Peyton Manning came into Sunday as Brock Osweiler’s backup, after the game he was defending the young quarterback who got pulled from the game for Manning.

“I really don’t think Brock was having troubles, I thought Brock was making good throws,” said the future hall-of-famer. “The ball gets tipped up or you get hit, nobody wants to hear about it, every interception has a story, nobody wants to hear it… I thought he was seeing things well, I thought Brock was playing well.”

Manning is not wrong, when he was pulled from the game Osweiler was 14-22 for 232 yards and a touchdown. Osweiler had two interceptions and a fumble to go along with that, but, like Manning said, it’s arguable that not all of that blame fell on his shoulders. If Emmanuel Sanders doesn’t fumble the ball in the red zone when the Broncos were looking to go up 14-3, we may never have been talking about this.

But the Broncos got hit with the turnover bug and head coach Gary Kubiak’s team needed a spark.

“Coach Kubiak said, ‘If we need you can we put you in there,’,” Manning told. “I said, ‘Yeah, I haven’t played in six weeks but I think I can go in there and do something.'”

He did do something, going 5-9 for 69 yards, but Manning didn’t exactly light the world on fire, keeping him from taking too much credit for the win.

“I can’t take credit for a really good handoff or helping those guys hold onto the ball, I refuse to do that,” he explained. “I think when I was in there, we ran the ball better, held on to the ball better, caught the ball better and that’s just kind of how it worked out. That was the biggest difference, we held onto the ball better, eliminated the penalties and mistakes and that allowed us to get some points.”

Regardless of what it was, the story will show that Manning lead the team to 20 second half points and a victory and some of that is definitely credited to Manning and his ability to get the team in the right play at the line of scrimmage. One thing is for sure, we are in for an interesting couple weeks at Dove Valley, full of juicy storylines. Stay tuned.