The Broncos’ starting quarterback reminded me of something Sunday I either never knew or had forgotten. At my age, one is never sure, but I’m pretty sure Peyton Manning would call it bad preparation either way.

He reminded me that he and Lance Ball have played together before.

Ball wasn’t drafted when he came out of the Univeristy of Maryland four years ago, but the St. Louis Rams signed him to their practice squad as an undrafted free agent. They released him at the end of September and Manning’s Indianapolis Colts picked him up two weeks later, adding him to their practice squad.

On Dec. 28, the Colts activated Ball for their season finale against division rival Tennessee. Both teams had clinched playoff berths, the Titans as division champs and the Colts as a wild card. Manning started for the Colts but played only the first series. He went 7-for-7 and led his team to a touchdown.

It is perhaps worth noting that the touchdown came on a 55-yard pass play to Joseph Addai, the Colts running back. Unlike Sunday’s big play to Ball, a 38-yard rainbow up the right sideline, this was a short pass into the right flat that Addai ran the rest of the way. Still, it’s a reminder that Manning is an equal opportunity thrower — if you’re the best matchup, he’s coming your way.

Ball made his NFL debut that day, after Manning had retired for the day. He carried 13 times for 83 yards and caught one pass for five yards from Jim Sorgi.

What this means, of course, is that Ball was practicing with Manning and the Colts for most of the 2008 season. Everybody knows Manning played with Brandon Stokley and Jacob Tamme in Indianapolis and this is at least part of the calculation that puts both Stokley and Tamme on the Broncos’ final 53-man roster.

Assuming the rib injury Ball sustained in Sunday’s third preseason game isn’t too serious, I’m thinking he makes that list, too. That would leave only one possible opening at running back for Knowshon Moreno, Jeremiah Johnson or Xavier Omon, and then only if the Broncos keep four in addition to fullback Chris Gronkowski.

I could certainly be wrong about this. My record predicting the future is not that good. I nailed that they would make another Star Trek movie after Wrath of Kahn, but that’s about it.

Still, Sunday was as close as the Broncos are likely to come to a dress rehearsal for the season opener against the Steelers on Sept. 9, and Ball was part of the first-team game plan. Manning threw to him twice consecutively on the Broncos’ first touchdown drive.

The second throw, a loft so perfect up the sideline it could have been animated by Pixar, was the drive’s big play, taking the Broncos from their own 36 to the 49ers’ 26. It was also a bomb on third-and-three.

Manning’s reminder came when I asked him about that throw, which he delivered while taking a helmet to the chest. I wondered if the timing was a matter of instinct, since he couldn’t have worked on it with Ball that much.

“Well, Lance played for the Colts; he did,” Manning said.

“But in training camp we have put him outside at wide receiver a few times and have thrown that particular pattern, actually, a couple of times in training camp. So it’s always nice when you can take something you’ve worked on in practice and take it to the playing field. I thought it was a really good route and a good finish by him today.”

Manning was sharp throughout his short stint Sunday. His second touchdown pass to Eric Decker was waiting for the third-year receiver like a room service tray suspended in mid-air after Decker sold an inside fake and turned uncovered toward the left corner of the end zone.

Against last season’s No. 2 scoring defense in the NFL, Manning played one quarter, completing 10 of 12 passes for 122 yards, two touchdowns and a passer rating of 148.6. He might be ready.

“I’ve seen steady improvement since he’s gotten here,” coach John Fox said. “That’s a tribute to him, his work ethic. I think the offensive coaches, his offensive teammates, for being a first-year guy, he’s not a young player by any stretch, but to come in and learn an offense, execute an offense with the precision he has, is pretty good.”

Manning declined a victory lap.

“Well, you’ve still got to do it every week,” he said. “I thought we did some good things today. We moved the ball pretty well and we got two touchdowns. It would have been nice to have gotten three . . . .

“I thought one thing that was nice was the defense got a turnover and the offense went out there and capitalized with a touchdown as opposed to having to settle for three. That’s always big when you can feed off one another, offense and defense.”

