Locked On Colts - Daily Podcast On The Indianapolis Colts - LOCKED ON COLTS -10/10- Colts Improve to 2-3 on the Leg of Adam Vinatieri, and the Arm of Andrew Luck

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

Despite the second half failings of the #Colts defense, the running game and the offensive line #AndrewLuck came through in a major way to will the Colts to a 29-23 victory over the #Bears. Vinatieri kicks 5 critical field goals, and some will criticize #Pagano for anything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, where are you going, Jim? The elevator's over here. Taking the stairs. But our meeting's up on 8. Yeah, I know. But that's 8 floors up. That's like 8 times... I don't... a lot of stairs. That's the point. I've already lost a few pounds and earned almost $100 in wellness incentives. Whoa, you're getting rewarded for working out? Yeah, I know. I'm just as surprised as you are, Bob.

Fearless is full of surprises. That's the power of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Federal Employee Program. Learn more about our healthy benefits and sign up at fepblue.org slash choose blue by December 11th. You are Locked On Colts, your daily podcast on the Indianapolis Colts, part of the Locked On Podcast Network, your team every day. Welcome back to Locked On Colts, ladies and gentlemen. I am your host, Matt Dainley, and this is your Locked On Colts for Monday, October 10th, and the Colts are now celebrating their second win of the season after a 29-23 win over the Bears. Off of the leg of Adam Vinatieri and the arm of Andrew Luck. So we've got, obviously, if you watch the game, you know that we've got some things to be concerned about still, obviously.

But we've also got some things that we should be very thankful for if we are a Colts fan. And one of those is Andrew Luck and how he can just simply cut up a defense and do just about anything that he wants to do when he's given time to throw the ball and to survey the field. So, I mean, watching this game, I think that if you ever had any reservations about Luck's ability to take over a game, this should put most of those to rest. And I don't think that too many Colts fans feel that way, although there's plenty of criticism to go around for this or that on Andrew Luck. But first, I wanted to get to a couple of things that I thought stood out to me during the game, and I'm sure there'll be plenty more over the course of the show. But first things

first, when we look at the offensive line, we know that it was, man, kind of a train wreck in the second half. They, you know, were letting, I mean, Willie Young was getting through kind of at will he had three sacks today they had multiple times where they were doing secondary blitzes and they were getting through the line a little bit of stunting you know Jarrell Freeman you noticed him because they said his name a few times on there but he didn't make any real impact plays so I guess as a Colts fan that was nice you didn't want to see him tear up the Colts on defense or anything like that. And like I said, Andrew Luck was phenomenal. Frank Gore was really pretty good in the first half. A lot of things were pretty good in the first half, actually, and it was kind of a change of pace if you are used to the Pagano coached Colts getting off to

such a slow start. I thought that the Colts did a good job getting their heads in order right off the jump. They scored on all of their possessions in the first half, I believe, in one way or another. And they didn't take 43 minutes to get into the hurry-up offense. In fact, they did it pretty much from the jump, I think. So we saw them kind of get themselves out of it a few different times throughout the second half. And a couple of times in the first half, you know, they would huddle up and stuff like that, but they were still actively using it even on the same possession where they'd huddle a few times per four downs or so. And then we'll get themselves back in the mix and run off a few plays at a time. So they did a really good job mixing it up, I thought. But overall, like I said, the O-line was pretty solid in the first half.

They gave up two sacks in the first half. One of them, I mean, it's technically a sack, but it was due to luck taking his eye off the ball out of the shotgun. The ball fell to the ground. He went down and covered it, and that's the second sack of the night, or the second sack of the first half. So the first sack was a legit sack given up by the offensive line. But the second one was not. It just goes in the stat sheet as a sack. So they deal with it. Second half was quite a different story. Good,

Muhort, and Kelly were all three not really very good. In fact, Haig, I think, probably was a little worse than what I actually noticed. But it seemed like a lot of the pressure was coming up from goods area uh kelly like i was talking about those secondary blitzes and whatnot the he and muhor i noticed a few different times were turning their backs a lot uh to the other defenders when they uh if they're if they're shedding off and they've only got three or four guys to block up front and the center's got one guy on either side of him that needs blocked he's going to help one of the guards with that block but his issue was Kelly's issue was he wasn't coming off of that after the guards had them handled and then ultimately that opens up the middle quite a bit and they got a lot of pressures uh that way and I won't say a lot but

