I had concerns about whether or not the Colts could get to and/or win the Super Bowl even before the season started, due to the fact that the team let Edgerrin James go and decided to rely on the combination of first-round draft choice Joseph Addai and Dominic “Butterfingers” Rhodes to supply the ground attack; I became a bit more concered as the first few games were played and it became clear that the rush defense was back to its porous ways, allowing teams to eat up yards and clock time on us; found even more room for concern as it became clear that the Chicago Bears were not a fluke - but were, in fact, the best team in the NFL; and pretty much gave up the idea as hopeless when it was revealed that Corey Simon had some top-secret (but not life-threatening) personal health event that woud keep him sidelined for the rest of the season.
Quick note: I hope that Corey Simon makes a full and complete recovery from whatever it is that is keeping him out of uniform. I hope that he is able to play again (whether for the Colts or for someone else), because he is a superstar who has a gift for the game of football and makes any team he suits up for instantly better. I don’t pray, but my thoughts and well-wishes are with Corey and his family. I hope that the next thing I read about him is that he is healthy and happy and recovered, and I hope that the thing I read about him after that is that he will be able to play for the Colts next season.
Having said that, the Colts will have rush defense trouble all year, because the coaching staff is unable to put the fire into these guys. The coaches are unable to motivate the rush defense (this is DEFENSIVE LINEMAN and LINEBACKERS, and is not meant to indicate plays in which the guys in the secondary, by the nature of their positions, are supposed to make plays on opposing tailbacks). These guys, with the exception of Dwight Freeney (who gets held or double-teamed on every play) just don’t have the talent or the personal motivation to come out and start a game on fire.
Make no mistake, once they get embarrassed in the first thirty minutes and get the weekly tongue-lashing (which better not be the good kind you hear about masseuses giving to their special customers) in the locker room at halftime, they come out hungry. Not hungry like the kids Sally Struthers used to sponsor on TV commercials...more like fat-Uncle-Louie-on-line-at-the-Old-Country-Buffet-on-pot-roast-night hungry. Enough to do some damage, but not enough to, you know, take sharpened sticks and chase down Piggy or anything.
So why don’t they bring that in the first half? Don’t they know the teams they’re playing? Don’t they know Vince Young can’t throw the ball (yet), but that Travis Henry can run it? I know this. You know this. How can it be that it has escaped the attention of guys who get PAID to know it? Well, okay, it probably hasn’t escaped their attention.
So how can it be that these guys, who get PAID to prepare for it, fail to do so? I know people like to say that the Colts are a team that is built to play with the lead; but you can’t get and defend a lead (a big lead is easier to defend because it forces the other team into a vertical game plan, which scores points, when it works, faster than a ground attack does) when your offense isn’t on the field. And you can’t get your offense on the field when the other teams is chewing at the clock (probably like the Piggy-chasers would do) with running plays that don’t automatically stop the clock when they go wrong.
They can’t play that kind of first half rush defense against one of the really fine teams in the league this year - and here is the list of those teams: New England, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Seattle (I don’t buy Baltimore yet, because their schedule has been mostly cake and they’re all old; the Steelers are sloppy because of Motorcycle Ben and therefore won’t make the playoffs because they won’t win their division, and the two Wild Card spots will go to 1) the team above them and below the winner in their own division, and 2) Jacksonville; and I can’t quite buy the Giants because their chemsitry hasn’t taken hold quite the way it needs to for a team to be really dangerous, and they have to be really dangerous to win big in the toughest division in football) - because those teams will get down and score on you, not just run up the yards; and the Colts will have a hard time scoring on any of those teams (except New England).
I love this Colts team dearly, have supported the new stadium from day one* despite all of its detractors and its $10 million (so far) budget overrun, listen to them every week on the radio, pore over the stats on Tuesday morning (okay, Tuesday afternoon...sometimes late Tuesday night...okay, usually very, very early Wednesday morning - I keep unusual hours, what do you want from me?), and talk anyone’s ear off who will listen about how great these guys are, and how they are this step or that step away from going all the way.