After managing just 38 yards rushing against Pete Carroll’s Seattle defense last week, the Broncos made the ground game a point of emphasis this week. It set no records — 26 carries, 83 yards — but was at least a viable option. Rookie Ronnie Hillman, seeing his first preseason action, had a 14-yard burst for the day’s long run, and veteran starter Willis McGahee had a 12-yard inside scamper out of a two-back set.

“I don’t think there’s really any barrier with this offense,” Manning said. “What I’ve done in my past and the teams I’ve played on I think (is) really irrelevant to this year’s team. We’re still forming our identity, seeing what plays we can hang our hat on.

“I thought coach (offensive coordinator Mike) McCoy emphasized the running game today. He challenged the guys to run the ball. I thought we did that against a good defensive front. It’s still preseason. It really carries no weight once the regular season starts, but it was good to do that and answer that challenge.”

To be sure, the Broncos still have issues. In each of the last two weeks, Manning and the first team have beaten an NFC West first team, then watched Denver’s second and third teams dominated by their counterparts. The first team led Seattle 10-9, but the Seahawks won 30-10. The first team took a 17-0 lead against San Francisco, but the Niners won 29-24. I asked Fox if consecutive flacid performances by the back end of his roster concerned him.

“Yeah, it all concerns me,” he said. “That’s kind of what I do. At the end of the day, I think we made a little bit of improvement, not a lot, but last week we flung up 21, I don’t remember what it was this time, but we’ve got work to do. When we pick the 53, you can do that a lot of different ways.”

For example, linebacker Nate Irving, a third-round draft choice in 2011 playing on the second team, was run over by 49ers third-string quarterback Josh Johnson, whom he tried to arm-tackle.

Luckily, the second team won’t be called upon to play as a unit once the games begin to matter. The first-team defense had only one major lapse. That came after Fox decided, up 17-0, to try an onside kick. It might have worked, too, if Matt Willis hadn’t grabbed it before it traveled the necessary 10 yards. Still, this is something Fox wouldn’t try on a bet in that situation if the game counted.

Given their best field position of the day, the Niners scored on the next play. Tight end Vernon Davis ran by linebacker Von Miller and safety Rahim Moore was so late getting over he looked like he’d missed his bus.

Caleb Hanie was the second quarterback in, arriving with 42 seconds left in the first quarter and the Broncos up 17-7. He was unsteady at first, throwing his second pass behind Decker into the arms of former Bronco Perrish Cox, now a Niners nickel back.

But Hanie eventually found a rhythm, leading the Broncos to a touchdown in a two-minute drill just before halftime. Rookie Brock Oswieler, second in last week, was third Sunday. Again, the offense sputtered, suggesting Hanie will be the No. 2 quarterback going into the regular season unless John Elway elects to make a waiver wire claim at the end of the week, when all 32 teams must cut down to 53-man rosters.

Ideally, Osweiler would have proven able to back up Manning right away, which would have allowed the Broncos to carry only two quarterbacks on the active roster. But through three preseason games, Osweiler, a one-year starter at Arizona State, does not look ready for prime time.

Befitting a dress rehearsal, McCoy trotted out a variety of schemes and personnel packages Sunday. Manning and the first-team offense huddled during their first series, then went no-huddle in the second. They used a two-back formation with Chris Gronkowski at fullback — it produced McGahee’s 12-yard inside run — and an empty backfield set featuring three wide receivers and two tight ends.

For much of the second series, McCoy went with a three-wide look that had the veteran Stokley in the slot, where Manning used to find him in Indianapolis. They connected twice Sunday, including a balletic tip to himself by Stokley on a third-and-six he converted into a first down.

Manning and Stokley may be the only 36-year-old pass connection in the league this year, but they looked a lot like they did in 2004, when they were both 28 and Stokley caught 68 balls for 1,077 yards and 10 touchdowns.

“We wanted to do a lot better than we have in the past couple preseason games,” Stokley said. “We put some good things together. It would have been nice to score touchdowns every time we got the ball, but I thought all in all it was a lot better than the two weeks before.”

This week will be all about the problematic back end of the roster — in the game Thursday night at Arizona and in the work Elway and the front office staff does poring over the waiver wire Friday.

As for the first team, it looked ready for the curtain to rise on the regular season.