they got several but man I'll tell you what when they were protecting Lux especially in the first half there was some times in the second half where you saw them really give him a lot, but they got several. But man, I'll tell you what, when they were protecting Lux, especially in the first half, there were some times in the second half where you saw them really give him a lot of time in the pocket, allowed him even to get out of the pocket a couple different times and evade a couple defenders. He just, you know what, and they could send eight guys back in coverage if they wanted to. He has time to survey, allows the receivers time to work through their routes and get open. And he can hit, he was so precise too. I mean, it was really nice. There was a ball to T.Y. Hilton at some point in the game. One of the defenders was in front of him. And I think that he just, I think luck just totally did not see him, but the ball was high enough and he's lucky that it was

to where it was only tipped. And I don't even know that T.Y., if he went up to get the ball, would have been able to get his feet down if he caught it, but other than that, luck was really precise on Sunday. It was really nice to see how well he was throwing the ball and how accurate he can be. The running game was thriving in the first half. That O-line really did a sharp job in the first half, I think. Like I said, they gave up a couple pressures, but overall, they did themselves a solid for sure, and Andrew Luck definitely saw the fruits of that with his play. Ferguson, he wasn't a big part of the game either way, but for some reason, he just stands out to me over and over because, I mean, again, he just proved that he's just a guy. He's yet to make a play in a significant play in space.

And I'm not trying to necessarily senselessly harp on this guy or anything like that, although it may seem like I am. And that's fine, too. But he had a couple opportunities and he had a ton of space to make a play. He picked up 10 total yards on two catches and was unable to evade any defenders. I just, you know, he's just a guy. Maybe they're not, you know, if the opportunity arises for them to get somebody else on the roster that can be an impact player on one side of the ball or the other doesn't make a difference.

But other than that, I just think his snaps need to decrease. I don't think he's going to get a lot of opportunities unless he can start proving that he's going to do something. We saw very little out of Akeem Ayers, but what we did see of him was pretty good. He looked good in coverage. He made a really good play in coverage on the Bears' second drive of the game. I think it was on second down and 10 and ultimately kept that drive from going anywhere else because on the following play, Brian Hoyer hit Eddie Royal for a nine-yard gain.

It was a bad pass and made Royal lay out for it, but he only got nine yards, and that ultimately was a three and out for the Colts. So I'm a little surprised we're not seeing more of Ayers. What I saw of him, what I remembered of him anyways, it looked like he had done a pretty good job, kind of wondering if he's not getting the snaps, why that is. Now we get to the negative, of course, and whether it was first half or second half, didn't really matter. Brian Hoyer just absolutely

dissected the Colts defense front to back from the first snap to the end of the fourth quarter. Again, the Colts make a replacement level quarterback look like a stud. And this is something that's happened four years and years now and just can't seem to understand it. Maybe Brian Hoyer just has the Colts number. Maybe it's just one of those guys, but it's not one of those, you know, it's not one of those situations, I don't think, because the Colts have continuously allowed that type of quarterback to have their number. Patrick Robinson was getting picked on pretty much all day, and he was pretty bad. Meredith, who he guarded a large portion of the day, had nine catches for 130 yards.

At least the majority of that was on Robinson. Vontae was pretty good. He did get beat, you saw on the replays there, by Alshon Jeffrey, you know, towards the end of the game on that very last throw from Hoyer. But all in all, Vontae held it down for the most part. Antonio Morrison is absolutely god-awful, especially in coverage. He's a solid run defender, not anything great. I know he's a rookie, but his coverage ability is just non-existent whatsoever. Butler, for the most part, did his job. Forced to fumble. The Bears did recover it, but all in all, I thought Butler was largely unnoticed throughout the game for the most part. I think he gave up a couple of big passes to, or gave up a couple of big catches

to Meredith as well. But now we'll get into more of this here in just a minute, but first I want to tell you about my bookie. Football season is now into its second quarter of the season. And to get into the action and play like the pros, you can do it at MyBookie.net. It's the most exciting online experience for sports fans. MyBookie features real Vegas odds and incredible player props on every football game. Whether the game's already kicked off or not, MyBookie has live in-games with odds updated in real time. It's never too late to make a play.

