket and decided to remain in Knoxville another season. He is not staying, as others have before him, to pursue his degree. He will graduate this spring. He is staying because he has “just sort of a feeling,” as he put it.

Three weeks before his 21st birthday, Manning is mature enough to understand that a college senior can have the best of both worlds--adulthood and no responsibility. Among the people Manning consulted in recent months were Michael Jordan, who left school early, conquered the real world, then retreated to chase his childhood dream of a baseball career.

Basketball, not football, provides more apples-to-apples comparison to Manning. The most recent is the consensus national player of the year: Wake Forest senior center Tim Duncan, who remained in school to fulfill a promise to his late mother that he would get a degree. Another is Ralph Sampson, who turned down the NBA in 1982 after his junior season. His reason: He wanted to sleep on the Lawn. The University of Virginia has a handful of rooms that frame the Lawn, which is the center of campus. They are available only to seniors.

There have been other football players who turned down the first round of the NFL draft. Three years ago, tailback Tyrone Wheatley of Michigan and wide receiver J.J. Stokes of UCLA stayed in school to continue pursuing their degrees. Yes, both players suffered injuries that rendered moot any idea of playing their way into the top pick in the draft.

Manning, obviously, can do no better than have the same status next spring. That is only another way in which Manning’s senior season won’t differ from what he experienced last season. He will come into the season as the primary candidate for the Heisman. He will be expected to lead the Volunteers to the national championship. He still will be asked for autographs during class--he signs only on the last day of the semester --and his fellow students will continue to gawk.

Given that he already has lived with those high expectations for one season will make it easier to endure that spotlight again. The life of a college football hero on a southern campus doesn’t belong solely to the hero. Manning knew that before he ever arrived at Tennessee because of the thrall in which his father, Archie, is held in Mississippi. Others learn it through experience. By the end of last season, Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel rode from the practice field to the locker room in a van “to give him a chance to breathe,” Florida assistant athletic director Norm Carlson said.

Wuerffel won both the Heisman Trophy and a national championship ring. “It’s something he wouldn’t have missed for the world,” Carlson said of Wuerffel. “It was very frustrating at times. Still, he’ll remember it all his life. Peyton will, too. The real world would be sitting in New York and the Jets are 0-10 and all of a sudden they’re booing you.”

No one can guarantee that Manning won’t have the opportunity to play for the Jets a year from now. No one could guarantee Manning anything this year except the Jets. He declined. Last summer, Tennessee offensive coordinator David Cutcliffe said that Manning will walk up to him on the field before a game and say, “Smells like a Southeastern Conference Saturday.” In the end, the aroma of the New Jersey swamps didn’t have a chance.