The Colts were able to hold off the Dolphins Sunday to get their 7th win on the season. The Colts have the chance to be a .500 team next week if they can beat the Titans in Indy. There is also still hope that they may be able to make the playoffs this year, however there needs to be considerable help from teams winning and losing to get the Colts in the playoffs. Essentially there are nine games that have to fall the right way for the Colts to be a part of the postseason. Nine games have to be the right outcome for this underachieving Colts team to slink into the playoffs. That doesn’t sound very pleasant to me. Would it do any good for the Colts to get into the playoffs only to be bounced in the first round? Not really. So what is the point in the Colts making the playoffs anyways? There isn’t one other than to say that they made it to the playoffs in all four of Pagano’s seasons.
We all need to face it that this season is over. There is still one more game and I am hoping for a Colts victory. I would much rather be 8-8 than 7-9. Being a .500 team makes you feel better as a fan about this season and it makes the players feel better about it as well. Hell, this is a season in which so many starters were injured and the team lost their star quarterback for the majority of the season. When he did play he played like a junior varsity quarterback against a college football team for most of it, but he’s still our team leader. A lot of back-up players lead this team to where they are now and that is encouraging to a point. To know that there was enough talent on the bench to come in and pull that off is great news. That shows that the scouts and possibly the Colts general manager, Ryan Grigson, know what they are doing. What else is there to look forward to you ask? Other than the Super Bowl of course there is the draft and NFL free agency. Those are always a great thing to wait for during the offseason.
So what are the takeaway’s from this season so far? Possibly going 8-8 with a decent draft position is truly about it. We learned that Andrew Luck will play a football game with a lacerated kidney and still beat the best defense in the NFL. We learned that a 40 year old quarterback still has some fight left in him. We saw a team be resilient which is very good as well. We also learned that Donte Moncrief is for real and will more than likely continue to grow into a breakout star in the NFL. Moncrief has had a great season and he will be a key player for this team for as long as he is on it. What else did we learn? This offensive line still needs an overhaul, the defensive backs need to be changed out at certain positions, and the defense, which was good in flashes, still needs a ton of help to compete against the juggernaut offenses of the NFL.
I’ve said before and I will say it again, there are some really good pieces on this team to help build a real contender very quickly. Luck has to shore up his bad play and if Johnson stays he will have to put in the extra work to be useful next season. Gore likely won’t get to 1,000 yards this season, but he has shown when he has good blocking he is more than effective. Hilton is a star, but he didn’t have a quarterback for much of the season that could get him the ball downfield where he is most effective.
The Colts offensive line isn’t full of bad players. They need a solid center and a solid right guard to make this unit better equipped for next season. I feel Joe Reitz is more than capable of handling the right tackle position with Denzel Good as a capable backup. The Colts front office will need to find suitable depth for this offensive line though. Guys like Xavier Nixon, Khaled Holmes, and Lance Louis aren’t going to cut it. There needs to be as many viable options as possible when it comes to the offensive line so that if one goes down Luck won’t have to worry if the replacement can get the job done or not. Hugh Thornton had me on board when he was inserted, but quickly went back to his old ways of playing badly down the stretch. There are other positions on this team the need to be addressed and if the offensive line isn’t priority number one then there is no point in putting a team on the field in 2016.
I know it’s hard for Colts fans to realize that after next Sunday the Colts season is over. We all had aspirations of watching our boys in blue contend for another Lombardi. Things obviously did not go as planned and there wasn’t much that could be done about what happened. Could the guys on the field have played harder? Sure they could have, but would that have changed many outcomes? No one knows. I’m sure that the sting of this season will remain with all the players that will be here next season and they’ll not want to feel that again. Hopefully they will be working three times as hard to ensure that it doesn’t.
