Did you mean win the Super Bowl again? Brady will be there for the playoffs.
No, I mean win the Super Bowl. The Broncos/Patriots were mentioned separately because they're the "real" contenders, although the Pats have lost a
lot this offseason, including Wilfork, Browner and Revis, and some other players who are smaller names but were still valuable(Akeem Ayers). Belichick has been pretty terrible drafting DBs lately so Browner+Revis might be a huge blow when you consider the group of castoffs they're trying to replace them with(Brandon Fletcher lol).
Remember that the Pats once won 11 games with Matt Cassell at QB.
Yeah, 11 wins with a team that went 18-1 the year before. Go look at that roster and tell me with a straight face the 2015 Patriots resemble that team at all. So many insanely good players in their primes.
Also,
they missed the playoffs.
Granted, they still play in the AFC East which has consistently been the easiest division in football to win. Other divisions have had ups and downs, AFC East has just been awful for forever. Maybe the Dolphins or Bills will get their act together this year and take advantage of it depending how long the suspension is. If he gets 8 games he would miss the Bills in Week 2, Jets in Week 6 and Dolphins in Week 8.
If he's back for the playoffs, great, they still have to make it. If it's 4 games they'll probably survive because their schedule is really, really easy this year because they play the AFC South and NFC East. If it's 6-8 they could have problems.
Denver's concerns go beyond Peyton's longevity. Every "off season scorecard" thing I have seen rates them at or near the bottom. They scored poorly in free agency, didn't have a good draft, and the general consensus on swapping John Fox for Gary Kubiak is that friendship overbalanced judgement. Now the third round draft pick TE who was one of the bright spots of their draft because it he offset one of their really bad FA losses is out for the season with an ACL.
Honestly I thought swapping Fox for Kubiak didn't make a difference. They have the same flaws of being way too conservative with playcalling etc. I mostly want to see how Peyton holds up so we can see if last year was his age or if it really was an injury. It'll be interesting to see how Kubiak's run scheme interacts with the new blocking rules too.