Marcellus: Night of the fight, you might feel a slight sting. That’s pride fuckin’ with you. Fuck pride! Pride only hurts, it never helps. You fight through that shit. ‘Cause a year from now, when you kicking it in the Caribbean, you gonna say to yourself, “Marcellus Wallace was right.”
Marcellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction, telling Butch to take a dive in round 5 of the fight.
The Colts played the Jets for most of 3 quarters, then took a dive. And, Marcellus was right, even as a spectator, my pride was stung. I can only imagine what it felt like for the players. Jim Caldwell and Bill Polian have voluntarily put a giant monkey on their backs and on that of the Colts. It will be chittering loudly in their ear throughout the playoffs, and if they don’t win the Super Bowl this year, they will have broken Curtis Painter’s psyche for nothing.
I don’t know that the extra quarter of rest that Manning and the rest of the starters will add to the next 3 weeks of rest were worth the trade. (Shake-n-Bake over at Stampede Blue would say that the rest is beneficial.) Presumably Polian and Caldwell (and Shake-n-Bake) know better than me, and I hope they do, but last night’s game was horribly disappointing. The Colts were playing solidly and had a small lead through most of three quarters when coach Caldwell benched Manning and most of the rest of the starters. Backup quarterback Curtis Painter was placed in a horrible situation where the pressure of 23 consecutive regular season wins and a 14-0 season was abruptly placed on his shoulders in front of a very unhappy crowd. He crumbled. He went 3 and out. He fumbled a ball into the end zone for a Jets touchdown. He threw an interception. And then I turned off the game.
Maybe taking the next 3 weeks off will leave the Colts fresh as daisies and sharp as knives cutting through the playoffs like warm butter. I sure hope so. But, the decision to quit on the regular season just added more pressure to those playoff games. Quitters never win, I’ve been told. Hopefully the Colts can prove that old adage wrong.
Bill Polian may be a great selector of talent, but had he been in charge of the US Pacific Fleet in 1942 we would have avoided the Coral Sea and lost New Guinea (“we have to preserve our strength for the offensives in the future”), lost Midway (“a flyspeck island not worth risking our carriers over”), and would have likely have withdrawn from Guadalcanal (“we’d suffer more than we might gain”). Then, instead of being the “Year That Doomed the Axis”, 1942 would have been another banner year for Imperial Japan.
Bill Polian should spend more time reading Patton. If he did, and he understood the message, he wouldn’t be pulling the plug before final victory.
He’s sort of the George McClellan of the NFL.
Well, Polian makes the point that his Bills’ teams of the 1990s did this quite a bit and managed to qualify for four consecutive Super Bowls.
My problem isn’t so much with resting the players, it’s with the way that handled this specific game. I could have understood if they had played to win for four quarters. I could understand, but would have disagreed, if they had played the starters for a series or not at all. But I can’t make any sense of yesterday’s spectacle. If injury and fatigue are such risks, then why did they play the starters for 40 minutes? It just makes no sense to be to play the starters for most of the game and then to yank them off the field when one more touchdown drive would have put the Jets and their rookie QB in a desperate situation. Also, if they were bound and determined to play Painter, they should have mixed him in earlier with the first team receivers. Honestly, playing a rookie QB with scrub receivers against one of the league’s best defenses? They may as well have forfeit.
George McClellan? Good call, Doug (at least a far sight better than Mr. Polian’s). I’d make one other military comparison, but I imagine it would be taken the wrong way.
JohnM. Key word is “qualify”. Who remembers the qualifiers? Football is supposed to be about winning, not qualifying.
I honestly want the Colts to lose now. The people that paid VERY good money for those seats for the last home game of the year did so to watch their team to everything ethical to WIN. I dare say that benching the starters like that is in the same league as the Patriots.
Do the fans REALLY want to see their team give up like that just for a CHANCE that they MIGHT go to the Super Bowl 1,000 miles away, instead of winning at home?
I’m not going to support a team that gives up like that. I liked the Colts because I felt like they had integrity. I still feel their players do, but not their leadership.
I felt sorry for the fans who paid to watch the game.
I felt sorry for the players who had to swallow their pride.
I felt sorry for other teams whose playoff chances were diminished by the Jets’ tainted victory.
I felt sorry for the Jets, who ust bear thestigma of being handed a game, rather than earning it.
I felt sorry for the NFL, which now must address the integrity of the game and. (Why should playoff teams be affected by games scheduled late in the year?)
