What would signing Peyton Manning mean for backups?

On Twitter earlier Thursday I joked that Tennessee’s top draft pick from last season will soon be known as Jake “Cleaned Out” Locker, in light of how aggressively the Titans are pursuing Peyton Manning.

Of course, it would be a shock if the Titans were to trade Locker, the eighth overall pick in the 2011 draft. But the possibility of Manning joining the team -- and, yes, there are several other suitors – does raise interesting questions about what that would mean for Locker’s development.

Some people point to the Brett Favre-Aaron Rodgers model in Green Bay, but that doesn’t really apply. First, there was ongoing tension between those two players that presumably wouldn’t exist between Manning and Locker. And second, Favre and Manning are much different players. Favre wasn’t close to the same kind of disciplined, Type-A stickler for detail that Manning is. They’re both first-ballot Hall of Famers-to-be, but they approached their jobs differently.

That said, I was at Colts camp last summer and wrote a story about what it’s like to be Manning’s backup. In it, I spoke with several of his backups over the years and found some consistent themes – they almost never took snaps in practice, and they didn’t even have a chance to approach Manning’s depth of understanding of the offense.

Mark Rypien, who played behind Manning in 2001, called it “probably the best and worst job in the NFL.”

“You know you’re never going to see the field, but you’re going to get a paycheck,” he said. “If you want to be a competitor and you’re a young kid waiting in the wings, it would be hard.

“For an old guy like me who was just there as an insurance policy, it was great. I got a chance to be around a lot of young kids and had an opportunity to be in an organization that was heading in the right direction.”

Rypien, a former Super Bowl MVP with the Redskins, added: “You really couldn’t learn the offense quite like Peyton does because you’re only going to get a small percentage of what he has in his head. And most of the things he has in his head, you’ll never be able to learn.”

If Manning winds up in Tennessee, though, it’s very likely that A) he wouldn’t take all the snaps in practice because the Titans would want to save his 36-year-old body, and B) he would assume more of a mentor/tutor role, with no threat of anyone replacing him as long as he’s healthy.

The same would apply, of course, if Manning winds up in Denver, Arizona, Miami or someplace else.

Still, whichever team signs Manning is also giving up something (besides money) in the development of young quarterbacks.

Then again, like George Allen used to say, the future is now.

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What would signing Peyton Manning mean for backups?