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here, and we'll talk about how bad Hoyer killed the defense here in just a minute. As good as Andrew Luck was in the first half of the game, he really didn't have a lot of time to throw the ball. He didn't have quite as many opportunities in the second half to get his wide receivers the ball, his playmakers in general. But over the first five games of the season, Andrew Luck's second halves have been absolutely phenomenal. In the second halves of all these games, he's gone 74 for 112, which is 66% completion rate, 877 yards

or 175 yards per game in the second half. He's thrown eight touchdowns and only one interception. I'm pretty sure that if you really broke it down, if he's not the top quarterback in the fourth quarter in the league, he's one of the top two or three. He has just absolutely been just tearing teams up. And like I said at the beginning of the show, typically the Colts are a second half team. Whether you want to give somebody credit for them starting off hot or not, they did come out of the gate, you know, playing pretty decent ball, at least on offense. And if you look at the Colts' first several possessions, they had their first possession was seven plays, ended in a Vinatieri field goal. Their second possession

was 12 plays, ended in the luck touchdown to Dwayne Allen. Their next one was only five plays, and it also ended up in a field goal. The following possession was 10 plays, again, a Vinatieri field goal. And at halftime, the Colts were up 16-13. So, you know, three field goals and only one touchdown. Yeah, you can complain about it. And this kind of brings me to another point here. At the end of the half, there was, you know, an opportunity on fourth and one for the Colts to really take a gamble there and try to go for the end zone. They'd already done that once earlier in the game. So you kind

of figure you don't want to necessarily, you know, test your boundaries, so to speak, I suppose. But there was a lot of complaining about Pagano kicking the field goal there or having Vinatieri kick the field goal there with, what, 11 seconds to go. Now, if you just want to complain every time Pagano makes a decision, then good for you. But let's be honest. If the Colts lost by three, and let's put it also in another sort of context here, the Colts only actually won by six. So in that last drive of the game, Hoyer doesn't have to go for the end zone. Hoyer only has to get them in field goal position to push it into overtime, if that's the case. If the Colts don't go for three right there, and let's say they go for it on fourth and one with 16 seconds to go, and they

miss. Okay? But the Colts wanted to pick up, Pagano wanted to pick up three points to end the half, at least get some points when he knows that they're getting the second half kickoff. Let's not, look, there's plenty to complain about Chuck Pagano about. Don't get me wrong. There's plenty of complaining to do about a lot of things with the Colts. But why complain about a smart decision? I don't understand this. You can call them weak or scared or whatever you want to do. That's smart football, guys. And if you can't understand that, I don't know what to tell you. Like I said, there's plenty that both me and you will complain about, Chuck Pagano about. But taking points

at the end of the first half, when you know you're getting the ball in the second half, that's smart football, guys. Whether you like it or not, it doesn't really make a difference. All in all, quit complaining about every little move that is made. Yeah, I mean, you either understand football or you don't. And, you know, that's fine if you don't agree with it, if you think he should go for it. But if your job's on the line, which Pagano's very much is on the line, you're taking points when you know you're getting the ball first in the second half. It's not really all that hard to figure out. Now in the second half, the Colts did ultimately screw it up because they went three and out. Gore got a few yards. Doyle got a few yards.

Luck scrambled up, put him into another fourth and one situation, and they decided to punt the ball, which was smart. The Colts did stop the Bears on their following possession, and then the Colts ran off another 10-play drive on the third possession of the second half, but they had to settle again for a Vinatieri field goal as Luck was sacked on the last play of that drive. The Colts punted on their next two drives, but on the following drive, there was this beautiful 35-yard touchdown from Andrew Luck to T.Y. Hilton. Let me explain this to you because I put something on Twitter about it because I wanted everybody to understand how beautiful this was and how intelligent this was

from Luck at the line of scrimmage. The crowd was completely quiet. You could hear Luck calling out all the cadence and everything else at the line. And Luck did some hand gesture, made a couple other comments at the line and said, rattle, rattle. And as soon as he did that, he pulled in Dorsett. And Philip Dorsett came a little closer to the line of scrimmage. And as soon as he started to move, I kind of had an idea of what he was doing. He knew that, of course, that was Willie Young's side and Willie Young had been beating up that right side of the Colts line the majority of the day. So what that ultimately did was take Dorsett out of the play when he was more than likely going to be just running a shallow crossing route anyhow. And what he did is he chip blocked Willie Young and pushed him inside, helping out the

offensive line a little bit. That allowed Luck just that extra half second to take a step up in the pocket and unleash that bomb down to T.Y. Hilton. Beautiful throw, beautiful catch, really good breaking off that post late by T.Y. Hilton to catch that ball. It was a thing of beauty if you watch it. And if you do get a chance, go back and check that out. That was one of the really, really sharp plays of the game with, I think, just about three minutes and 45 seconds or something like that in the game. It was a fantastic play call. Luck really set that up all by himself. Now, the Colts obviously had another drive right after Rashawn Melvin forced the fumble on Meredith, and the Colts again had to settle for a Vinatieri field goal as Luck got bounced

