Fallout

It feels like we are right back to where we were three or four weeks ago doesn’t it? The Patriots are mauling an AFC East team, so everyone assumes it’s metaphysically impossible to beat them. Meanwhile, Peyton “Hawkeye” Manning and his lovable band of wacky military doctors are just sort of plugging along. You all should know by now how we feel about the rest of this season…nothing counts until January. I suppose that’s slightly overblown, as in 13 days, the Colts should have a pretty tough matchup with the Jholes, but in essence it’s true. The Colts can afford one and possibly even two losses and still have the two seed. It’s not about playing well, it’s about getting healthy.

That being said, the lack of pressure was disturbing yesterday from the D-line. It was pressure that keyed the defense against the Patriots in the first half, and when that ran out, the Pats hit some big plays. Watching the NE game yesterday (admittedly, only for about a half a quarter) it looked like a return to the Brady-has-a-half-an-hour-to-throw-days of several weeks ago. I’m still a little baffled by how horribly bad these teams play against the Pats. The Bills had an awful game plan and horrible execution. I think that bad weather in January will help slow NE down, but in the end it’s going to take consistent pressure on Brady to win. Freeney’s injury may kill us all yet.

I think we’ve all come to accept that Marvin isn’t coming back anytime soon. My best guess: they’ll roll him out for the playoffs after being out all season. Why? Simply put, they haven’t put him on IR. The Colts are incredibly thin right now and desperately need the roster slot (they cut a staple veteran every week just to make the roster limits). If Marvin absolutely wasn’t playing, they’d put him on IR. At this point, I think they are keeping him around just to trot him out against Pittsburgh and NE. Or he could play Thursday, who knows?

A couple of quick links (remember those?): FO still likes the Colts as the only real challenger to the Pats.
Peter King thought going for it on fourth down was crazy. I was espousing Dungy’s logic yesterday, that the Chiefs were likely to be forced to punt to the Colts, and they would have a chance to move into FG range anyway. The real mistake was taking the timeout with 6 instead of 2 seconds left. Demond mentioned it yesterday, but I’ve seen lots of coaches do this. I’m not sure why. We did it against Denver last year as well. I get doing that on 3rd down, in case of a bad snap, but on 4th down why not just let the clock run down to 2 secs? Lots of coaches do that and it just makes no sense.