Tennessee football: Top 10 former Vols to win Super Bowls the past decade
. Quarterback. Denver Broncos. Peyton Manning. 5. player. 45
Super Bowl 50
Denver Broncos: 24
Carolina Panthers: 10
This was Peyton Manning’s worst Super Bowl performance. But he came away with a win in it. And it was a game in which Tennessee football was well-represented with lots of former players coming away with a championship for the Denver Broncos.
Manning specifically, the greatest former Vol, had a notable tumultuous run to get there. In his final season, he had fallen off the cliff, and he got hurt and benched in the middle of the season for Brock Osweiler. But Gary Kubiak put him back in in the final game of the regular season, and he carried the team through the postseason to the Super Bowl.
In the championship game, with the Broncos huge underdogs to Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers, the defense stepped up. Von Miller forced two turnovers that resulted in their two touchdowns. A punt return set up another field goal. However, Manning did his part. He converted on a two-point conversion late, and he set the tone to open both halves with field goal drives.
It’s hard to know if the defense would have been galvanized to step up the way it did without Manning orchestrating those two drives. He finished 13-of-23 for 141 yards in the game but did his part. So that’s why he’s No. 5 on this list.