“I’ve always thrown the ball well on the road, but there have been times you’d be starting the two-minute drill and they’d give you the football and I’d think, dang, this is slick,” Manning said after torching the Broncos for three touchdowns in a victory at Denver last Sunday. “The reason you do or don’t win should be how you play and not some outside influence.”

Whether the rule change has affected game results is debatable. Through Week 8, visiting quarterbacks have completed 59.5 percent of their passes, thrown 144 touchdown passes and 128 interceptions and compiled a cumulative quarterback rating of 78.4, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. That is slightly worse than their performance midway through the 2005 season, when they had completed 59.2 percent, tossed 149 touchdown passes and 116 interceptions and produced a passer rating of 80.0.

The ball, it seems, has less to do with performance than the opponent does.

All game balls are still manufactured in Ohio by Wilson Sporting Goods. Each one is made from two and a half square feet of leather that is processed at the same Chicago tannery that has been doing the job since 1941.

Dennis Grapenthin, Wilson’s general manager of footballs, said the leather is treated with a resin-based material that gets tackier after the ball is rubbed down a bit with a brush and a sponge provided by the company. It gets about as sticky as a Post-it note, and that improves the grip.

But for quarterbacks, who touch the ball on nearly every offensive play of the season, the feel of the ball generates a level of concern that in some cases borders on obsession. Almost all of them are convinced that when a new ball comes out of the box, it has a finish on it that makes it slick. They want all of that coating rubbed off, perhaps not realizing that they are trying to eliminate a substance designed to improve the grip.