Category Archives: Jim Irsay

Bill Polian, Denver Broncos, Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay, NFL, Peyton Manning

The Book on Manning

On Sunday night, Peyton Manning returns to Indianapolis to play professional football in a state-of-the-art football stadium he played a large role in getting built.
Perhaps you have heard of this little fact. If not, let me know once you’re out from underneath that rock and I’ll fill you in on government shutdowns, Miley Cyrus and this new thing called the iPhone.
In all seriousness, Peyton’s return to Indy as the quarterback of the Denver Broncos continues to grow in significance with each passing day. This is due largely to the fact that the Broncos are undefeated, that Peyton Manning is doing Peyton Manning like things, you know, generally embarrassing defenses with an offense so cutting and precise, it would make a slew of surgeons, architects and engineers jealous.
But Peyton has always done this, or at least it has felt like he has. Now there’s that undertone flowing into this Sunday’s game with the Colts, that imagine what he could do if he were still there and that the Colts might have given up on him.
So of course, the normally quiet and reserved owner of the Colts, Jim Irsay, spoke up about this after a litany of questions this week.
Actually, again, unless you living Patrick Starfish-style under a rock, you know that it was the exact opposite – Irsay talks constantly, about anything and everything under the sun, without prompting. His comments about wishing the Colts would have won more Super Bowls weren’t really controversial; it was the truth.
The media has latched on to the story this week, but that’s what the media does.
If you’ve seen the “Book of Manning” documentary, then you can get the background needed to write the book on Peyton Manning. He’s prepared, flawless, exceptional, born to play quarterback and thrives by knowing every possible situation and outcome – like a mathematical genius that sees every possible outcome before it happens.
But being built in such a way does not leave room for randomness, spontaneity, surprise. What happens when things go wrong and something does not go as planned. This is where, as we learned from that documentary, where Peyton’s father, Archie thrived.
And by watching old footage of Archie – even that crazy scrimmage game in the late 1980s at Ole Miss – you can see it: Archie just kind of made things up.
You know which one of Archie’s sons does that now? Eli – not Peyton. Just look at the New York Giants Super Bowl wins, the playoff runs, the regular season games where they look out of it. Eli scrambles, chucks and pulls rabbits out of his hat.
Peyton’s act is no magician; he’s a professional quarterback. As such, the book on Peyton has always been that he’s exceptional in the regular season, but come playoff time, he’s not very good. It happened at Tennessee and it definitely happened with the Colts.
Now, that’s not meant to place the blame of first-round exits and humiliating defeats in the playoffs at the hands of Peyton Manning. Football is more nuanced than that. But just look at the key interception of the Super Bowl loss to the Saints. Is Reggie Wayne to blame for that costly pick? Or, could it be that Peyton is such a tactician, he threw it to the pre-programmed spot on the field where Reggie was supposed to be? Who’s actually at fault, Wayne for not being there, for a variety of reasons – or Peyton for not adjusting his read and throwing it anyway?
This could obviously spiral off into a multi-layered conversation if we actually rehashed even just that one play.
The overall point: nothing Irsay said about Peyton was inaccurate, and frankly, not that controversial. How can you not have wished to have won more than one ring with perhaps the greatest quarterback of all-time taking you to the playoffs 11 years? The same has been said about the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s with their incredible pitching staff of Glavine, Smoltz and Maddux.
As I heard earlier this week, the real and hidden swipe might have been at Bill Polian, with Irsay essentially saying Polian could bring the horse to the water, but couldn’t make it drink. While slightly unfair – and kind of uncalled for, considering what Polian did, it also might be just inaccurate.
Polian had a tough task of building an entire franchise around Peyton, and accordingly, he put together a team that could play from ahead defensively, since that was the goal: Peyton gets you a lead, pin your ears back and go after the other team aggressively on the defensive front.
It did work. Polian cannot perform on the field, any more than any other sports executive. He assembled the team and accomplished a great deal during his tenure, the likes of which had not been seen either in the NFL or in Indianapolis from a consistency standpoint.
If it was indeed a swipe, it was unfair and needless.
But let the good fans in Indy not waste any time thinking about what could be currently. It was time to change direction, switch things up and try a new approach. And clearly, we didn’t know if Peyton would return to form like this. We still don’t know if it will last for more than a year or two.
The Broncos were simply a better fit last season. They looked a lot like Manning’s 2000s Colts. Still do, just more dangerous weapons and a better overall defense. We shall see if this translates to another 13-3 season and a bitter playoff failure, or, perhaps a Super Bowl.
For the Colts, Andrew Luck couldn’t be a better fit. It could not have worked out better.
Is it going to be awkward Sunday night? Of course. These things always are. Without Manning, the city may not even have a pro football team, let alone a new stadium. It certainly wouldn’t have the Super Bowl banner it has.
But every legend leaves with a little gas left in the tank. The Colts just didn’t want to be left holding the keys when it went empty. They saw a chance for another once-in-a-generation quarterback who fit their city and style perfectly and they took it.
Its sports. It is how these things work. Would the Colts be better off with Peyton right now? There’s no real way to know for sure. We’re not in an alternate world where he is with the Colts, we just have what we see.
And for all that he did accomplish, for basically saving football in Indiana, the fans will give him a standing ovation, Peyton will be humble, gracious and appreciative. The game will start and aside from the crowd not giving him the benefit of pin-drop quiet he’s used to in Lucas Oil Stadium, it will be fine.
While it will be easy to look back at the end of the season or in five years and point out what happened as evidence either way, just remember this: it seemed right and natural at the time. Because as crazy as Jim Irsay is, he was not necessarily incorrect (this time).
The book on this Manning may not be complete, but the preceding chapters to this one have told a story, and not every page was perfect.
We did want more.

