quick thoughts on the donkeys
 

1) I hate this team. I hate the players, the coaches and the GM. the colts are hands down the most embarrassing franchise in football. this franchise needs an entire reset. a fire sale would be fine with me. just get rid of everyone.

2) that isn't really an overreaction. go back 5 years and think of how embarrassing this franchise has been. cant win in Jacksonville. even when the playoffs are on the line the last game of the year. Jeff saturday being coach. 33-0 and losing to the Vikings. hell the entire 2022 season. giving up a 1st and 3rd for Wentz. how we handle AR. the constant stupid mistakes. this franchise is a fucking embarrassment. we make every backup QB look like a hall of famer. we are a fucking joke

3) AR gets no help but he can't complete 50 percent of his passes. we don't have any plays to take the pressure off. he gets benched for not being a pro. not putting time in. what the fuck are the coaches coaching him to do?

4) JT? his whole contract debacle and then he plays like this? what the fuck is that? pay a rb that cant pass block and who knows if he can catch. we don't throw to our backs

I will add more tomorrow. I have shit to do and don't want to think about this shit team

Good shit!

This edition of the team is one of the most disappointing of Ballard’s tenure.

Burn the place to the ground.

I agree the whole franchise needs a complete reset.

Think of the Manning years. Not a single player we have could carry Manning’s jock strap. Just a bunch of weak kneed pussies. From JT, to Nelson, to Ryan Kelly, to Zaire Franklin, to Matt Gay, to AD Mitchell, to EJ Speed, to Michael Pittman.

Not a single one of these guys has a pair of balls.

The whole stinking mess needs to be replaced. Start with Ballard and work from there.

And for the good of the record, DOUBLE FUCK AD MITCHELL! He alone should be enough for Ballard to be terminated. Dude is a fucking joke!

Well said Omaha. If we're gong to be honest with ourselves the Colts have pretty much been a shit show since Manning went down w/ his neck issues. Yeah, we won the division a couple of times w/ Luck, but that was more about him bailing us out combined w/ a super easy schedule.

Couldn't agree more.

The only time the Indianapolis Colts have been good was when Bill Polian ran the show. Fact.

Taylor dropping that ball like he did is almost poetic. It's almost a perfect encapsulation of what this organization has been the last 5 years. What better example could the universe provide us than our own diva pulling off the biggest Colt blunder I've seen in my 30 approximate years of watching this team?

For someone (Taylor) who had no problems dragging our organization through legitimate shit - That's just incredible. What an awesome moment for all the worst reasons. Part of me gets an almost Dostoevskian pleasure from watching a moment like that, and that's what bothers me most about ALL of this. There are some times where I get more pleasure out of these folk's failures as a result of spite.

This relationship is toxic.

This is easily the worst team in Indy Colts history.
Yea, worse than the 80s teams, worse than the suck for luck team. All of it.

I’ve never seen a team with this much talent just completely refuse to do things the right way, to win games they can and should win.

I’ve been very slow to sour on Ballard but he’s the one who is supposed to determine the culture of this team, and this culture is awful.

Dead on with this. This is BALLARD'S TEAM! They carry forth his ethos, and that ethos is to be haughty with absolutely zero justification. He is a fraud and the team he has constructed is a mirror image of him.

FUCKING FIRE HIM!

I came out here this morning wondering if I was the only one sick of this team...obviously I'm not! The worst part is I have very little confidence that any of this will get fixed soon. Our ownership, with Irsay's health problems, is one of the weakest in the NFL, Ballard is a blowhard that has been exposed, Steichen is a coordinator not ready yet to be a head coach, and the team doesn't appear to have any leaders and no real identity. How do you fix all of that?

We are a small market team that has zero clout right now in the NFL. Nobody wants us to win right now, we had one of the best QBs of all time for 14 years and won one Super Bowl, I'm not sure we will ever sniff one again. Players like Andrew "I want to travel the world" Luck and Jonathan "I'll just leave this here" Taylor, have destroyed this franchise. I know many of you disagree with me on Luck, that's fine, but how many franchises have had that happen to them? That was knife to the heart that still hasn't healed!

Sorry for the long post, but I just don't know when or if this team will ever be a contender again?

There are probably 10 players on this team I would keep. The rest needs to go and start over. I would include some that need to go that are on the other side of 30 and will serve no purpose in a complete rebuild. This is just a poorly constructed team in every aspect. A big swing and miss on a QB, and a swing and a miss on a receiver who is supposed to take the top off (AD Mitchell) Balard fucked it all up. He has no business being a GM. Roll it back and get in line for Arch.

