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Doyel: The Colts have no idea what they're doing
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www.indystar.com]
Gregg DoyelUpdated 11:37 a.m. ET Sept. 11, 2017
Stephen Holder and Gregg Doyel break down the Indianapolis Colts' 46-9 season-opening loss to the Los Angeles Rams. Matt Kryger/IndyStar
LOS ANGELES – The Indianapolis Colts stink, and not just the players on the field for that 46-9 loss Sunday to the Los Angeles Rams in their 2017 NFL opener. The whole damn franchise stinks, starting with the owner and oozing downhill, as this sort of excrement tends to do.
The front office stinks. The coaching staff. The scouting department. The players? Bless their hearts, yes. The players stink, too.
A loss like this, it goes looking for people to blame and it does not go wanting. The difficulty is deciding where to start. Quarterback Scott Tolzien was terrible, but you don’t start there. Tolzien has been something less than an NFL quarterback for years, and he stayed in character Sunday from his first pass of the game: an interception the Rams returned for a touchdown. He threw a second pick-six, and flirted with a third and a fourth, before being benched for Jacoby Brissett.
Tolzien’s amateurish play Sunday – quarterback rating: 33.8 – was as predictable, if not as uncommon, as a lunar eclipse. Where were General Manager Chris Ballard and coach Chuck Pagano looking this summer when they chose Tolzien over Stephen Morris? Directly into the sun.
OK, that’s not the real answer. The real answer is even dumber.
While Morris was fabulous for a second consecutive year of preseason games, Ballard said last week that the job went to Tolzien because he was better than Morris in offseason OTAs and again in the early practices of training camp. And Pagano on Sunday said he “would never second-guess” that decision, because Chuck Pagano is nothing if not reliably prone to say things that sound blatantly untrue.
No, this loss wasn’t Tolzien’s fault, though he did try to take the blame for it. To his credit, he acknowledged that football “is a team effort, but I certainly want to own this” defeat. To Pagano’s credit, he accepted blame for this loss on multiple occasions, even as he referred to the Rams as "the 49ers." To the credit of star receiver T.Y. Hilton, who fumbled his first catch of the season as he was diving to avoid contact – read that again – he tried to take the blame as well, saying: “I fumbled. It started with me.”
Who’s right? They’re all right. A loss like this, a loss in need of a mercy rule given that one team belonged in Little League, it’s too heavy for any single set of shoulders. It falls on offensive coordinator Rob Chudzinski, who called two goal-line rushes, power running plays, with his power back – Robert Turbin – on the sideline. And after those two carries by home-run threat Marlon Mack resulted in a loss of 1 yard, Chud put in Turbin … and called for Tolzien to throw it. Rams cornerback Trumaine Johnson, who delivered the pick-six on the Colts’ first pass of the game, might’ve had another had he hung onto this amateurish toss by Tolzien.
This loss also falls on defensive coordinator Ted Monachino, who either chose converted safety T.J. Green to start and play most of the game at cornerback – or yielded that decision to Pagano, when what Monachino should have done was offer to resign before letting someone as lousy as T.J. Green undermine his defense.
And make no mistake: T.J. Green is lousy. Moved from safety midway through the preseason because all he'd consistently done there since last season was miss tackles and deliver cheap shots, Green missed a tackle early in the second quarter when Rams running back Todd Gurley was fighting for extra yardage near the goal line. With Gurley’s entire body as a target, Green went for a cheap shot – he targeted Gurley’s head – but glanced off Gurley’s helmet, allowing the Rams running back to fall forward, into the end zone for a touchdown.
Chuck Pagano just said the Colts lost to the 49ers. They played the Rams.
Oh, and Green was in coverage on Rams receiver Cooper Kupp’s 18-yard TD catch that gave the Rams a 24-3 lead. At the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis, Kupp ran the 40-yard dash in 4.62 seconds. Green ran it in 4.34 seconds. On the touchdown in question, Kupp was wide open because he was running away from Green.
Don’t ask me to explain that. Still can’t believe I saw it.
Can’t believe what happened on the Colts’ second series, either, after Tolzien completed a short pass to Marlon Mack and Mack sprinted toward the end zone. When 5-8, 190-pound Rams safety Lamarcus Joyner approached near the goal line, he nudged the 5-11, 210-pound Mack pushed out of bounds. It was a soft play by Mack, a play the Colts have become famous for in recent years as their blowout losses have mounted – and then it became something much worse.
Because Chuck Pagano didn’t challenge the official ruling that Mack was pushed out of bounds before reaching the end zone.
Colts battle the Rams in the Coliseum
No, Pagano was too busy hurrying his next play onto the field – a power rush that Chudzinski gave to speed back Marlon Mack, who had just demonstrated that power is not his thing. With the Rams unable to substitute, Pagano was looking for a personnel mismatch, and he found one: His personnel was outmatched.
Pagano outsmarted himself, the only NFL coach I’ve ever seen him outsmart, and afterward said that whole sequence was on him.
And it was. But other sequences were on the defense, which put almost no pressure on Rams quarterback Jared Goff (career-best 117.9 quarterback rating) and allowed multiple Rams receivers to run wide open. The defense has been completely remade from the Colts’ 2016 opener, literally 11 new starters, which means that’s on the general manger who put the unit together. And his name isn’t Ryan Grigson.
The Colts offensive line, meanwhile, allowed four sacks and nine quarterback hits in a game where they attempted just 21 passes. It was this past week when Pagano had decided “I’ve never felt better about an offensive line,” but again, that’s what he does: He says things that simply don’t sound honest. Pushed on that piece of Pollyanna a few days ago, Pagano doubled down:
“Never felt better,” he said again. “You guys can write it. You can put it on the record and hold it to me.”
Done. And now let's move on and remember what Colts owner Jim Irsay had said this summer about the biggest problem of the Andrew Luck era: his lack of protection.
“I’m telling you,” Irsay said in June, “the offensive line is fixed.”
I'm telling you something else: The people who run this team, from the owner on down, have no idea what they’re seeing, saying or doing.
