It’s really starting to get depressing thinking that Jeff Saturday is seriously hurt. I’m not worried about it from strictly a football standpoint. The truth is that center is a weird position. It is simultaneously over and underrated. The mental side of center, (making the line calls, leading the group) is critical to a team. Saturday is a captain. In that sense he is irreplaceable. As far as blocking goes, center is one of the easier positions to fill, and the Colts are stocked with young ex-college centers, so there is perhaps no position the Colts could possibly be MORE prepared to suffer a major injury at than center. Might we see some fumbled exchanges? Sure. But ultimately, the year isn’t in the crapper just because we lost Big Jeff.
What really gets me down is that Saturday is one of the nicest, most articulate (hey, someone DID use that word to describe a white guy!) players in the NFL. He has been a leader on the team and in the league, and for his sake, I was hoping he’d have a great year so he could sign one more big time deal. As it stands, he’s gone for probably a couple of months, maybe more. I have no idea what this does to his chances for getting resigned by the Colts (maybe it helps because now his market value is crap), but it probably won’t be the big time offseason he and his family were probably hoping for. I’m sure he’ll be in the Ring of Honor some day.
Links:
FO linked to a Scouts Inc. animation of every team’s ‘best play’. It’s a cute thing, but like most stuff by Scouts Inc. it’s flat wrong. It shows the Colts play as “Joe Addai’s best run” and it’s a run right. Any observant fan knows the Colts run dramatically better to the left behind Ugoh. And guess what? There are stats to prove it. The Colts are at their best when they run behind the left tackle (2nd in the league). The really cool stats at the bottom of that page show the percentage of plays run in each direction. The Colts ran around the left end 17% of the time, and the right end 18% of the time. They ran behind the tackles 12% of the time in both directions and up the middle 40% of the time. In other words, it’s impossible to know where they are going. They keep an amazing left/right balance.
Bill Polian thinks you need a #1 WR. The Titans scoff. Who needs wideouts when your QB sucks?
Great news! The same idiots who don’t know their left from their right, think Manning will struggle due to the knee injury. Chalk him up for 40+ TDs.
Scouts Inc. looks at the center situation.
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