But they are a bunch of •••••-••• ••••• •••••• who are afraid to play a little ugly (or a little rough, or a little dirty) sometimes, for fear of irking their quarterback and their head coach. They need to hold a players-only meeting and let someone other than Peyton Manning facilitate it; and they need to make a persuasive case for Manning to take to Tony Dungy and Tom Moore (methinks Moore will be more receptive to it from jump street than will Dungy, but that’s just me) so that Manning can let the coaches know that the team wants to show its fire and its heart, and that they are all agreed that they need to up the passion voltage - in the locker room AND on the field - before anyone is going to take these guys seriously as Super Bowl contenders. And then the defense needs to step up and create turnovers, squash opposing quarterbacks into the ground, and start making tackles with conviction (and in a way that make the hits Bob Sanders puts on people look like pimp slaps); and after that, Manning and the offense need to get back out there and shred the other team’s defense with Joseph Addai running draw plays and stretch plays on first and second down, and then Manning going deep to Harrison or Wayne or Clark or Stokley or Moorehead for touchdowns. I don’t want to see Adam Vinatieri on the field for anything but PATs, and I don’t want to see Hunter Smith on the field, ever. Ever. Let him trace the outside edge of the field at the beginning, middle, and end of games. I don’t ever want him inbounds, even if the clock is off.
Because I’ll tell you what - Chicago is head and shoulders above every other team in this league, and no one else, including the Colts, is even close. And they’re doing it on both sides of the ball, now that Rex Grossman has remembered the fact that he’s a good quarterback; they don’t have to rely on their defense to keep them in games anymore. They have two receivers (Muhsin Muhammad and Bernard Berrian) who are on pace for over a thousand yards each, a kicker who has already kicked seventeen field goals (EIGHT of which have been in the 40-49 yard range) and fifteen extra points (missing none of either), and a quarterback who has thrown for over twelve hundred yards and ten touchdowns, against only three picks, and is fourth in the league in quarterback rating. Their running game is less impressive, although Thomas Jones is on pace to go over a thousand yards and score almost eight touchdowns. Clearly, this is a team that is getting it done through the air, but which also has a running game that will keep you honest.
Another quick note: this post is pouring out of me at a remarkable rate, but it is doing so on Sunday night, so it’s possible that these Bears stats are only through four games. That makes them more impressive. Stats through game five will be even more gaudy, as the Bears thrashed the hapless Buffalo Bills for forty points today. I’ll check the stats and update the post on Tuesday.
UPDATE: The stats in the paragraph above are through five games. And they are sick.
*Note on the stadium: Most people like to complain about the Colts and the fact that the Colts are getting a new stadium. Wrong. Actually, that’s not quite right. WRONG! There. That’s better. Indianapolis is getting a new, state-of-the-art sports and entertainment venue THAT WAS MANDATED BY THE NEW CONTRACT WITH THE NCAA, AND NOT THE COLTS. Indianapolis will host the men’s Final Four, on average, every five years for the next thirty-nine years, because of that deal. There will also be men’s AND women’s first and second round NCAA Tournament games, probably the women’s Final Four, and maybe, just maybe (since the bugger will reach the NFL’s magic 70,000 seats number), a Super Bowl. The men’s Final Four alone brings in something like $30 million to the city’s economy. Let’s see...thirty-nine divided by five is 7.8, which, when multiplied by THIRTY MILLION is $234 million. That’s almost half the price tag right there. Never mind all the conventions that are going to take place in the EXPANDED convention center, and all the new conventions we’re going to get that we couldn’t get before, and all the conventions we’re going to get back that we had started to lose because they were growing and our convention center wasn’t...and don’t forget the eight Colts games a year over the thirty years we get to keep the Colts because of the new stadium (that’s 240, and even if you figure the estimate of how much money that brings to town at a conservative one million bucks**, that’s nearly half the price tag again). I don’t have numbers on the conventions, or on the women’s Final Four or men’s/women’s first and second