I’ve been a Colts fan for as long as I can remember. For those of you who know how old I am, that means you realize I lived through eras with Jack Trudeau, Chris Chandler, The Jeff George bust era, names like Browning Nagle, Scott Tolzien…
I’ve known offensive suffering.
And even when the team was good–when we had Peyton Manning and Dwight Freeney and Bob Sanders and won a Super Bowl– I have known defensive suffering.
This season, Jacoby Brissett has been better than I expected. But with Andrew Luck hurt and that team built around Andrew Luck, it’s been difficult going. I was telling Julie today as I watched the game– one of many where the Colts showed the potential to win but really never had much of a chance– this is the time when you know you’re a fan. It’s easy for people to bandwagon a team like New England or the Steelers… what’s the potential pain of being a fan of a team that almost always wins?
What’s interesting as a Colts fan right now is that the team is in a sad space– it needs to be blown up and rebuilt. And by that, I mostly mean that either we have to find out of Luck is coming back and shape a future based on that or we need to stop pretending it was okay to give Luck a terrible offensive line and start over. Frank Gore looks great, but he’s nearing the end of his career. There’s a great deal of promising young talent here-and-there, but the money on that roster is tied up in people who need to move on. Other than Luck. We just need to figure out what will become of Andrew.
I want to thank the team–as a fan– for not giving up. Other than that first game against the Rams, they’ve been “in” every game. And when your team is trending bad, that’s all you can hope for. A few kicks here or there, stops on a few big plays… that team could be in playoff contention. It would go nowhere in the playoffs as this team cannot stand up to an elite team, but it was on-the-verge.
I hope that the front office can figure out what it’s trying to do before next season. This was a year lost to “when Andrew Luck is healthy,” just as most of last year was. We can’t build that way. We wasted the best years of Peyton Manning’s career wait-and-seeing with the team around him. We have to build on the lines and worry about the skill positions later.
Maybe Santa can bring us a defensive scheme and the plan to get the players to execute it. 🙂