around a little bit on there. And another thing, the offensive line, man, guys, focus. They had so many different penalties on Sunday. It just was, it was beginning to become so redundant, how there was false starts and not paying attention. And then, you know, then the Colts got kind of screwed earlier in the game with the false start on Luck, which was a total sham of a call. Luck didn't move his hands. He didn't even bob his head. I have no clue what the whole point was of them throwing the flag on that, but there was a couple situations where these referees kind of perplexed me a little bit for the most part. On the last Bears drive, which ultimately ended the game, Hoyer went right down the most part. On the last Bears drive, which ultimately ended the

game, Hoyer went right down the field as we've seen so many times. And this with a six-point lead, this is what worries me. You know, if you're doing it and you're up two or three touchdowns and there's that much time on the clock, that's one thing. But when you're doing it when you're only up six, I just don't understand this. I mean, this is just very soft defense, no pressure. The Colts didn't sack anybody, you know, to Sunday. Man, they just got to get some more pressure. They got to find something because they're not getting any. Hoyer went to Meredith for a first down, came right back and went to Jeffrey for a first down immediately, back-to-back plays. Then Hoyer went to Miller for another first down. And then

once the Bears kind of got into the, you know, danger territory for the Colts, the Bears and Hoyer kind of fell apart there. They had a really pivotal holding call on Logan Paulson, and that ultimately kind of sealed the fate as they were down to a third and 15. Hoyer threw to Royal for seven or eight. They went to a fourth and long, and then Hoyer threw the ball behind Meredith, and the Colts took over on downs. Now, looking at Hoyer, this has to be a huge red flag for Chuck Pagano, Ted Monachino, just about any other coordinator on that defense as well. Hoyer went 22 of 43 for almost 400 yards, 397 to be exact, and two touchdowns. Also, Howard, their running back, ran for 118 yards,

had a receiving touchdown on only 16 attempts on the ground. Meredith, like I said, nine of 130 for a score, and it just, man, they just were getting shredded. In fact, Alshon Jeffrey, who, you know, didn't really get a ton of targets, he only had six targets, had five catches for 77 yards. Like, every catch that he made was big yards, you know. The Colts have really got to do this, but they're lucky that they were combating this with really good performances of their own. Luck ended up 28-39 for 322 and two touchdowns. Gore, 14 carries for 75 yards. Again, 30 of that was on his first three carries. So the Bears defense kind of brought it in a little bit on him especially on the next 11

carries he only got 45 yards so that's a you know could be a little bit of the offensive line could have been a little bit of Gore but he had a nice you know in fact on the very last offensive real play of the game for the Colts Gore had a a 13-yard run. So you take that out, and he did virtually nothing after his first three carries. So that's a little frightening, if you want to say that. But Hilton caught 10 balls for 171 yards and a touchdown. Hilton is having a phenomenal year. And Luck and Hilton, their chemistry is getting even stronger. We even saw Luck go to Chester Rogers a couple, a few different times. A couple times were some maybe not great passes, a little behind, but also Rogers, the one where Rogers went really deep,

Luck overthrew him about three or four yards, and Rogers was wide open. That would have been a touchdown for sure. So Luck definitely has some confidence in Chester Rodgers and Rodgers, you know, did a good job. He only ended up with three catches for 24 yards, but a couple of those targets he had would have been for big yardage. I think Rodgers could have easily gone for a hundred and plus yards himself. And, you know, then we get down to Jack Doyle, who kind of fell off the train today with only two catches for eight yards. But Quan Bray had a nice day for no more than he actually does, two catches for 29. And he had some really, really nice returns. He's proven to be a quality return

guy and definitely a guy that can fill in at the receiver position. The Colts have a couple of unknown guys right now that are making some waves, and that's good because the Colts need that, especially with Moncrief out. We don't know how long he's going to be out. But it's nice to have those guys be able to step in. Dorsett only had a couple catches himself, but he definitely has that big playability, and he has run some fantastic routes early in the game. He ran a real nice job, like I was speaking about him this past week

with Arthur Arkush of Locked On Bears. Philip Dorsett runs very poignant routes, sticks his foot in the ground and makes a cut, and he just totally blew away a couple Bears defenders with his route running today. He didn't get open a ton, but when he did, he was open. He made some fantastic catches, and it's just nice to see a lot of this coming together at different times. Now the Colts just need to put a full four quarters together

and show that they have – we complain about the roster a lot. And believe me, there are a lot of teams in the NFL that have, top to bottom, better rosters than what the Colts do. But the Colts, especially with Andrew Luck, not only is he hiding warts with the offensive line, the defense being awful at times, you know, certain things like that, but Luck really makes a lot of people look good. If a receiver runs a pretty decent route, Luck hits them.