I almost feel sorry for the bettors who were screwed by non-competitive factors. Nah, I take that back. I don’t feel sorry for the gamblers.
But mainly, I felt sick, as tanking a game goes against every instinct I have about competition. It was like a boxer being asked to take a dive. It stinks.
It’s like voting for a governor to serve four years, but she quits on you to serve a more lucrative mission.
Well, 1) Nimitz had the other team’s playbook, and 2) if Polian picked up certain of Patton’s messages he’d start parading around in a toga and Napoleon hat.
Y’all forgotten what happened to our productivity when Clark went down in 2006? How routine the plays that changed Marvin and the Edge’s careers forever? You’re one stepped-on blocker’s shoe from playing Curtis Painter throughout the playoffs.
I’m not sayin’ I agree, necessarily, just that it’s Caldwell’s call, and it’s absolutely time to be preparing for the Super Bowl, despite the fact there are no guarantees. He gave ’em three quarters to win the game; they left at least fourteen points on the field. And anything my dog trees, I’ll eat.
2006? You mean the year the Colts won the Super Bowl, even though we had people hurt and didn’t give up?
I get the disappointment. But in most cases the histrionics are excessive.
I paid a couple hundred bucks on a couple of tickets, and don’t feel particularly wronged. I understand why the starters need to be in the game long enough to work on timing and see live defenses, and then get out before some dumbass play puts Manning on the devastated-quarterback-knee list that has included folks like Brady and Palmer in the last few years.
They don’t give a trophy for beating the Jets. But maybe now they should. Colleges have Oaken Buckets, Old Brass Spittoons, etc. Maybe this particular meeting in future years should be commemorated with some similar token. As it is, it’s just one more game.
This Colts team is not dominant. They are good enough to win it all, while not blowing anyone away. They were sneaking by. If they lose one starter needlessly, their chances against the Chargers or resurgent Patriots take a blow.
The 1972 Dolphins failed to make the playoffs for the 37th year in a row. Those guys suck. Meanwhile, we’re in again, with a chance for the franchise’s third title. The Dolphins have one. Some teams have one great moment followed by a few decades of suckitude. Our path is to rock for a decade at a time, with a title or (hopefully) more thrown in.
I don’t know why someone would bemoan the Colts losing in this way (with its supposed, though dubious, purpose), and then hope they just go on losing. They’re still my team, represent my state, have the players I like watching.
Don’t know how any comparison can be made to the Patriots, who cheated. Using professional players on your active roster for a strategic reason (even if misguided) does not compare to cheating in any way.
If a bettor lost his ass on this game, he deserved it for not doing due diligence. This move was telegraphed and should not have been a surprise.
Screw other teams whose playoff hopes were affected. It’s not the Colts job to beat Team A so that Team B gets in. If Team B wants in, Team B needs to win ballgames.
I wish the Colts would have played to win. I think whatever marginal strategic benefit may have been possible to have been gained has been offset by the ensuing circus. That having been said, I hope the starters play the first half next week, and then dress warmly and sit next to the heaters. I also hope Tom Brady gets dinged up trying to extend a lead to thirty points, and Shawne Merriman injures himself doing a post-sack dance.
The Chargers or the Patriots are gonna kick Indys’ ass. The difference is now I don’t care and as a matter of fact I just might enjoy it. Gotta love karma.
I see I’ve missed the crux. That being that professional “sports” is a business, not sports. And, the business model seems to be geared towards maximizing profits, and nothing else. Maybe the newspaper needs to move professional sports reporting to the business section where it might be a better fit?
Whatever money could have been gleaned from an undefeated regular season? Obviously not enough to offset the ethereal potential of the profits possible by winning a Superbowl. I say ethereal potential because by track record, the Colts’ business model hasn’t really been all that succesessful in claiming the brass ring. Once, and that time the business model wasn’t applied. Hmmmmm. Well, whatever. They don’t pay me to run strategy.
I just hope that T doesn’t apply this same kind of business model in his profession. Wouldn’t I feel cheated if I had been treated by T up to a certain point when T would then determine that he had to save his skills for later and he handed me off to the newest intern in the office? Yeah, I wouldn’t mind.
And DR, the distorted lens of time overemphasizes Nimitz having his opponents’ playbook. Until Midway, the codebreakers were most often dismissed out of hand by the Navy bureaucracies. Still, you didn’t see Nimitz holding the Yorktown out of play at Midway because of her injuries from the Coral Sea?