You don’t necessarily expect the electronic communication system between coaches and the quarterback to go down in the first scrimmage of the year, but when it happened Saturday during the Broncos’ summer scrimmage, it left Peyton Manning doing what he does so often anyway — calling his own play.

Not surprisingly, it turned into the only touchdown of the sun-splashed afternoon.

“I thought (Eric) Decker’s back-shoulder touchdown catch was awesome,” Manning said of the play.

“It was excellent coverage by (Drayton) Florence, but Decker did a good job kind of holding his eyes until the last minute. Back-shoulder fades are a hard route to cover. That was something he and I had been working on, so it was good to kind of put that in play today.”

I mentioned that Manning checked off on the third-down red-zone play and appeared to leave only one second on the play clock.

“The headphones went down, actually,” he said. “Sometimes those do, on occasion. So instead of burning the timeout, coach (offensive coordinator Mike) McCoy just told me, ‘Hey, if the phones go down, just call something that you like.’

“The defense was blitzing, kind of showing man-to-man. Obviously, one-on-one on the outside, Decker and (Demaryius) Thomas have to win. So that was a good play to see out of that guy today.”

When I asked head coach John Fox if he expects to get accustomed to seeing one second on the play clock when the ball is snapped, he laughed.

“I think 18 does a pretty good job of managing the game and the offense,” he said.

The day before, Manning stopped by the KOA tent at Dove Valley and talked about what he’s looking for out of his new receiving corps.

“I think what you want to see is a guy who’s got an excellent work ethic who really wants to get better, who truly wants to master his craft,” Manning said. “I’ve been fortunate to play with a lot of guys who just wanted to get better every day.

“I had a receiver in Marvin Harrison who never missed a practice (and) only would go against the starting corner. If he were here, he would not go unless Champ (Bailey) was going to cover him. He wanted to get better every day. Those are the kind of guys I like playing with and that’s the kind of work ethic I’m seeing so far in these guys.

“Eric and Demaryius, they’re young guys but boy, they really take care of their bodies, they work hard in the weight room, they’re into it in meetings and in practice. I just have a real appreciation for that, being a veteran player seeing a young player with that kind of work ethic, and both of them have a ton of ability.

“To me it is a process, though. You can’t say you’re on the exact same page with a guy after four months. You could argue it might take two seasons to master everything. But you try to get it as good as you can. We do spend a lot of time talking in these walk-throughs, talking on the sideline.

“To me, in practice there’s never a time that you can’t do something to get better. Talk to the guy after the route on the sideline. Whether it’s a completion or an incompletion: ‘Hey, that was exactly what we’re looking for there.’ Or, ‘Here, you might have to cut that route off at 10 yards instead of 12.’ Just the little things because you want to just try to get it right. Because the game’s happening so fast out there, the more you can be on the same page, the better chance you have.”

Being able to count on a receiver being exactly where he’s supposed to be is critical, Manning explained, because on many pass plays, he never sees his intended target.

“As a quarterback, you’ve got guys in front of you, you’ve got rush, you’ve got hands up,” he said. “Dropping back, very rarely do you actually see the receiver. You’re throwing to a spot. Maybe now and then in man-to-man you might lock in on a guy and see, but on these zone coverages, you’re throwing it 18 yards on the hash, on the fifth step of the drop, whatever it may be.

“He’s got to be there. If he’s at 16, it’s not going to be complete. You’re throwing to the spot. That’s where the reps in practice and routes versus air, they’re so important, because they’ve got to be in that spot and you’ve got to trust the guy that he’s going to be there.”

With fans screaming his name and offering jerseys, programs and hats, Manning spent 10 or 15 minutes signing autographs when the scrimmage was over. The Broncos reported 41,304 fans were in attendance at Sports Authority Field at Mile High, a record for the Broncos’ summer scrimmage. Most of the lower deck and club level were filled. A few fans even dotted the upper deck.

“It was a great crowd,” Manning said. “No question the fans were into it. A beautiful day here in Denver. The players were excited. It was a little change in the routine to get out here into the stadium and play in front of the crowd. It really felt like a game atmosphere with the crowd and our pre-game routine. So I knew it was good for me and for a lot of the players going into the game against Chicago on Thursday.”