I totally agree.

My biggest Christmas wish for this franchise right now would be:

A. Love ya Jimmy but hand over the reigns of the franchise to Carlie.

B. Carlie, pull up your big girl panties and fire your GM and HC from whom all accountability should flow. Put together a panel of folks to consult for your next GM that should include Bill Polian, Tony Dungy, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, heck....Bill Belicheat if desired and find your next guy.

C. Put your full faith and confidence in that next GM for him to find and hire a staff that can rebuild the franchise.

D. Evaluate every player on the roster and sell. Sell hard in 2025. Get every possible draft pick for the 2026 draft and beyond that you can.

E. Put a team of the field for 2025 that can, perhaps, win one game as you bring in every player you can find who is under 25 years old and evalute them as to their long term viability. Sell EVERYONE over 30 and ALMOST EVERYONE over 25.

F. Get the #1 draft pick for 2026 and go with the QB you think is most able to be a long-term franchise QB. AR is not the guy.

When you need to start over, there is no time like RIGHT NOW to do so.

One of Ballard’s biggest issues is he believes and has grown a culture of “next year” instead of “right fucking now”. The team has talent, it lacks leadership and direction. His gifting positions to rookies philosophy sucks and I sure as fuck don’t want to repeat them. You need vets to win. So I don’t want a complete rebuild, I want a complete retooling. New leadership, new direction, and accountability. Keep the guys that fit and buy in, and push out the ones that don’t (bye JT). Do that and see what you have in AR. But the roster doesn’t need completely blown up, it needs molded into an actual fucking team instead of just a collection of high ceiling potential players.

IMO it would be stupid to give up on AR at this point. He’s one of the rawest rookie QBs to come out and he’s been surrounded by a shit show with no accountability. I’m not convinced he’s the one, but I’m not sure he isn’t. The team has done him no favors. Put an actual fucking team around him and see what we have.

Two things I'm afraid of;

1. Fire Ballard and we'll be even worse. Yes, it's possible to get worse. I remember the 80s and 90s until we got Polian and Peyton. Awful. National laughing stock.

2. Colts "fans" don't have the patience to be bad anymore. LOS will be empty, games might be blacked out from TV again, and they could leave town (especially if Jim passes away). Colts fans are, largely, "fair weather" garbage. Y'all are okay though.

Aside from that, blow it all up. This team is unlikable. I feel sorry for Buckner.

Okay, almost 24 hours later, and it’s time for everyone to turn off the gas and pull their heads out of the oven. No one is more disappointed with yesterday’s game than me. But, the cupboard is not dry and there is hope just over the horizon.

The defense played well, they throttled an offense that had begun to run on all eight cylinders. They took some of the gloss off Bo Nix and made him look like exactly what he is… a rookie. For a defense that specializes in making nondescript quarterbacks book like Dan Marino, that was a welcome sight.

The game, of course, hinged on Jonathan Taylor’s miscue. Calling it a miscue has a certain quality, almost like calling the Titanic, a minor traffic mishap. But, without a doubt in my mind, that play and the interception/fumble that was returned for a touchdown were the only things that stood between the Colts and victory.

And, let’s not be hypocritical. Of the 14 people who put their cojones on the line and picked the game in the sodas contest, eight of you picked Denver to win the thing. Congratulations on your insight, but now some of you seem to be complaining that you were right.

This team has no leadership or discipline. It starts with asshole Ballard & works down to Shane Stinkin. Flip the entire fucking building. The Colts flat out suck.

Newsflash. Today right now they are a National laughing stock.

Imagine if this game had been flexed for the whole world to see! This will go down in NFL folklore along with Pagano's puntarooski, Jim Marshall's wrong way run and the Leon Lett chronicles.

I’m with you on this, that blunder by JT was the difference in the game.

Outside of that this roster is definitely flawed and in need of some tweaking… AR reminds me a lot of Cam Newton, it would benefit this offense to be run heavy and involve some dual threat TEs which we currently have zero

It’s still not as bad as it looked, JT runs that in and there’s no doubt in my mind we win that game convincingly

Sometimes, you hit rock bottom, and then it is all up afterwards. Living in the Nashville market, I can say that they feel like they are the laughingstock of the league. They won three games, and only one was against a good team (debatable that Houston is actually good). They lost to Jax, with Mac Jones at QB. They beat the Jests and the Phins without Tua, and lost to a QB they cast off for a late round draft pick. They are just three seasons away from the team that played in the AFFCG. Their salty tears are delicious.

