AMERICA AT LARGE:The biggest football audience of all time had its collective eyes glued to the screen when Peyton Manning made his unchallenged bid for the goat's horns, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

LAST THURSDAY night I was seated between George Foreman and Robert Rodriguez at the conclusion of a boxing symposium sponsored by the University of Kansas. Nearly 500 souls had braved an impending snowstorm to attend, and almost half, it seemed, were now queuing to have books signed and to engage.

Most, it became clear, hoped to engage in a bit of sporting chit-chat with the principals. We’ve become accustomed to that. In fact, I dare say there wasn’t a man among them who could have come up with a question Foreman hadn’t heard before, and I’d like to think that by now I’ve heard most of them myself.

I was taken aback, then, by the fellow who followed his request for an instant analysis of Super Bowl XLIV, which would be played three nights later, with a presumption cloaked as a question: “You’d have to agree that if Peyton Manning wins this one, he’s the greatest quarterback of all time, right?”

Say what? “Did you say ‘of all time’?” I asked as I retrieved the pen I’d dropped on the floor in surprise.

Well, I replied as diplomatically as I could, that covers a lot of ground. But even a win on Sunday night would still leave Manning one behind Tom Brady, and that’s just counting the past decade. What about Joe Montana? For that matter, what about Terry Bradshaw, the dumbest quarterback ever to win four Super Bowls? And what about all those quarterbacks whose misfortune it was to play before there even were Super Bowls?

As it turned out, Brady, Montana and Bradshaw can all rest in peace for another year. Peyton Manning wasn’t even the greatest quarterback on the field Sunday night. Matter of fact, Manning has now won exactly the same number of championship rings the Saints’ Drew Brees has. Which is to say, one.

Not so long ago television network officials would have been so disheartened by the prospect of an Indianapolis-New Orleans Super Bowl that they’d have set to work rejigging the format for post-season play to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Teams representing smaller media markets traditionally don’t fare as well when it comes to capturing audiences, but between the Colts’ campaign to displace the Patriots as the Team of the Decade and the human interest angle provided by New Orleans’ resilience less than five years after Hurricane Katrina, this one figured to be more compelling than most.

Not only was XLIV the most-watched Super Bowl, but last Sunday’s game accomplished something none of its predecessors had achieved: the US television audience of 106.5 million topped that of 1983’s final episode of M*A*S*H to become the most-watched programme in US history.

Thus it was that the biggest football audience of all time had its collective eyes glued to the screen when Manning made his unchallenged bid for the goat’s horns when, with three minutes left and the Colts driving and in position to tie the game, he unleashed a pass that sailed straight into the arms of New Orleans safety Tracy Porter, who returned the interception 74 yards to put the game away.

It was an uncharacteristic, unforced error on Manning’s part, a gaffe of such nuclear proportions that old-timers were set to scratching their heads, in vain, to dredge up a similarly critical Super Bowl miscue.

Manning, for his part, accepted the blame, but he didn’t exactly cover himself with glory with his stony silence when it was suggested that his intended receiver, Reggie Wayne, might have opened the door for Porter’s theft by running the wrong route.

The replay suggests Porter put himself in position for the interception by locking in on Manning’s eyes, instantly analysing what was about to take place in the same way Manning usually parses defences. Whether Wayne was in the wrong place is somewhat immaterial, because Porter was clearly in the right one.

The other game-changing moment, of course, came on the second-half kick-off, when New Orleans coach Sean Payton, in a decision that has inevitably been described as “gutsy” “risky” or “daring” (and sometimes all three), ordered an onside kick that was recovered by the Saints.

I was watching in the company of a young friend from Dublin who, though conversant with the American game, was seeing his first Super Bowl, and his startled reaction to the squibbed kick was to ask whether kicker Thomas Morstead might have mis-hit the ball.

No, I explained, it was intentional. Unlike, say, a punt, a kick-off need travel only 10 yards when it becomes a live ball, recoverable by either team. Given the high potential for failure, the onside kick is usually a desperation measure enacted in the waning moments of a game in which the kicking team literally has no alternative.

But the truth is that, while Payton gets high marks for ingenuity, the onside kick was, statistically speaking, not nearly as risky as might have been supposed at the time.

Stats Inc, whose business it is to keep track of these things, came up with an interesting analysis. Since the 2000 season, more than 500 onside kicks have been attempted by NFL teams. Nearly half took place in the fourth quarter and were of the desperation variety, when both teams can probably anticipate it, and accordingly have their “good-hands” personnel on the field. Of those, the kicking team was able to recover the ball only 61 times in 416 attempts, or less than 15 per cent.

On the other hand, when the tactic has been used in the first three-quarters the element of surprise has led to the kicking team winding up with the football more often than not. With 65 recoveries in 111 attempts, the success ratio approaches 60 per cent, though Payton did go against the grain in one respect. Having made his decision even before his team reached the locker-room, the Saints’ coach immediately informed Morstead, who thus spent the next 20 minutes reflecting on his task rather than enjoying the half-time concert by The Who.

Ironically, though the Colts were caught by surprise, it wasn’t some bulky oaf of a defensive lineman but their normally sure-handed tightend Hank Baskett who made contact with the football. Aware it was a live ball, Baskett then treated it like a live grenade, and it bounced away into the bottom of one of those massive pig-piles of humanity. When the bodies were at last unstacked, it was New Orleans’ football, and Payton was a genius.

If things go the way they usually do in the copycat NFL, come September, when the 2010 season gets under way, about half the games you see will open with an onside kick.