My sister-in-law is a big sports fan. It’s one of the many things i love about her. But when it comes to the three teams a central Indiana resident looks at being a fan of – the IU Hoosiers, The Colts and The Cincinnati Reds she has a saying so true it makes one want to cry – “they’ll just break your heart.”
Coming into any season every NFL team has “questions.” The biggest one for the Colts this year is would Carson Wentz come in at Quarterback and show the form he did before injury back in the year that the Eagles won the Super Bowl, especially being behind one of the best offensive lines in the league.
The answer was at best on shaky ground as they started the season with a woeful 1-4 record which included a game they dominated at Baltimore but made woeful mistakes and decisions in the end that allowed the game to get to overtime and led to a loss that their coach Frank Reich admitted afterwards was the fault of how they managed the end of the game.
But as my sister-in-law would be able to tell you, these teams exist to break your heart so the Colts seemed to right the ship a bit and started playing a bit more up to their potential. Their best player, Jonathan Taylor, was tearing up NFL defenses and they seemed to find a rhythm and formula for winning. The Colts would over a stretch of play beat Buffalo and San Francisco, two teams that are very much in the running to get to and win the super bowl.
It put them in a position where, despite their woeful start, they could make the playoffs if they won one of their last two games, the first against a mediocre Las Vegas team or their last against an absolutely terrible Jacksonville team that is so bad they’ve clinched the #1 pick in the draft already.
A sure thing right? They’ll. Only. Break. Your. Heart.
They lost a game to the Raiders where they made a ton of bad decisions. Poor plays. Poor Coaching. Poor execution. That was ok though, they need only beat the Jaguars today and they would be in.
For many years, even when Peyton Manning was our QB and Tony Dungy was our coach I railed against how often the team would be so ill-prepared for games and so easily shut down when playing against really good teams (the Patriots and Tom Brady owe Dungy and Manning a great deal over that era). The last few years we’ve had Frank Reich and the team now is not just unprepared but have an uncanny ability to “play down” to the level of the team they are playing.
Coming into the game the Colts were 14 point favorites. If you’d have bet on it earlier in the week you could have gotten as many as 16.5 for the Jaguars. Vegas was bad wrong. Greg Grumbel noted “this is shocking the entire NFL” as the Jaguars took the opening drive straight down the field for a touchdown. As usual it looked like the Colts were not just unprepared but the allowing of this opening drive momentum seemed to just drain the effort from the Colts.
The Colts got the ball after and simply looked lost. At halftime they Jaguars were up 13-3. I kept watching knowing the Colts were getting the opening half kickoff. Surely Reich had taken them in the locker room and channeled his inner Bobby Knight and tore his team a new ass. They’d come out fired up knowing they’d just had their ass kicked by the worst team in the league in the first half.
They fumbled the open kickoff. Fortunately they recovered it. All Colts fans in their mind said “stay calm let’s get Taylor going and it will be ok.” It wasn’t. The Colts did nothing with the opening possession. They gave up more points. They turned the ball over. It was embarrassing and humiliating.
Halfway through the third quarter I turned the TV off and went to take a nap, knowing full well there would be three things I hate still going on:
Carson Wentz is still our quarterback. Frank Reich is still our coach. And the Colts are only going to break our hearts.
Wow. So nothing has changed.