Peyton Manning shouldn’t pursue Bob Corker’s Tennessee Senate seat

Former Vols quarterback Peyton Manning’s name came up when Republican Senator Bob Corker said he wouldn’t run for re-election in 2018.

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Let’s be clear on something. If Peyton Manning ran for Bob Corker’s U.S. Senate seat in 2018, he’d likely win. The NFL and Volunteers legend is treated like a god in the state of Tennessee. And everybody loves him.

But politics is something he should not pursue for a career. It’s fine to donate, speak at retreats, and befriend politicians.

Running for something, though, is significantly beneath him.

Former Vol Heath Shuler, who played before Manning at Tennessee, was a U.S. Congressman for six years, but he needed to resurrect his career after his failure in the NFL. Manning, on the other hand, needs to resurrect nothing. So going into politics can only hurt him.

If Manning ran for Senate, attacks on all the skeletons in his closet would be fair game. His opponents would try to re-hash the Al Jazeera steroid report and the trainer scandal in 1996.

Even if nothing truly is there, does he really want that stuff in the media for a significant amount of time? That’s a lot to put himself through.

Meanwhile, he would alienate one half of his fan base. Based on things we’ve seen, it appears to that he’s a Republican.

However, his political affiliation isn’t a big deal to fans if he isn’t too heavily involved, whether he’s a Republican or Democrat. But if he becomes a U.S. Senator, he will actively be supporting policies that make the other side mad.

Is that really worth it to him?

Again, we go to Shuler. He did it to resurrect his career, and Shuler tried to be the least offensive person imaginable. He was a Democrat, but he supported numerous conservative policies that made Liberals upset.

So by the time he left office, nobody liked him. That’s what politics does to you. And it brings us to another point as well.

Football players turned politicians often leave behind sad legacies.

While Shuler was a Democrat who clashed with his party, former NFL player Jon Runyan was a Republican who clashed with his. He was elected to Congress from New Jersey and served from 2011 to 2015 but did not seek re-election, and that came on the heels of his frustration with his own party over the government shutdown, according to this report on NJ.com.

Arguably the most high-profile football player turned politician was the late Jack Kemp. But he’s known as a failed vice presidential candidate.

And the last president to play football was Gerald Ford. History knows him as the only president never to be part of a winning presidential election ticket.

Does Peyton Manning want something like that added to his legacy? The only football player ever to thrive as a politician was Dwight Eisenhower, who played at West Point. But he was a five-star general in World War II.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say Manning is no Eisenhower. So he shouldn’t take this risk.

You could say it’s worth the risk to help the country. But Congress has been so bad about doing nothing for a while that it’s hard to see what use Manning would be anyway.

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It’s a bad time to involve yourself in politics with the current climate. As one of the most successful sports figures in NFL history, Peyton Manning has no reason to do it. He would risk his entire legacy, and it would be for a position that serves no use right now.