Colts must move on from Chuck Pagano and Ryan Grigson
By Tyler Brooke
After missing the playoffs once again, it’s time for the Indianapolis Colts to start from scratch.
Week 17 was a fitting end to the season for the Indianapolis Colts. After trailing 17-3 at halftime, the Colts were able to pull off a comeback over a struggling Jacksonville Jaguars team to get a 24-20 win, moving them to 8-8 on the year.
Sunday also marked the final game of Robert Mathis’ career, officially ending an era in Indianapolis. Outside of kicker Adam Vinatieri, Mathis was the final player on the roster from Super Bowl XLI.
It’s now been 10 years since the Colts won their only Super Bowl with Peyton Manning at the helm, and a lot has changed since then. That couldn’t have been more clear than when former Colts stars like Dwight Freeney and Antoine Bethea reached out to offer their congratulations to Mathis on his retirement.
Look at the current Colts roster. Outside of Andrew Luck, T.Y. Hilton and Vinatieri, who else on this roster is going to be remembered as a “Horseshoe Guy” like Mathis or Freeney?
The Colts have now posted back-to-back 8-8 seasons without a playoff appearance. Despite the majority of the fan base calling for head coach Chuck Pagano and general manager Ryan Grigson to be fired after the 2015 season, both were instead signed to extensions by Jim Irsay.
After another rough season, it’s time for Irsay to move on and find a new head coach and general manager.
To be as candid as possible, the Colts are wasting Luck’s prime years. Luck will be turning 28 years old at the beginning of the 2017 season, and after five seasons in Indianapolis, the Colts have failed to put a respectable supporting cast around him.
Sure, Hilton led the league in receiving yards this season, but the offense is still far from a finished product. Frank Gore isn’t the same player he used to be at 33 years old, Phillip Dorsett is looking like a massive bust (especially considering the Colts could have drafted Landon Collins), the offensive line is still wildly inconsistent and Luck is having to do too much by himself.
The other side of the ball isn’t much better. The Colts gave up the third-most yards in the league (382.9 per game), ranked 28th in opposing passer rating (97.5) and produced just 17 takeaways on the year. Vontae Davis has taken a major step back as the team’s No. 1 corner, and there are major concerns on all three levels of the defense.
So many of these problems fall on Ryan Grigson. Since Tom Telesco left to take over the GM job in San Diego, the Colts have failed to hit on their draft picks. The Dorsett pick was bad enough, but let’s not forget that the entire 2013 draft class is already no longer on the Colts roster.
From trading a first-round pick for Trent Richardson to letting Jerrell Freeman walk in free agency, Grigson has made bad decisions one after another in Indianapolis. Meanwhile, Pagano continues to be a poor game manager who gets too conservative or sometimes making flat-out bad decisions, like the infamous fourth down “trick play” from the 2015 season.
All of this mismanagement by both the general manager and head coach has been masked by Luck and arguably the best special teams unit in the NFL continually bailing the Colts out. Even owner Jim Irsay continues to make excuses, talking about games that the Colts almost won instead of addressing some of the serious issues that the team has.
Perhaps nothing showcases more appropriately how much trouble this franchise is in that comments earlier this season from former Colts receiver Reggie Wayne, who bashed the front office on NFL Network.
“A lot of people are wanting to criticize Andrew Luck instead of really, in my opinion, going after what the big problem is,” Wayne said. “I think that big problem is a lot of the front office decisions. Whether it’s draft picks or it is free-agent picks, they’ve missed on a lot of guys.”
Gone are the days of Manning, Edgerrin James, Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne, Dwight Freeney, Robert Mathis, Bob Sanders, Tony Dungy, Bill Polian, Jeff Saturday, Tarik Glenn, Gary Brackett and countless other Classic Colts.
If the Colts want to get serious about winning a Super Bowl with Luck under center, then they’re going to need to clean house and begin rebuilding the franchise so that the next generation of Colts fans can remember players as fondly as they do of players of the previous era.