Question: Seventeen players who were elected to the Pro Bowl this season have opted out of the game, some because of injuries and others for other reasons. This is your 10th NFL season and the eighth time you have been elected to the Pro Bowl. You have yet to miss one and seem to genuinely enjoy it every season. What keeps you coming back?

Answer: It’s voted on by the fans, of course, and by your peers and by the coaches. I’ve never taken it for granted and every chance I’ve been voted I’ve wanted to come over here. You’ve got 38 first-time players here, so you get to know some of these guys. You get to know some other coaches on other coaching staffs. It’s a special week.

Q: Being in your 10th season, considering a lot of these guys are in their first two or three seasons, do these guys start looking pretty young to you?

A: (Smiling) A little bit - when they tell me what grade they were in when I was playing my first year with the Colts or even back in college. But they’re the future of the league and I think it’s important for (San Francisco 49ers linebacker) Patrick Willis to come over here and spend some time with (Baltimore Ravens middle linebacker) Ray Lewis, or whoever it may be and keep that going. With the Super Bowl the other day, I think it made a lot of players proud to be a part of the NFL, to see that kind of effort from those two teams. The players are the ones who are going to keep this thing going, so we need these young players to keep learning about the right things. This is a good week to pass some of that on.

Q: A question about the Colts, specifically. This is the first season in a while where a large amount of roster turnover doesn’t appear imminent. How does that make you look at the prospects for next season?

A: That’s what you’re looking for, I think. Every off-season, you look for that continuity and the more you have, the better. We’ve always had a pretty good bit of it. We’ve always had that core group of guys back, and it certainly helps when you have the coaches back. That’s always been critical, but I am excited about this year. We are a young team. It will be nice to have these guys back. A lot of our guys got great experience last year in different situations we faced, with some of the different injury situations we faced. That can only make us better next year, I hope.

Q: Is it too soon to look back on last season and appreciate what you accomplished? The team didn’t accomplish its ultimate goal of a Super Bowl, but it finished 13-3 and won a fifth consecutive AFC South title. It also did that while playing through a number of serious injuries. All in all, a season to remember . . .

A: It’s not too soon. There’s no question everybody wants to be where the (Super Bowl champion New York) Giants are, but there definitely were plenty of positives we can take from last year and things we can build on – the way our guys competed and the way we fought through and didn’t use any injuries or whatnot as an excuse. We just sort of kept our mouths shut and played and played through it. We really accomplished a lot of positive things and that can really make us a better team next year.

Q: You spent the past weekend at the Super Bowl and on Sunday, watched from a press box as your brother, Eli Manning, quarterbacked the New York Giants to a victory over the New England Patriots. You were obviously enthusiastic, but was it difficult at all to watch?

A: I don’t know that it was hard. You certainly realize how important it is and what it means. When you have a family connection involved in the game, you kind of have your game face on going into the game. I was pulling very hard for him. I wouldn’t say it was difficult. Intense, maybe? Passionate, I guess. I was just obviously very, very proud of the way he competed and the way he played and I was very happy with the results.

Q: And just one year after you were named Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XLI, your younger brother was named MVP of Super Bowl XLII. Have you given much thought to the historical significance of that?

A: It could happen again, but I like the odds that it probably won’t. You certainly couldn’t expect what has happened in the past two years for he and I. As happy as I was last year, it would be hard to say I could be any happier last year than I was for what happened on Sunday. It’s your younger brother. I bleed for him every Sunday and what he did the other night was truly special. I’m really, really proud of him.