Sometimes, you just have to roll the dice.
these comments sadden me. i understand being disappointed by the loss, but abandoning the team over it?
And DR, the distorted lens of time overemphasizes Nimitz having his opponents’ playbook.
It was a crack–I thought an obvious one–not historical analysis, meant to tweak the idea that everything is amenable to (cherry-picked) military metaphor. You know at least as well as I, probably better, that every Napoleonic victory by forced-march is countered by an over-extended pursuit that turned victory into defeat, every triumph of L’audace! is met with at least one tale of a force depleted through inattention to hygiene, and every close-run Midway by one near-disaster at Leyte Gulf. It’s just that dashing heroism makes the history books, while careful husbandry goes into the Petty Details file.
If you want to use the medical analogy, fine. I’ll abandon a waiting room full of people, untreated, to run to the hospital and resuscitate a crashing newborn during an emergency C-Section. The waiting room full of people have every right to expect my care, booked my services in advance, etc. It’s horribly unfair of me to abandon them. But the critically ill newborn is more important. In my profession, at that moment, that’s my Super Bowl. The sinus infections that have to be prioritized lower are my “regular season games.” Others might prioritize differently.
Here’s my war analogy:
Stonewall Jackson had the balls to stay on the field longer than necessary–and got shot out of the saddle for it. He could have sent a scout forward, but what kind of overly-cautious puss would do that?
So when Lee’s team went to his Super Bowl (Gettysburg), he was without his star playmaker.
T, your example confuses me. If, someone is having an emergency c-section, is or is not, the ER qualified to handle such an emergency? Or, don’t you trust the ER to handle the jobs they are tasked with handling? Or, are you the physician on call, or is this supposed to be your own patient? Don’t you have a nurse practitioner who can dole out z-paks as well as you can, or don’t you trust them either? I’m having trouble following just where this is supposed to equivalize to our discussion.
Ah DR. Sometimes I’m more subtle than I had thought as well. ;)
ER doc is treating ER patients. During the day, I’m responsible for my patients, including newborns, in the hospital–as well as unassigned newborns if I’m on call. As an FP in a small town, I function as the pediatrician in providing resuscitation to newborns.
I don’t have a nurse practitioner. Those patients of mine who don’t want to wait can see my younger partner who is in his second year here and has a more open schedule. I wouldn’t say my partner is Curtis Painter to my Peyton Manning, but the analogy can almost be stretched to fit.
I could ask my partner to do the most critical case for my most gravely ill patient, and stay behind to see the more mundane cases. But we do it the other way.
Regarding the Colts’ business model– It appears to have come up short in the past. The argument against the “why start them at all?” question is that if you play a half, you stay in sync, don’t get those fatigue-induced injuries, and cut the risk in half. It’s trying to thread the needle, sure, but that’s what they think will work. Past results don’t necessarily predict future returns. If Nick Harper runs the sideline rather than straight at Ben R., we beat the Steelers and the “too rusty” argument loses some of its steam.
I was struck last night, watching Monday Night Football, by the couple of players who left on stretchers. One from two teammates colliding, the other by getting bent over backward on a pretty routine tackle. If that type of play took out Brackett or Clark or Wayne or Collie, let alone the obvious Manning, that would increase the chances that our first loss would be in the playoffs. A Jets victory would be insufficient salve for such a loss. Opinions vary, obviously.
I meant, a victory over the Jets would be insufficient salve for such a loss…
Ah, T. I’ve just been living in one city or another my whole life. Hard to relate to rural/small town life.
Re: Stonewall Jackson. I can’t count the number of Union general officers who never fulfilled their potential because they led from the front (and weren’t killed by friendly fire). IIRC, the Union won anyway (convincingly).
Why is the Super Bowl such a priority?
I assume it is because of the honor, history and prestige of such a prize.
How many teams have won a Super Bowl?
How many teams have went 19-0 with a Super Bowl win?
Quitting, as Doug’s title pointed out, promised the Colts that the perfect season would not come. On top of that, now that they’re so set that this is the right way to do it, there is no hope of it ever coming from the Colts.
Colts fans have had the promise of their team becoming the greatest football team in the NFL taken away from them, forever. Sure, they might win more Super Bowls, but someday, some other team will have enough backbone to actually play from the start of the season through the Super Bowl and win every game. That team may not be as great as the 2009 Colts, but they will be honored as such.
So, why root for the Colts? They will never be all they could be.
