Peyton Manning or RGIII your choice

[Schneed10]

To me it's a no brainer. You take Peyton Manning and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.

You get one of the very best quarterbacks in NFL history. You don't have to give up anything but money, so you still get to make all your picks and continue building the team through the draft in a sane fashion. And signing Manning buys you three years to find the QB of the long term future.

With Griffin, yes you get a very talented player who can make plays on the ground and in the air. But you sacrifice a ton of (high) picks to do so. This team still needs talent, we're not one player away, even if that single player is a potential franchise QB.

And in the end, Griffin is an unknown commodity. Sure he seems like he'll translate to the NFL, but so did Akili Smith and Jamarcus Russell and Tim Couch and Cade McNown and Ryan Leaf and on and on and on. To me, Manning's recovery is less of a question mark than whether Griffin will pan out. The stats don't lie, half of the QBs drafted in Round 1 become flops. So don't be so quick to dismiss that possibility with Griffin, I guarantee you the Bengals thought they had a good thing with Akili Smith, as did the Raiders with Russell.

If you want a precedent for this, look at Montana in Kansas City, they went to an AFC title game. Sometimes football is not that complicated. If the best player in NFL history (in my humble opinion) becomes available, you get him.

And think of it this way: if we miss on Griffin we're set back SIGNIFICANTLY in our efforts to return the team to the playoffs. If we miss on Manning and his neck doesn't pan out, at least we still will have filled our squad out with high picks. In the end, the downside with Manning is much less.