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Andrew Luck, Bill Polian, Indianapolis Colts, Jim Caldwell, Jim Irsay, NFL, Peyton Manning

What Goes Around…

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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Duane Bickett, Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay, NFL, Peyton Manning

What Goes Around…

Like any good football fan, around 1:00PM yesterday, I was all set: Fantasy football league StatTracker loaded on the computer, beer in hand and scrolling through NFL Sunday Ticket to see which game I wanted to watch, I settled on the Atlanta Falcons vs. Chicago Bears tilt.
Being a Bears fan, this was a natural selection for me. But living around Central Indiana all these years, as the Indianapolis Colts bandwagon grew, part of me reveled in checking in on the Colts trip to Houston to play the Texans. So I did, around 1:20PM.

The Colts were already down.

I had a hunch – just a sneaking suspicion really – that the Colts would sorely miss Peyton Manning, out for “awhile” (in the words of owner Jim Irsay) due to a second surgery on his neck.
And wouldn’t you know it, I was right.
After the Texans 34-7 throttling of the Colts, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Scrolling through my Facebook updates, I saw friends trashing the team, talking about how horrible they were, how it could have been 68-0.
Right on all accounts.
And then I saw this: “This is going to be such a long season…I won’t be able to watch!”
Bingo. 

The money line I’d been waiting for. You could almost hear Colts fans across the state hitting the sauce, opening their fourth beer of the day in the early second quarter.

See, a few years ago, I wrote about how the Colts fans were spoiled brats, the whole bandwagon lot of them. Nearly 10 straight playoff seasons, seven straight 12-win campaigns, nine straight 10-win seasons, fans didn’t know how good they had it – or had forgotten had bad it had been.
The last time the Colts were under .500 was 2001 and Manning was in his fourth season, just 25-years old. In fact, 2001 was the only other season other than Manning’s rookie year in 1998 that the Colts were below .500. The last time the Colts won 10 or more games in a season before 1999, when Manning led the Colts to a 13-3 mark? Try 1977, when they were in Baltimore.
Since arriving in Indianapolis in 1984, the Colts had 7 losing seasons in 13 years. They had a few fun years with Jim Harbaugh and Marshall Faulk, but they always felt like punchy underdogs in the playoffs.
But since Peyton Manning came to town, the Colts have been the heavyweight favorites in the regular season. I’ve often argued that most fans just want a team that always has a shot and contends. But the Colts are proving my theory wrong, really.
Perennial contenders, the Colts fan base forgot how bad it sucked to be Colts fans. And I can say this because I’m unattached, unemotionally watching it happen from the sidelines as a fan of another team who doesn’t rival the Colts like the New England Patriots or Pittsburgh Steelers.