Jason. One word. M-o-n-e-y.
Superbowl equals lots of moolah for the NFL and the winning owner.
I agree varangianguard. That’s why I’m not watching football anymore. I honestly thought the Colts, as an company, was more morally grounded than that. I started watching football again because of that. I was a fan of their attitude more than I was a football fan.
Wow.
The Super Bowl is a priority because it is the league championship. It doesn’t matter if you were 8-8, or 16-0– if you beat all the championship-caliber competition in the post-season tournament, you finish #1. That is way more significant than being able to say that we beat the Jags, Titans, etc, and ALSO the Jets, which numerically made 16 total wins and never mind the Super Bowl because it’s of some unknown significance.
If it’s more important to be able to say that each week we were better than the team the NFL assigned us to play (and of such importance that doing that 15 times is thoroughly unacceptable compared to doing it sixteen times), than it is to be able to say we were the last victorious team standing after vanquishing all challengers for the title, then so be it. I just don’t see the world that way.
Getting to the point of that championship is a process. The Chargers’ path is to usually suck to the point of having it become a soap opera for a month or two, and then suddenly remember how to play football. The Steelers play to their purported potential every third year or so, and otherwise struggle, have injuries, etc. The Patriots go balls out every game and haven’t won a title for five years. Our path is to get past our opponents and then try to use the last couple of games for either healing or protection of essential assets. These are all legitimate paths to take. But they all are in service of one goal–winning the Super Bowl.
One team in the Super Bowl era has gone undefeated. The other 43 or whatever seasons were apparently just wasted efforts.
Without looking, name me the winner of Super Bowl XIV.
Steelers would be a good guess, since they won four in the mid-late 1970’s.
Good guess. So, I bow to your superior football knowledge and cede you the field. ;)
Listen, I hear the arguments. They have a lot of merit. I was relishing having my team, my state have the only undefeated 19-0 season. It sucks that that won’t happen. I was thirty feet from the Colts’ sideline, watching it go down. I was not happy.
As for the question of who won what Super Bowl, I could reply, “Who did we beat in week 4?” Because that week 4 game, by virtue of being part of the hypothetical undefeated season, was a game of extreme importance–possibly eclipsing even the Super Bowl.
My contention is that an argument can be made either way, and the reaction is way out of proportion to the offense. Look, we’re 14-1, positioned for a championship run. We’ve played the starters to keep them sharp, and rested them to prevent injury. The Lombardi Trophy alone has been sufficient reward for 42/43 of all NFL champions. To hear people say they’re going to pack it in over this, or the coach should be fired, is some pretty bizarre stuff. They made a calculation. It’s unknowable whether it was right or wrong, because the hypothetical injury that was prevented is an unprovable negative.
Disagreeing is fine. Making it into some huge moral judgment, as if it violated some kind of football commandment is just silly. Every person on the sidelines is a professional who is eligible to play. Why even have a bench, if not to use it? I think management was too cautious, but where do you draw the line? If the highest percentage play at the end of the Jets game is a quarterback sneak, do you think that’s the play that should be run? There are people out there saying that they would have preferred to lose Peyton Manning for the year and have the win against the Jets than be in the position we’re in now. It’s just silly talk.
To all those who have just had it with the Colts and need to divorce themselves from the team over this, enjoy your Sundays off. It’s about to get pretty exciting. If you have any playoff tickets to sell, I’m buying.
V– I don’t know more than probably 1/4 of the Super Bowls. But when I was a kid, up through the mid eighties, I knew them all–because winning them is a big deal. Plus there were only a couple dozen to remember up to that point. Ask me who won in the mid nineties and my guesses would be much less likely to be right.
But I can tell you–and most fans can– how many titles Dallas, SF, Pittsburgh, and New England have. In fact, most regular fans can probably tell you pretty well how many Super Bowls each team has won. A lot of them haven’t won any.
I also think more than a few Dolphins fans would trade their team’s legacy for the Steelers’.
T+1
Completely agree with T. Sure, this might have not been the best move, but there are way too many people who are way too upset about a strategic move which may or may not have paid off.
XIV would be the 79 season. I believe the answer is the Raiders? Steelers were mid and early 70’s so that doesn’t sound right.
John: the answer to your question is that you don’t want the players to get rusty by not playing at all.
Super Bowl XIV was won by the Pittsburgh Steelers over the Los Angeles Rams. The Raiders beat the Eagles the next year. Aside from one other Raiders win in ’83, the NFC would go on to win all the Super Bowls until 1997.
