The Indianapolis Colts are 0-10. They have lost their last four games by a combined 110 points. Coincidentally, they lost their fans about four games ago, too, when they were beaten 62-7 on national television by the New Orleans Saints.
And last Monday, their head coach, Jim Caldwell, said this: “You can see that they [the players] are going to fight you until the end.”
Everyone smiled happily and nodded. Unicorns danced about the room and Colts owner Jim Irsay sang a song about Caldwell’s lucrative contract extension while playing his acoustic guitar.
Fine, I made those last two sentences up. In fact, it was the total opposite. I was waiting for the next question to be from someone called “Reality” who asked if Caldwell had ever visited him or if he just sent postcards from Fantasyland.
Caldwell says the Colts are just going to keep playing and playing extremely hard. Odd, as most of us are wondering if the Colts knew that the season started two months ago. Perhaps the lockout threw off their internal clocks and they think it’s still preseason, because I can’t come up with any rational explanation for why the Indianapolis Colts are 0-10 and by far and away the worst team in professional football.
As I wrote last month, someone’s got to get fired over this. But that’s not the issue to me anymore. You don’t get to 0-10 and it’s just the coach.
It’s pathetic to watch the effort, or in this case, the lack thereof, the Colts display on weekly basis. And I can’t help but wonder what sports karma has to do with all this? If, possibly, past sporting sins are catching up to the Colts.
The thought process is simple, if even by my own admission somewhat silly: what you do as an organization, what your players do, how your owner acts, how you win and lose plays into future results.
For example, I’ve long believed that Jerry Jones is the reason the Dallas Cowboys haven’t won a playoff game in 12 years. He’s a smothering figure over that franchise and their drama over the years is comeuppance for that.
Likewise, I think sports karma can work for and against you at the same time. The New England Patriots openly declared they were chasing perfection in 2008 and were rewarded with a perfect regular season. However, they ran up the score and illegally taped some opponents, so sports karma put velco on David Tyree’s helmet in the Super Bowl, leaving the Patriots with the moniker of greatest regular season team to not win a Super Bowl.
Perhaps what the Colts are experiencing now are ramifications from all the years where they didn’t go for it, when they didn’t rest their players. Everyone should be trying to win every game, because, in essence, that is the backbone of sports. You are giving your full effort against an opponent who’s giving his best effort. Someone wins, someone looses. But the common thread is the integrity with which the game was played.
Maybe karma decided it broke the integrity of the game by not playing all their games to the best of their ability and always setting their sights on the playoffs.
Why teams rest players, I’ll never fully understand. You play to win the game! (copyright, Herm Edwards). How many sports do you see rest your best players? How often does it work out well and the team that does the resting does the winning of a championship? More often than not, it’s the hot team that fought and kept working that wins the title (the Green Bay Packers last year, St. Louis Cardinals last month).
But wait, you say, what about teams that don’t fall behind and are good like the Colts were? Well, did you see the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls take their foot of the gas? How about the 1998 New York Yankees? It’s often fun to prove how much better you are – in both the regular season and the postseason.
The minute you start getting ahead of yourself and eyeballing the playoffs or setting your lineup or protecting your players, karma seems to get irritated.
And I’m only half-serious. I don’t widely suspect this is the case. I don’t really, deeply believe in karma. I’m Catholic for crying out loud. But I can’t say that I’m mildly curious and wondering if all this epic Colts sucktitude isn’t the hair of the dog that bit them.
All those years resting their stars when they were 13-0 or 13-1 or 14-0; all the seasons they took the last couple weeks off to be fresh for a first round drubbing at home at the hands of Bill Volek and the Chargers or Mark Sanchez and the Jets – that has to account for something.
At the time, we probably thought the loss in that year’s playoffs was to a byproduct of the resting players. But Dungy, Caldwell, Polian and the Colts just kept on doing it. Year after year after year. After. Year.
You know, they say insanity is defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Maybe sports karma got pissed off the Colts didn’t ever learn their lesson?
Forget the theories of how resting players prevents injuries. Athletes get hurt all the time, doing any number of things. That’s not the point. Why keep doing it if it never worked? I mean at some point, doesn’t someone suggest doing it the other way? Why did that light bulb never go off? Why didn’t someone say, “I think, I don’t know for sure…now call me crazy…but possibly…we should play our starters the entire game.”
(Cut to gasping sounds of disbelief and most likely a shattered coffee cup. I really see the whole thing in playing out in slow motion as Polian was the one who dropped the cup and screamed “Nnnnnnoooooo!”.)
For a team that never approached anything from the standpoint of being “in the moment”, the Colts, somewhat oddly, also seemed wildly unprepared. From the playoff loses to mediocre teams – again, Billy Volek? – to this whole YWP (Year Without Peyton), to their draft strategy, the Colts always seem frantic, confused and out of sorts.
You’ve been trying to build and sustain a franchise around a quarterback like Manning, that has 12-15 years to win a championship and you waste prime seasons on underwhelming talent in the draft the past five years? You proclaim to be a small market team that can’t spend money in free agency to bring in a big name or marquee talent, but then you don’t draft good talent? It seems, I don’t know, contradictory.
And Jim Sorgi is fine as a backup when a young, vibrant Peyton Manning is between the ages of 25-30. But at some point, around the time your franchise quarterback hits 32 and starts wearing down after 250 consecutive starts, you might want to spend a pick on a decent quarterback. Not even to be Manning’s replacement – just to have a decent backup quarterback.
But all of this seemed to shock the Colts, especially when it was revealed that Peyton wasn’t recovering quickly after having a second offseason neck procedure this summer. And even if the Colts believed that it would only be 4-6 weeks, they could have signed someone who was passable at the quarterback position to keep the team in the hunt.
Yet what did they do? They went and signed one of Polian’s old favorites from his days with Carolina, Kerry Collins. The same Kerry Collins who six weeks before he signed with the Colts, retired because he didn’t want to put in the work. No, really, he said that. Here’s his retirement statement:
“The past several months have brought on much introspection, and I have decided that while my desire to compete on Sundays is still and always will be there, my willingness to commit to the preparation necessary to play another season has waned to a level that I feel is no longer adequate to meet the demands of the position.” – Kerry Collins, July 7, 2011
And the Colts signed him anyway! How do you read that statement and think Collins is a guy who can lead the Colts offense in Peyton Manning’s place, coming off a lockout, with the season opener two and a half weeks away?
If this were a movie, it would be a comedy.
Except no one is laughing. And even worse, and somewhat indefensible, no one is questioning the logic and rationale of the Colts brain trust on how they arrived at this point.
Now, why is that? Why is no one questioning Polian, his son, Irsay or Caldwell? Is it because Andrew Luck is coming to town? All is saved, right? The Colts will just lose their way to the No. 1 pick next April, draft Luck and enter another 12-15 years of competing for championships? I mean, Peyton Manning gave Polian his blessing to look for a quarterback just the other day. Everyone wins!
I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time believing fate will allow that to happen.
For one thing, we have every right at this point to question the heart and integrity of this team and management for how they’ve played out this season. And on some level, I could totally see Luck not panning out. And I’ve got no other reason to say that than this: fate. If Luck went to Miami or some other team, I bet he’d have a fabulous career. But part of me wonders if because of how the Colts operate, how they’ve played (or not in some cases), if Luck wouldn’t get hurt or become Ryan Leaf 2.0 and set the Colts back five years.
And if that happens, they’d be $%# out of luck.
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