It's tough for me to be objective about this because I was so annoyed by the Brady stuff and have always enjoyed a good Manning humbling. With that said, the people doing the Officer Barbrady "nothing to see here" routine are clearly just as biased as Pats fans. It's pretty apparent that the Packer dudes and Manning were into shady business. We may never know the extent of which but there is WAY too much smoke with Sly. If the documentary just had video of him rattling off names, sure, that would be one thing but Teagarden changed everything. Sly may have exaggerated his involvement or relationship with these athletes but he almost surely was involved. And his information was delivered so naturally that you simply can't buy his defense that he was "testing" Liam.
Now, back to Manning, I think he's really going to regret his initial press conference if this blows up. Sly seems like a perfect candidate cave under pressure (kind of like Manning..heh) and if he does, this story becomes a lot more real. Manning is not used to having his feet held to the fire by the media and it shows. Al Jazeera is going to keep pushing on this story to demonstrate their journalistic integrity and I bet more information is going to come to light in the offseason. And there won't be any distractions in the spring other than the draft to help make this go away. I would bet that the Feds are already building a case against Sly and others mentioned.
Manning could have gone the aloof Pettitte route and people would have stopped caring after a week while the media runs their, "hey, he was just trying to come back from a serious injury" narrative but now he's risking going down the path of Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, which is not a good place to be. Of course, Manning has so much media capital to work with that he could admit to being the leader of a huge HGH ring and the ESPN fan boys still wouldn't care.