round games, but I’ll bet, over 30-40 years, it’s better than $36 million, which is difference between the conservative estimates of Colts and men’s Final Four revenue over those 30-40 years and $510 million, which is the price tag plus the $10 million overrun. Of course, that’s assuming that Colts and Final Four revenues stay flat, which means ticket prices not going up over the course of a generation...and who really thinks THAT won’t happen?? Oh, and don’t forget this, you ••••• •••••••••••: Governor Daniels stole the funding plan for the stadium from Mayor Peterson, and it was Daniels’ plan that raised taxes, not Peterson’s. Apparently the conservatives are okay with raising taxes but not with gambling (as pull tabs would have closed the funding gap in Peterson’s plan, whereas the Daniels plan implemented that whopping 1% food and beverage tax in Marion and the surrounding “doughnut” counties - for the math-challenged, that means the next time you go out and buy your wife dinner and blow a hundred bucks at St. Elmo, which you can easily do even if you don’t get drinks or wine, you drop a whole extra buck on the stadium; and don’t talk to me about the principle of the thing, because there is no principle involved if you can afford to drop a hundred bucks on dinner and then choose to bitch about floating a buck to the stadium - the homeless beggars on Meridian Street probably guilt you out of least that much on your lunch break!). You got the tax increase because the Republican stole the plan - and it’s usually Republicans who try to cut taxes, so there you go. I suspect old Mitch might be eyeing the Senate seat Evan Bayh will vacate when he is elected President, but that’s a topic for another post, I think.
**Note on ticket prices: the lowest priced single ticket at the Hoosier Dome*** is twenty bucks. Now, regular Colts games will not use the 70,000 seat capacity of the new stadium; the more realistic number is between 63,000 and 65,000 seats, so let’s run the numbers this way.
$20 * 63,000 = $1.26 million
$1.26 million * 8 home games = $10.08 million
$10.08 million * 30 years on the lease = $302.4 million
Just Colts home games. Regular season. And yes, I know that most of that money goes to the players and the coaches and Jim Irsay and everyone but you and me. But that’s ticket revenue, and ticket revenue is taxed up the ass, baby, and every one of those tax dollars goes back to the city. And remember, that’s just ticket revenue AT THE CHEAPEST LEVEL. It does not include money from concessions, parking, items sold at the Colts Pro Shop (yes, I know most of the money from merchandise goes back to the team, but don’t forget the taxes...), television revenue, or the fact that most of the tickets go for a lot more than twenty bucks. In fact, take a look at the seating chart in the Hoosier Dome. You’ll see that the cheap $20 seats represent the SMALLEST chunk of seats available. So...ipso fatso (as Archie Bunker used to say), the actual amount of money generated from ticket revenue (which I above pegged at just over $300 million over thirty years) will be SIGNIFICANTLY higher; and ticket prices probably won’t be doing down at all over those thirty years.
And that doesn’t even take into account the intangibles, which is another conversation entirely. Seen any big hotels go up in downtown Indianapolis lately? Who do you think stays there? That’s right, convention attendees. Now, I know that those hotels are owned by criminal corporations who don’t pay taxes because cities are so excited to get their business that they practically fall all over each other trying to offer the biggest tax abatements, but what those hotels mean in terms of real dollars for this city is jobs for the people who work there, jobs for the people who build those hotels, and taxes paid to the city by the people who stay in those hotels. And, unlike the stadium, which fills with Colts fans all of eight times a year (okay, maybe ten to thirteen times, including playoff and pre-season games, but you can’t always count on playoff games, and pre-season games don’t sell out like regular season games), those hotels do business on pretty much a daily basis. Oh...and they all have restaurants on their ground floors, don’t they? Yeah, I think they do. The new Marriott has two, actually, and an overpriced, low-quality Starbucks. Actually, the Westin has a Starbucks, too, though I cannot attest to whether or not it is overpriced or low-quality. The one inside the Marriott has pretty much soured me on Starbucks stores inside snooty hotels.
***No, I won’t call it the RCA Dome. ••• ••.
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