Speaking of which - Has anyone heard when/if Funchess would be returning this season?

I heard mid-November

Reich indicated that Funchess would likely start practicing this week. If that timing holds, the earliest he could return to game action would be Week 11 vs. Jacksonville

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10 WEEKS LATER ) (Halfway Mark)


While the Colts lost yesterday in extremely frustrating fashion, the fact that the game went right down to the wire without Jacoby Brissett for the majority of the contest emphasizes the point that was made by Chris Ballard before the season started ........ that this is indeed a solid, competitive TEAM, with or without Andrew Luck, and even more so, even without Jacoby Brissett.

Yes, the loss sucked, as did the disappointing overall performance against the Raiders, and the very winnable game that the Colts lost to the Chargers ........ even the win against the Broncos was somewhat disappointing in spite of the fact that the Colts won the game, considering how bad of a team that the Broncos are. But the bottom line appears to have been confirmed ........ whether it be Andrew Luck, Jacoby Brisett, or even Brian Hoyer taking the snaps from center, I don't think that there is a team in the league that looks at their schedule and presumes that they will get an easy win when they play the Colts. I don't think that even the best teams in the league (the Patriots, the Chiefs, the 49ers, the Packers, the Saints, etc) look at the Colts in that manner. And so at the halfway mark of the 2019 season, I suspect that Chris Ballard is very likely pleased with his effort to not make the Indianapolis Colts a one-man show.


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I’m hoping Ballard isn’t pleased about anything on this team.

I hope he is, there's a lot to be pleased abut. I hope he's far from satisfied, especially with his own efforts, but pleased that he has started building a solid team. There's very few old timers on this team, and the oldest is certainly in his last year.

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Brissett will not play against the Dolphins on Sunday ........




Colts Rule Out Jacoby Brissett for Dolphins Game

(ESPN News Services)

https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/...-dolphins-game


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Smart. Let him rest his knee against the phins


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Another point of view ........




Jacoby Brissett Holding Back Colts is Present & Future Problem for Indianapolis

(By Brent Sobleski)

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...r-indianapolis


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Wait, wait, wait, this guy just advocated having Hoyer "develop" a draftee. FUCK YOU BRENT, FUCK YOU TO HELL! The article makes some decent points, then he endorses a year with Hoyer at the helm. I need to take a few days off work to recover from the trauma encountered by reading that!

Brissett has benefited from a great run game. And last night showed how important Mack is to this team.

What Brissett hasn't had for the last 4 games is an honest to god #1 reciever. TY wasn't TY. The only guy he can count on is Jack Doyle. Its hard to judge a QB when guys don't catch the ball or run a route deep enough to get a first down.

Brissett wasn't great last night, but he didn't get a lot of help. Drops, missed blocks, penalties, missed penalties and an inability to get to the opposing QB is what lost the game.

The Colts don't need a new QB. They need a ass kicking DE/DT that can get to the QB. They need two recievers that can stay healthy and make plays.

All of the above would cost less than a QB

Jacoby can't throw the ball 20 yards down field. You could put Jerry Rice and Randy Moss opposite each other, it wouldn't matter much if the ball can't get to them.

This!

They DO need a new QB.

Reich would make them run short crossing routes.

Gotta fit Jacoby's skill set...

Jerry Rice was known for taking short crossing routes to the house.

We are not going to get another franchise quarterback. It took us years of being shit to land Peyton. We got a huge break to get our next one. We need to build a great defense and put guys around a decent qb. Not sure if that qb is Brissett but not sure it isn't. Which guy is the real player, the first game against Houston or the second game? Hell if I know.

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The Colts had one shit year which landed them Peyton Manning ........ the 3-13 1997 season.

In 1996 the Colts went 9-7 and made the playoffs, in 1995 they went 9-7 and made the playoffs, and in 1994 they went 8-8.


http://www.jt-sw.com/football/pro/te...istories/colts


The Colts had 5 or 6 shit years between 1984 and 1993, but they had nothing to do with their eventual landing of Manning.


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Haha! Five or six shit years before Peyton Manning? Good lord! That's your Baltimore talking. Try eleven shit years to start. The Colts were awful! They were a national laughing stock. I grew up with it. My family were Bears fans because the Colts were a joke. Non competitive. Then, when I was in the Navy, they had the Harbaugh year. I was still a Bears fan and took some heat from the guys who knew I was from Indy. I remember "no trim til the Colts win" and people's dad's walking around looking like Grisley Adams. "Lord help our Colts" was a weekly staple. I remember one year when Subway offered a promotion on the last game of the season, that if the Colts beat the Jets, you can get a 6 inch sub for the price of the point difference. The Colts won by a field goal, and by the time I got to the Subway, they were out of bread. Three cent subs sell out fast. And after that, at least half of the damn fans wanted to draft Ryan Leaf.
I know you're old as hell and I have nothing against you or anything, but that post was asinine. Absolutely clueless about Colts life in Indianapolis before Peyton Manning.
Five or six shit years...jeezus

Man those were some fucked up times- I remember going to games and 70% of the crowd, regardless of the opponent, were for them- including folks from Indy! Go to a Browns or Bills game, better be ready to get beat up by their fans. Dean Beasucci was a fucking star back then- he had like 85% of our points for a decade or so!

