I figured Manning would be good, but I didn't think he'd be so game. I mean, getting someone who's polished his image so well to do a spoof where he's injuring kids and telling them to bleep off takes more self-deprecation than many of us could manage. I can't imagine Tom Brady, for example, being as willing to do that dancing as Manning was at the end of the coach sketch.
And Peyton can act, a little. We've seen that in his commercials, as opposed to Wayne Gretzky, who didn't pretend to be an actor and who looked as comfortable on stage as we would in the NHL.
The only problems I had was the usual one -- most sketches are too long. They'll take a one-minute joke and stretch it to f-i-v-e minutes of hell. The party chick, the locker-room thing and the coffee sketch at the end all could have been better by being shorter.
And the thing that was missing from the NCAA pool thing was a reprise of Abdul-Jabbar's role in "Airplane!" where the kid tells him he doesn't work hard. Jabbar looks around, breaks character, then lectures the kid, directly. The same thing would have been just as good in that sketch.
I agree, the show hasn't been very inspired in recent years. This was one of their better efforts. And the Montana sketch is a classic, as was the one where Fran Tarkenton was with a woman in her apartment, calls timeout, then goes to talk things over with Bud Grant. Yeah, I'm old.
