"We looked into Peyton Manning, who obviously is a first ballot Hall-of-Famer, tremendous person, tremendous player that we all know, and we looked into it," Tannenbaum said in the conference call. "But again, like I said, as events continued to unfold, we continued the negotiations with Mark -- and what's important for us is where we are tonight, which is, Mark is our starter, and we're excited about 2012."