Maybe this will wake them up, and turn them around. And without having to suffer through a season like the Tacks are in this year.

Further, there are a lot of teams in a more drastic level of futility, such as Carolina, Vegas, NE, NYG, and NYJ.

It would have been close late and the Colts would have had a good chance of winning.

But winning convincingly? No.

This team is incapable of doing that.

Leadership and discipline…for most teams, those attributes flow from the Quarterback position. The Colt’s problem is that Richardson simply doesn’t yet have the experience or the skill set he needs to operate at an elite level. Personally, I think that, given time, reps, and coaching, his ceiling is high. But, 14 games as a starter is simply not enough.

At this stage of his development, he needs a clean pocket, he doesn’t handle pressure well. Knowing that, confidence for victory in yesterday’s game was never high. The right side of the Colts Offensive Line was crippled by injuries. Matt Goncalves is a rookie, Mark Glowinski is a has been, and Danny Pinter is a never was.

Anthony Richardson dropped back and passed 38 times. On 21 of those snaps, he was under pressure. With a healthy OL, with Raimann, Nelson, Kelly, Fries, and Smith, they would have taken a 20-7 lead, then pounded away with Jonathan Taylor. The problem was that the line had an equally futile time blocking for the run.

There are, of course, other issues. After Pierce went down, the Raider D could breathe just a little easier. And, Richardson is set up for failure by the lack of a viable TE and Taylor’s shortcomings as a receiver. There’s also a critical need for a big time receiver, a Marvin Harrison for a new generation.

The idea of firing Ballard and Steichen, then tearing the team down to the foundation is too painful to contemplate

If there were candidates available that we knew of that could get us over the himp, sure. But the candidates are few and far between that would be upgrades. There’s a reason good coaches are not fired.

o


I would like to point out something that l YDFL Commish l said in direct response to this point.

o

o


1999 - 2010: lllllllll.. The Colts had leadership, with Peyton Manning.

2011: ))t,lllllllllllllllllllllllll. The Colts did not have leadership.

2012 - 2016: )lllllllll. The Colts had leadership, with Andrew Luck.

2017: )))tlllllllllllllllllllllllll. The Colts did not have leadership.

2018: )))tlllllllllllllllllllllllll. The Colts had leadership, with Andrew Luck.

2019: )))tlllllllllllllllllllllllll. The Colts did not have leadership.

2020: )))tlllllllllllllllllllllllll. The Colts had leadership, with Philip Rivers.

2021 - 2024: )tlllllllll The Colts did not have leadership. ) *



* ) In regard to the disastrous 2022 season, I thought that it was a minor miracle that Matt Ryan had the Colts with a record of 4-5-1 after 9 games with that atrocious line blocking for him. That offensive line was nothing short of awful that year, with only a modest improvement in the final few games of the season ...... in fact, if Philip Rivers had had that same terrible offensive line "protecting" him, I think that that 2020 solid, playoff season would have resembled the disastrous 2022 season. Philip Rivers had the mobility of a statute at that point in his career, and there is almost no way that he would have survived that season without getting killed, let alone led the team to an 11-6 record and a playoff berth. Philip Rivers had one of the best offensive lines in all of football blocking for him, which is the complete opposite of the line that Matt Ryan had "blocking" for him. I believe that if Matt Ryan had had Philip Rivers' elite offensive line blocking for him, the Colts likely would have had a record of about 11-6, just like it was when Philip Rivers was here in 2020.

o

The idea we can’t make a change because it could get worse is exactly why this team is a shit show. Ballard operates off the same scared mindset. Hopefully Jim sees differently or we’ll continue the “next year” narrative many of you seem to be happy with. One of these days you may even be right and the team will finally make the playoffs again! Ballard just needs another 3 or 4 years to build the roster.

Exactly!

The time has come to end this fucking wash, rinse, recycle bullshit. Ballard has proven he is not a good GM. To say well our guy is bad, but the next guy could be worse, that's just fucking ludicrous and again, a reflection that some are just okay with mediocrity. Fuck being mediocre! I would much rather just fucking flat out suck and build up some draft capital that a REAL GM could convert to wins, than just watch bitch ass Ballard do absofuckinglutely NOTHING. You are right, he is a coward, period, he is afraid to take aggressive steps and this is the result- this same fucking middle of the pack bullshit over and over and over.

FUCK CHRIS BALLARD!

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”

— William Arthur Ward

I’m sorry, but this kind of season was exactly what you signed up for when you reached down in the draft and took a Quarterback who had played all of 50 quarters of football since high school. The year that they took Peyton Manning, they struggled to a 3-13 record, and Peyton was vastly more experienced when he came into the league.

