By Zack Cimini

Common place trends of consistency are hard to break. Whether it’s a personal routine all the way into the realm of sports, consistency is an after thought after awhile. For NFL fans and fantasy football enthusiasts that is what we have come to expect with the likes of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. Could the 2013 season be the year they officially come down to Earth?

Last year was the year of fantasy quarterbacks and wide receivers getting drafted in advance of running backs. We all know the reason for that, and that was because of how much value had shifted to those positions in terms of weekly fantasy points.

Teams are airing out the football, and that’s not going to change. For the most part Peyton Manning and Tom Brady have been as easy as a top breed horse to pen in at the finish line. Their names equate to success. Luckily for them even though they’ve never garnered top tier running backs (Peyton did with M. Faulk), they’ve been protected very well with great offensive lines.

Besides both missing a full year with separate injuries, they’ve been reliable on the field for seasons upon seasons from a health standpoint.

Sooner or later though age hits all the great quarterbacks, and when it does it appears rapidly. Not over the course of a game or two, it just happens. Think back to the late careers of Jim Kelly, Steve Young (even before his concussion), Troy Aikman, etc. It appeared Manning was heading that way last season with how his arm would diminish in certain quarters. That was early in the season though and he was able to improve his arm strength as the season went on. That or Head coach John Fox realized he needed to run the football more and mix up the amount of demand on Peyton’s arm.

Facts are facts. Peyton Manning is 37 and Tom Brady is 36. No athlete is susceptible to bypassing the father of time. I believe both of these quarterbacks are going to have down trending years from where they are projected statistically this season. They’ll both have their fair share of rise of abnormal games in terms of what we are used to seeing from them.

For Brady the excuses will be thrown out there that he does not have Wes Welker anymore, and he lost his go-to targets at tight end in Aaron Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski. That will be the early part of the season. As the season progresses it’ll surface more to reality, that Brady has played in this league for a helluva long time.

Think back to how long that Super Bowl against the Rams truly was, or even the time frame when Brady took over Drew Bledsoe’s position. It’s truly amazing he has performed to this caliber for so long.

For Peyton Manning his regression has from regular season to the playoffs has been a trend for plenty of years. It’s this season that it will trickle into the regular season.

For all you over/under takers out there, I’d take the under on both the Broncos (11.5) and Patriots (11.5) win totals for the 2013 season.