It was sort of an accident, really. The Broncos’ media relations staff came up with the statistic about Peyton Manning and John Fox that knocks your socks off as part of routine research before Manning visited Dove Valley a little less than two weeks ago.

It was part of a general briefing email the staff sent to Fox and John Elway two weeks ago today, the day the Colts released Manning. But this particular stat was also highlighted in a chance hallway meeting at Dove Valley between Fox and media relations director Patrick Smyth.

As soon as Fox heard it, he knew he had to make it part of his sales pitch to the four-time NFL most valuable player.

As Sports Illustrated’s Peter King reported in a fine blow-by-blow account of the courtship, Fox had requested certain information specifically, including some facts about the weather in Denver that would debunk its false reputation back east as a snowbound winter wonderland. That request, along with an Excel spreadsheet, produced the fact that the average starting temperature in 519 Broncos home games over the years has been 60.1 degrees.

Indeed, while they were at it, the Broncos broke down the average starting temperature for games in Kansas City, Oakland and San Diego — the Broncos’ AFC West rivals — and found it came to 61 degrees. Averaging the temperatures in Kansas City and San Diego in December may seem silly, but the exercise allowed the Broncos to tell Manning that the average starting temperature at the venues of 11 of his 16 games each season is in the 60s.

But the stat that made Manning and the Broncos look like a match made in heaven was not specifically requested. Rather, it grew out of earlier research Smyth’s staff had done when Fox was first hired almost fifteen months ago — the veteran coach’s record when his teams achieve certain markers, such as plus one in turnovers, plus two in turnovers; when they score 22 points, when they score 24, when they score 26, and so on. It’s the sort of standard stuff that appears in a team’s game notes throughout the season.

The first time I heard the money stat was six days after it made that internal Dove Valley memo, when Fox came on the Dave Logan Show following the press conference introducing Manning as the Broncos’ new quarterback on March 20.

Fox has long had a reputation as a conservative, defensive-minded head coach, a guy who likes to run the ball and whose teams play a lot of low-scoring games. But when I discussed that reputation with him in the middle of last season, he said it was a matter of circumstance, not conviction. And when you look at his teams, it’s true that he’s never had a quarterback likely to gain admission to the Pro Football Hall of Fame without a ticket.

“I’ve never had that guy,” he told me then. So, following the Manning press conference, I asked him how different the Broncos’ offense was likely to look now that he finally has a Canton-bound quarterback.

“You do the best you can with what you got,” he replied. “Unfortunately, that’s been a little bit more run-oriented for me in my ten-year head coaching career. Balance is the thing that’s tough to defend, being a defensive coach most of my career. Getting a guy like Peyton, a guy that’s got those experiences and getting you into runs or passes based on what the defense is doing, you definitely become more two-dimensional and you get that balance.”

That’s when he unloaded the stat:

“As I mentioned to Peyton in the process, he’s averaged 26 points a game over his fourteen-year career in Indy, and in my ten-year coaching career when we’ve had 26 points or more, we’re 39-3. So hopefully that will be more the ratio moving forward.”

Actually, the count is 38-3, but let’s not quibble. The bottom line is this: Over the course of his career, when Fox’s teams score 26 points or more, they win more than 90 percent of the time.

Of course, the stat also demonstrates just how rare that’s been for Fox. In ten seasons, he’s coached 160 regular-season games and ten playoff games, so his teams have scored 26 points or more less than 25 percent of the time. Last season, for example, the Broncos scored 26 points or more only three times — and went 3-0 in those games.

What turns it into a money stat for the marriage of Manning and the Broncos is that 26 is Manning’s career average. In 2010, the last season he played for the Colts, his team scored 26 or more ten times.

As King points out, the key factor in Manning’s decision to sign with the Broncos was his comfort level with the people, Elway and Fox in particular, the city and the organization. But that stat is an intriguing part of the promise of this marriage because what it says is this:

If Manning can be approximately the player he’s been throughout his career, and if Fox can be approximately the coach he’s been throughout his career, it could be an almost unbeatable combination.