The Indianapolis Colts are on the road to take on the Houston Texans for their week eight game, Sunday at 1 p.m. EST.
The Colts come into week eight having won four of their last five. A lot of Colts fans (and writers/bloggers/podcasters/YouTubers) have been riding that high and I feel like I’m living on an island, all alone, with my firm belief that this Colts team is not as good as it’s record. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy this team is above .500 in late October. That is fantastic. But had the Colts not played a rookie in his third game (Caleb Williams), a retread that has since been benched for what’s left of Russell Wilson (Justin Fields), Will Levis and the all-star combo that was Tyler Huntley and Tim Boyle last week against the Dolphins, well I’m not sure this team would have won any of those games. But the fact of the matter is, you can only play who is on your schedule and the Colts went out and won those games.
So I don’t mean to take anything away from the team.
This week I’ve seen people point out that the Texans only won by two points in week one and how last week C.J. Stroud threw for a career low 86 yards. They’re missing a great wide receiver in Nico Collins and their defense is missing multiple star players as well. And that’s all true but this Colts defense is bad. Very, very bad. Zaire Franklin is playing the worst football of his career. He isn’t getting off blocks and I don’t care how many tackles he ended up with last week, how many of them came before the back was 4-6 yards beyond the line of scrimmage? You don’t need to actually go look, it wasn’t many. Even the defense’s best plays from a week ago were from fluky fumbles that were caused after a Miami back had already picked up a big chunk of yards.
Had the Colts played better quarterbacks, frankly, I don’t know that they would have won a single game this year. And yes I just got done lambasting the run defense and you might be wondering how I’m making that connection. That’s fair. But when the Colts do manage to prevent the opposing running back from picking up a first down on either first or second down runs, often that opposing team chooses to throw on third down. Bad quarterbacks don’t often convert on third down. C.J. Stroud, despite his play last week and Collins’ absence, is unfortunately, a very good quarterback.
After watching Anthony Richardson last week, I also feel completely alone in the online Colts world. First let me say, Richardson was bad. There. Got that out of the way.
But it is wild to me the way people are talking about why he was bad.
I feel like I’m the only one who remembers week two against the Green Bay Packers. When he was sailing passes to wide open receivers and then when asked about it, he more or less said that he was working through things too quickly, getting excited and trying to rush the throw which was making the ball come out wildly.
So last week was it the same thing? No! His throws were mostly on target. He had one or two off target throws, but every quarterback will have one or two they’d like back. So what was it last week? Everything he threw came out late. He slowed down, way down, too slow. He worked his reads, found the open man, got his feet right and threw the ball. The problem wasn’t his accuracy it was that from the time he found his receiver to when he actually made the throw it took too much time, allowing the defensive backs to make a jump and break up the passes.
THIS IS FANTASTIC NEWS!
Not because the result was bad. Not because the balls were deflected. Not because we had to listen to another week of narrative based “analysis” but because he took a problem he had the last time he played a full game and he fixed it in the next one. He is working through a problem he (and probably his coaches) identified and he’s fixing things week to week. This is what progression looks like. It isn’t always that things just get better. Sometimes you have to suck at something in a different way before you figure out what works and the process is happening right in front of our eyes and it sure feels like everyone is missing it.
Little known online fact about me (I think) I coached gymnastics for almost a decade. I mostly coached bars and floor (I’m a big guy who was good at spotting the kids, I was most useful on those two events) but every now and then I would find myself working with kids on vault or beam. I, after a near decade of coaching, still don’t know that much about beam, I won’t get into it here but just know, I don’t. The one thing I do know is that when a kid is learning a new skill and is consistently falling off of the beam on the same side, you convince them to fall off of the beam on the other side. Every time I told a kid to fail, but just differently, I would get confused looks and every time they successfully fell off the beam on the “other” side, I would then tell them to split the difference and land on the beam the next time they did the skill. And guess what? Normally that worked.
Sometimes you have to fail multiple ways to understand how you can succeed, before you actually succeed.
I don’t know if Anthony Richardson is going to be a good quarterback. I hope he will be. But I am sure that he is progressing and it feels like no one in the football world is noticing.
Either way I expect the Colts to lose this game, mostly due to the defense. Unless Richardson puts it all together this week (unlikely) and the offense is dominant, I expect this to be a rough watch for Colts fans. I hope I’m wrong.
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This is your week eight open thread so hang out here, chat, celebrate, commiserate, and argue in the comments! Go wild (within reason)!
Go Colts!
