There’s a famous quote attributed to Wayne Gretzky and Michael Scott about missing 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, which also helps explain how Peyton Manning attempted to get Pope Leo XIV on the first Manningcast of the 2025 NFL season.
During the telecast of Monday’s game between the Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears, Manning revealed the handwritten letters he sent to the Pope in an attempt to get him to appear as a guest on the show.
It wasn’t made clear if the letters actually made it to Vatican City, let alone if Leo saw them, but Manning did note he is keeping the invite open if His Holiness happened to be watching on Monday night.
There’s a non-zero chance the Pope was watching Monday Night Football. After Leo, who was born as Robert Prevost, was elected as the new Pope in May, it was revealed he is from Chicago and is a fan of the Bears.
In fact, over the summer, Bears fans who were vacationing in Rome gifted Leo with a custom t-shirt.
Per the official Vatican calendar website, Leo’s only scheduled event on Monday was a message of the Holy Father to participants in the interreligious meeting in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is 11 hours ahead of Chicago, so the Bears game would have kicked off at 6 a.m. if he was still in the country. That’s not too early to wake up, especially for the first game of the season.
Granted, the logistics of trying to coordinate an appearance on the Manningcast from one side of the world to the other might have been a problem. But it was at least worth Manning taking the shot to see if he could get the most famous Bears fan in the world to appear on his show.
Who knows, maybe Manning’s overture now will pay off later in the season. The Bears have one more Monday night game on the schedule when they play the Washington Commanders on Oct. 13.
The game is featured as part of the ManningCast schedule that was released on Monday.