I was close on the Raiders.
Well, if I have not been more clear to this point, let me re-state, I’m not a football fan. So, I’m sure I’m missing something.
However, I do feel it is wrong to quit trying to win a game. I don’t think people need to grind their opponents to dust, like the Pats, but I do feel that it is bad sportsmanship to give up.
By the same token, I don’t deliberately lose when playing a game with my little girls, either. When they say that they beat Daddy, I want them to know that they REALLY beat me. To do otherwise feels like lying. That’s what I felt like the Colts did, they lied to everyone in how they played, posting a loss when we don’t know what would have happened.
I guess it depends on how you define the scope of the encounter. If each game is a discreet thing, then maybe it’s bad to give up. On the other hand, if each game is like a battle in the war to get a Super Bowl title then pulling the starters is more like a tactical retreat.
Having General McDowell call the performance of the Union forces at the First Battle of Bull Run “a rapid redeployment of strategic assets” doesn’t change it from being recognized by everybody else as a rout.
T, while you and I agree about your medical example being what should be, I think that Colts management sees it more as taking a couple of half days off to rest up for a face lift operation paid for by cash by old widow Harkins, instead of tending to the patients left unseen in the office at noon on those two days.
What I don’t understand about this is anybody (elsewhere) who is blaming the players. They sure didn’t look like they wanted to be sitting on the sidelines.
varangianguard,
Honestly, the player’s reactions to all of this has demonstrated why they’re such awesome people. Manning was wearing his helmet the whole time he was on the bench, ready to go. He wanted to play badly. Still, they as a team respect the chain of command, and that has been how they do so well normally. So, they don’t speak ill of their leadership. He wasn’t the only one that did that, too.
Apologies to the Dolphins. The year after their undefeated season, they won the Super Bowl again. Yikes, I guess that really says something. No one ever seems to mention that they won it the next year, too.
People also don’t mention that during the undefeated season, the Dolphins’ opponents had a record of 70-122-4, a .367 winning percentage. Only two of their opponents had (barely) winning records (8-6). They spent their year squeaking by a bunch of dogmeat teams.
Their back-to-back Super Bowl wins (against Super Bowl-calibre teams) are the more impressive achievement by far. But that’s not what people fixate on. They fixate on the fact that the Dolphins consecutively beat a string of shitty teams. Go figure. It even overshadows the next year’s title.
T: Check and Mate ;-)
I understand how people that can actually remember who won the Super Bowl every year (and the lineups of both teams, and the score, etc…) would see the Super Bowl to be THE issue, bar none.
However, for the unwashed masses like me, pop history is what we’re looking for.
Wow! 40 comments (now 41) on this topic? And by the way varianguard, ED doctors wouldn’t necessarily handle an emergency C section no matter what size the town. Emergency surgery is not necessarily handled by the doctors in the Emergency Department at any hospital. OB/GYNs and family practitioners who are experienced in obstetrics would generally handle emergency C sections. That’s why they are on call. They have to handle their patients or have a suitably experienced substitute on call to take their patients.
The analogies to medical emergencies, playing games with your kids, and war are inapt, and that’s putting it kindly. I hardly follow sports, but since one of the local radio stations has become ESPN all the time, even I was aware that the Colts were likely to pull or perhaps even not start key players such as Peyton Manning last Sunday. Why are so many people acting all shocked and dismayed? Since when is it quitting or giving up to play the bench? There was no way of knowing what the outcome was going to be. The Jets have been inconsistent this year, so Caldwell may have thought that a five-point lead was good enough to win. Seems to me that he made a calculation that his team would be able to score more points and/or hold the Jets. He turned out to be wrong, but his decision could hardly be categorized as giving up or handing the game to the Jets.
While the timing of pulling the key players may not have been the best–I think that the Colts should have scored one more time before pulling them–this move should not have come as a surprise to anyone. The Colts are hardly the first team to have rested starters in preparation for the playoffs. If the team had already lost a game or two, no one would have cared about starters being pulled, no matter what the final score. Are the Colts supposed to seek a perfect season at all costs, even to the point of needless injury? If anything, the collapse of the benchers in Sunday’s game shows that the Colts are not particularly deep, so if you are a fan, you should be grateful that the head coach is thinking about keeping the starters healthy.
Yeah, the Colts could lose their first playoff game, but thems the breaks. Then again, they could win the Super Bowl. Then the bandwagon would fill up again.