What a week this team has had. Firing Pep Hamilton, replacing his with Rob Chudzinski (Praise be unto him), beating the Broncos, Darius Butler winning Defensive Player of the Week, and finally Andrew Luck having his KIDNEY LACERATED and being reported to be out for over a month. Well, 4 out of 5 ain’t bad. It was a great game by the team. A lot of credit has to go to our new Lord and Savior Rob Chudzinski (again, Praise be unto him) for setting the team up for success with great play calling. Gore actually got to run the ball, the passes had plenty of curls and slants, and Luck ran the ball efficiently (even if he wasn’t sliding). Not a lot of people expected the Colts to win against the undefeated Denver team, but they played both sides of the ball fairly well and that’s why they won. Hopefully this can help turn the team around even with Luck being sidelined. The game was heroic…even super heroic. Get it? It was super heroic because this week 9 battle reminded me of the Marvel Studios phase II flick Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and let me tell you why.
Movie Synopsis:
If you need a refresher for a film that is barely over a year old then keep reading. If not…keep reading anyways because I worked super hard on this guys and girls. Well…not that hard, but my fingers did some work that they wouldn’t have otherwise.
The film is set in the present day New York and shows our protagonist trying desperately to adjust to his new life in the modern world, because if you haven’t seen the first film then you wouldn’t know this is important due to the fact that he’s actually from the 1940’s and was frozen…just…go watch the first movie if you haven’t seen it. I’m not going to break that one down too. So Cap is adjusting and fighting crime and overall just being the boy scout of super human being that we all know him to be from any medium you’ve taken him in from. Enter Winter Soldier who is a completely unstoppable force on the same level of our nearly unbeatable hero. The big thing about Winter Soldier is that he looks vaguely familiar to Steve Rogers (Cap’s real name) and his past. Upon sorting through his brain he realizes it is his best friend Bucky Barnes. How’d he get there? Why’s he fighting him? How does he stop him? With lots of explosions and team ups with the likes of old Avengers pals Black Widow and Nick Fury as well as enlisting the help of new friend Falcon, that’s how. All of this rings eerily familiar with the Indianapolis Colts’ week 9 matchup.
How it was like Week 9:
I think it is fairly obvious how these correlate, but let me break it down for you in case you have the intelligence of the Hulk and I of Bruce Banner mixed with Tony Stark…also I’m chiseled like Thor. A simple character-to-player breakdown should show what I mean.
Captain America = Andrew Luck : Of course they are both super humans that wear blue, but they are both also relics of a forgotten time. Luck is the reminder of a gunslinger in the way that Favre was and Cap was literally from the World War 2 era. Neither are perfect though. They meet their match and need a lot of help to put on an impressive display of heroism and win the game/fight.
Black Widow = Frank Gore : A feisty veteran that is used to sneak behind enemy lines and wear the horde down with unbelievable moves. Widow is a character that lies for a living and Gore is just an inconvenient truth that is hard to believe he can still do what he is doing at his age.
Winter Solider = Peyton Manning : The person that use to be the looked up to individual in the tandem and is returning to to earn that top spot back. Both feel like a distant memory even though they are still beloved and slightly brainwashed. They are a shadow of their former self and are seemingly held together by bio mechanical engineering advancements.
Falcon = Rob Chudzinski : The new guy in the crew. The eye in the sky. Captain America wouldn’t have been able to take on the threats he faced without him watching over him. Sometimes you have to trust a stranger like Falcon/Chud to be successful.
Nick Fury = Dwayne Allen : Because he needs an eye patch now.
Ouch.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier matches up so perfectly that you’d think that it was based off of how this game went this week, but it wasn’t. It will be perilous to be without our Captain for a few weeks, but the team can come together and persevere through what will be a slightly easier portion of the schedule than the last 4 weeks have been. This bye week is much needed to get some of the key pieces on defense healthy and to give Matt Hasselbeck an extra week to work with the offense as well as the offense getting more of a chance to learn the schemes Chud is going to set up for them. Hopefully it doesn’t turn into a civil war among the players, fans, and front office.