The fan base has swollen to include people who can’t name anyone on the team before 1998. They don’t know who Ron Stark is, Billy Brooks or Duane Bickett. The majority of these fans didn’t watch the team in the 1980s and 1990s – I know because the games were often blacked out. They got excited when Eric Dickerson came to town, but when the Colts didn’t win games, they stopped coming.

If you were looking for something to do in downtown Naptown in the late 80s or early 90s, it would have been a Pacers game. Or, wait for Indiana and Kentucky to play college basketball in the RCA Dome (or, as most should remember it, “The Hoosier Dome”). 

I can’t remember a single friend from the age of 8-16 who told me, at any point, they were a Colts fan. No one wore their jersey to school, no one went to the games.

And then, in 1999, it happened – they went 13-3 and had a franchise quarterback. Over the last 12 years, the Colts have used their success with Manning to build a new stadium and host the upcoming Super Bowl, bringing in millions of revenue in one form or another. Yeah, he’s worth the money and the roster bonus he earned even if he doesn’t play a down in 2011.
But Manning has masked a flawed franchise for years. Poor draft selections (just see everything from 2007-2011), bad hires (is Jim Caldwell even alive?) and an owner who seems to be going slightly insane (check out his hilarious Twitter feed).

This is what ancient Rome must have been like just before the end. Romans just ticked off at the lackluster leadership and star power: “Well, he’s no Caesar!“

Maybe Manning never plays another game or maybe he plays five more highly productive years and wins another Super Bowl. Honestly, both options are on the table. But that’s not what is at play here.
It’s the city and its fans at stake. This isn’t just an abnormal season or set of six games in which the Colts won’t have Peyton Manning at quarterback. No, Indy, it’s the future.
Take a look around – poor special teams, lackluster and unimaginative offense with a bumbling, aging quarterback and an incompetent coach? 

Welcome to how the other half of the NFL lives every week.

The problem is the fan base is built upon guys who’ve started rooting for the Colts in the Manning era and subsequently convinced their wives and girlfriends to watch, to go to games, to tailgate and host Colts parties.  At least 30 percent of the fan base is women under 50 – and I have no real way to back that up other than the fact I live here and see it with my eyes.

As a friend told me today, “My girlfriend didn’t want to watch the entire game because it was getting out of hand and she said, ‘I think I’m just a Peyton Manning fan, not a Colts fan.’”

And there you have it – the bulk of the Colts fan base is centered around Peyton Manning and wearing cute No. 18 jerseys.
Take a look at fans in other cities and you’ll see Gale Sayers and Walter Payton throwbacks in Chicago, Dan Fouts in San Diego, Montana and Rice in San Francisco, Bart Starr in Green Bay, Randall Cunningham and Seth Joyner in Philadelphia. 

No one’s wearing Earl Morrall throwbacks in Indianapolis. It’s a young fan base that hasn’t aged through time.

Being a fan of a team means you support that team no matter what. Want to curse at their ineptitude? Fine. Hate the GM? By all means, question the draft strategy. Criticize the players for not caring like you do? Well, only if you can back that up. You still have to tune in. You have to take your lumps, otherwise, the big wins and the championships don’t mean as much.
Most (again, not all, but most) Colts fans would tell you the lean years were during Peyton’s career, losses to the Dolphins, Jets, Patriots and Chargers, when the team had a good regular season and blew an opportunity in the playoffs.
Wrong.
The hard times were 1-15 in 1991, 4-12 in 1993, 3-13 in 1997. Those were the bad times, the bumbling times you looked away in horror, wondering desperately if it would ever get better, if they would ever contend. But there weren’t enough fans of the team now to remember that kind of pain because they bought their first jersey or ticket in 1999, 2001 or 2002.
Once Peyton’s done, this franchise will move forward and find a new quarterback. It might take five or six rough years, but they will eventually find a new guy that will be a good player for a decade or so and put the team in position to contend. It happened in Dallas, Green Bay and Pittsburgh. It’s the circle of NFL life.
There was only one Roger Staubach, but there was also only one Troy Aikman. He had a couple bad years early on too. Dallas fans stuck around for the whole thing.
No team can remain that good forever. And there will never be another Peyton Manning.
But there will be Colts football.
Question is for the fair-weathered fans of Indy, will anyone care enough to be around for the truly hard times?
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