Right there with ya Brylok :cool:

I was going to mention Dean Biasucci being the Colts best player but I didn't want to rant too much. Jack Trudeau at quarterback. The "Da Bears" guys on Saturday Night Live used to joke about the Colts. Five or six years...
I also remember the Pacers in the 80s. Before Reggie Miller. People would come to the elementary schools and give out free tickets. All you had to do was go to the main office and ask for them. "Can I have five Pacers tickets please?". Sure, here you go! I saw many a game at Market Square Arena in the Wayman Tisdale era. Pacers lost 85% of them but we kids had fun.
Times sure have changed but Indy sports fans should hope they never return to those days. Colts games were blacked out on TV most weeks. Five or six years...jeez

I've been a colt fan for over 50 years. I can remember buying a bic lighter with the Colts logo in Tahoe and having the girl at the counter actually laugh at me. They spent years as the worst run organization in football, always looking for that qb who could play the game. Peyton's first year I was watching him and my wife came into the room. She said to me 'Are you actually crying over a football game?' because I had tears in my eyes. I told her that after all these years we finally had a qb an would be actually fun to watch. She said I was full of shit, the Colts always would be crap. We are not going down that route again (decades of crappiness- really from Bert Jones to Manning with one half way good year with mixed in). Not with Ballard/Reich.

Colts and Orioles. I said that they spent years trying to get a franchise qb and were shit.I did not say all those years had anything to do with getting Manning. By shit I meant that they did not play any games that meant a damn thing after the first month or so of the season. Those were not fun teams to root for. The most exciting day of the year was draft day, I still have years of Pro Football draft digests to prove it. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole again. Obviously I would like to improve our qb play but not at the expense of the rest of the team. By that I mean not going all in for a qb that may or may not be a franchise guy by giving up a lot of assets to get him. By assets I mean draft assets ie picks.

Not to mention Slick doing a telethon to keep the team in Indy

Vern Fleming, Wayman Tisdale, Clark Kellogg and Quin Buckner lol..... Chuck Person "The Rifleman" got there a few years before Reggie..... like the Colts best years at 9-7 or 8-8.... pre Manning.... the Pacers were lucking to be a .500 team pre Reggie.

Oh man! I had totally forgotten about that. Can you imagine that happening in this day and age? No way that would be able to keep a team in town these days!

Yep! Those were the guys we'd get free tickets to see. Absolutely correct!

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The Colts had 6 losing seasons in that period between 1984 and 1996.

The Colts were the laughingstock from 1984 through 1986, when they won a total of 12 games (and lost 36.) The Eric Dickerson trade during the 1987 season trade changed that, and it showed in their record. I don't see going 9-6 with a division title, 9-7, and 8-8 as "shit."

I suppose that we have different definitions of "shit." For me, there was a significant difference between the 1984-1986 teams (that went a combined 12-36), the 1991 and 1993 teams (that went a combined 5-27), and the other teams between 1984 and 1996 that went .500 or better (except for the 7-9 1990 team.)


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OK, but your sentence read that way.

Thanks for clarifying what you you meant to say.


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That said, I do acknowledge that those .500 or better teams between 1987 and 1996 were a long way from being the perennial contenders that they were with Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck for almost every season between 1999 and 2018. In almost all of those Manning/Luck seasons I could at least dream of a Super Bowl appearance, while the only time that I had that in the pre-Manning/post-Baltimore years was 1995 and 1996 ........ and just a bit in 1987 when I saw an immediate transformation with the Dickerson trade.


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I don't intend to argue with you. You can look at the numbers on paper and come up with whatever you want, but I lived through those years in Indianapolis and surrounding areas and those were not good years. I think the majority of Colts fans would agree with me. And personally, no, I don't consider fighting to finish 8-8 every year as "good". Eric Dickerson never wanted to be here and didn't do all that much either.

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I don't want to argue with you either.

To say that Dickerson didn't do all that much when he was hear is absurd. They immediately went from being the worst team the league to winning a division title, largely because of him. It's not a coincidence that the Colts went 12-36 in the 3 years before he arrived, and then went 26-21 in his first 3 seasons with the team.

I also don't consider 8-8 to be a good season, but rather a mediocre season.


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The view from Baltimore must have been nice. Bc people had little excitement about the team till Harbaugh almost took them to a SB. Sitting through the Emtman draft disaster, Jeff George disaster. It was an endless cycle of almost, then mediocre, then bad again. I don’t remember anyone even being remotely excited about Dickerson, he certainly wasn’t excited about being here. Manning finally turned it into a football state.

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I'm not from Baltimore.


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(vs. TITANS, 12/01)


Brissett was awful in the 2nd half after the Colts built of 17-7 lead on its (the 2nd half's) opening drive.

The Titans were getting a lot of pressure on him, but several of his decisions were terrible ........ he wilted badly in crunch time.


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Thinking about Brissett's leadership, does his leadership take a hit when he either doesn't see open WRs, or sees them and doesn't make a throw that is even close to accurate?

I was in the JB camp early on when he was scoring and not turning the ball over, but after the injury, he wasn't close to the same player. Can he get back to there and improve?

I don't want to bash the guy, because he is a Colt, but where is his ceiling? Has he reached it?

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Good questions, particularly the reference regarding his injury ........ perhaps that was part of the reason for his (and the team's) demise over the final 9 games of the seasons after the promising 5-2 start over the first 7.

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I think he still has some room for improvement and I think he can deliver a lot of games like early in the season - with good OL and WR play. The problem is that I don’t believe he can elevate those around him like a great QB can. I like the guy and am rooting for him, but it doesn’t look like he has “it”. He may be able to improve his vision and reads, I just think his ceiling is basically as a system QB. Very rarely is his play going to elevate the team to a win. That makes it hard to have consistent success, especially against good teams (playoffs).