If winning, going 10-7, sneaking into the playoffs, and praying that the other guys team bus breaks down on the way to the stadium is what you want, Chris Ballard could’ve signed someone like Sam Darnold or Kirk Cousins and given you that. Heck, if the O Line was healthy, we’d be 7-7 and poised to close out the season with three more wins.

I know that a lot of people are unhappy, but Shane Steichen has been on the job for less than two freaking years. No one in their right mind fires a coach based on how they perform over that short a span.. With any luck, Jim Irsay will look back and remember the two decade long shit show that ensued when his father began firing head coaches, and general managers willy-nilly.

Ted Marchibroda can tell you exactly what that’s like. He lived it.. Bob Irsay fired him after he lost a preseason game.

Nope, you've got the wrong guy on this one Kray. Unlike some, I am still in AR's camp. I see things that give me hope and I am willing to ride with it for another season.

Hell, I can even sign up for another season of Steichen. Though here, anyone watching that game unravel after the JT poop play, has to question if Steichen is up for this. Frankly he looked completely sped up, seemed lost in the moment, unable to settle things down and just focus on capsules of time and effect. He literally looked like a fucking freshman QB thrown into the big game and shitting down his leg. Where was the designed runs for AR? The ONE THING he does consistently well- is gets on the edge and gaps for yards. Nope, all we saw seemingly mid 3Q through the end of the game, drop back and 12+ yard throws. It looked fast, it looked panicked, and it looked like a guy that was collapsing under pressure- and yes I am talking about the coach not the QB! So, nope, I'll go one more ring around the sun with the coach despite feeling very confident he isn't going to suddenly become Belicheck or Knoll.

What I am NOT willing to ride with for another season is a dead beat, lazy ass, coward ass, blow hard, do nothing, fucking flat bill stooge that hasn't done a motherfucking thing in his 8 years! I won't ride along with a fucking braggart that has NOTHING to be proud of sitting at a press conference and scoffing at the media that is simply pointing out his incompetence. This guy is a dud, a turd, a full on fucking failure. He needs to FUCKING GO! You are who your record says you are, and Ballard's record is fucking trash! Get him the fuck out of this organization right fucking now. Same team, same fucking injuries, same fucking fill ins- move Ballard, and we are 2 wins better over 17- he is THAT BAD! This team is a reflection of him!

Think about this, think about the Saturday debacle, the worst come from behind loss in NFL history, the QB tapping out due to being tired, the JT Playoff Plunder. Dude, all of these things- they are HIS! This is HIS TEAM, all this SHIT is happening under his watch. We need someone to come in and clean all this SHIT up!

This is ridiculous. The entire world, except you, knows Saturday was an Irsay move. It is not BALLARD'S TEAM, it is JIM'S TEAM.

just because I think something is going to happen, doesn't mean I can't be upset when it does happen.

yeah, you can't put Saturday on Ballard.



clearly an irsay move. but how embarrassing that team was, was all on Ballard.

Nothing is going to change. With Jim likely to step down soon, the daughters are not going to make a bunch of wild changes and risk the team completely imploding and them being blamed for it. All we can do is hope that AR works hard in the off season and comes back much improved. Maybe we get lucky and draft a real hard nose defensive superstar that totally changes this team's identity! Brylok says the fans in Indy are garbage, so I guess we all need to just learn to be better losers, cause if nothing changes, a lot of losing is in our future!

I don't think that you can assume that. I think that Carlie is positioning herself to be the eventual key decision maker.

I don't know much about her, but for all we know, she could be just the maverick dynamo that this team needs.

Besides, what is there to screw up anyway?

I suppose anything is possible, but if she suddenly finds herself in charge my guess is, she would lean even more on Ballard?

I’m ok with the team continuing with AR. I’d like to see Peyton come in and work with him for a year to see if he can get the cream to the top. AR has a shitton of talent but is green as a fresh cut tree. What’s he at about 15 games now as an NFL qb?
Ballard has to be the scape goat. Cut him loose.
JT is selfish, we found that out this week.
We were so spoiled with Peyton Edge & Marvin. They were team “mates”. We don’t have that with this team at all.
I thought the rookies would help us more than they have. At this point just sit Mitchell and let Gould have a go at it.
I’ve been a diehard fan for 50 years and will continue to be until I’ve gotta go.
Still pissed we didn’t sign Baker when he was available, we wouldn’t be in this shit hole we’re in.
But we can’t live in the past so let’s freaking go!