Luck has been very, very accurate this year. It's been really nice. He was almost at 72% on Sunday, and he's had completion percentages of almost 66 in week one at Detroit. Granted, week two at Denver was awful, especially because of the first half situation. He was 52%. But in the second half of that game, he was 16 of 25 for 144, a touchdown and interception. That's the only game he's got an interception in the second half.

But he's also, he was at 64.8% against San Diego for the whole game, 64.29% against Jacksonville. Andrew Luck is far and away exceeding everything that we should be expecting him to do. We all thought that he would have a pretty good year this year, but we're not hearing a lot about it nationally. That's all right. Nobody's complaining. I'm not complaining about it. I could care less what national people or headlines are about Luck. But a lot of this crap with Grigson talking about how Luck's contract kind of hampers his ability to build a defense versus garbage. And I think there's been plenty of people covering that throughout the weekend for you guys to know that, it was an absolutely ridiculous statement.

He needs to take some accountability for the crap that he's done. That's just really poor, in my opinion. There was something that I said last week, and it was right after we had Bob Kravitz on the show, and I said that it didn't make a whole lot of sense for Ryan Grigson to be let go in season and probably made no sense at all because of the fact that if he wasn't doing something to hamper the Colts moving forward this season, if he was doing something to make the locker room bad or, you know, talking about ridiculous things that could become a distraction to the team, there's no other than that. There's no reason for him to be let go. There's nothing he can do

in mid season, you know, as far as about the draft or anything like that, he can only bring guys in and let go of guys. So this, uh, I don't think that it's fire worthy for him saying it. I think it's ridiculous. I think that everybody who's heard him say it thinks it's ridiculous, but he did go on colts.com, uh, and kind of try to do a little bit of damage control and try to have, you know, his own controlled article written for his views. So make no mistake about it, there's very good reasons for him to have had that written in-house. But all in all, if he continues to do this because he's taken flack, then you know what?

You're not going to see me crying about Irsay letting him go. Does it make a whole lot of sense? Not really. But like I said, if he becomes a distraction for this team that is already struggling, then let him go because he's not doing any good talking out of both sides of his mouth when everybody's got all of the ammo in the world to defeat him on any argument he could possibly make.

Is Ryan Grigson a smart guy? He's a smart guy. Does he think he's the smartest guy in the room no matter where he's at? He does. Is he? No. However, this is a pretty touchy situation, but he can't be the distraction right now,

especially when Pagano's fighting for his job, the Colts are fighting for, you know, this coming week, they're going to be fighting for first place in the division. So the Colts are far from out of it. The Colts have a very good opportunity here to make a big dent in the rest of the season. And, folks, I've told you guys this before, but the Colts could very easily right now be 5-0. They're not, and they've played like crap in large portions of games.

But think about that. The Colts could be 5-0 right now. The Colts have to put a full four quarters together every single game. And if they do, the Colts could be a pretty decent team, guys. Like I said, Rashawn Melvin, some of these guys that people don't talk about very much are having pretty good years. He forced a fumble, a key fumble in the game. The Colts aren't turning the ball, aren't turning other offenses over very much, but

when they're doing it, it's at the end of the game. Gathers did it in their first win against San Diego late in the game. They're coming and they're being opportunistic a little bit, and they just have to be a little more opportunistic in the first three and a half quarters defensively in order to get over this hump, because they should have beaten Detroit. There's no question about that. They should have had, I think that they should have beaten Denver. Now, if you're looking roster wise, no, they shouldn't have beaten Denver. But the position that they were in with the time left on the clock, the Colts should have beaten Denver.

They should have been able to go down a score touchdown. If they didn't and they could only force a field goal and then go for the onside kick, so be it. Then maybe they shouldn't have won. But they should have been in that game more than they were. Definitely it was not a two-score game. They should have beaten Jacksonville. Jacksonville gave them tons of opportunities. The Colts did not take any of their opportunities. They had a chance right here to be on a three-game win streak coming off of that Denver loss, and the Colts could be a hot team right now with a pretty remedial roster overall. There's a lot to be on edge about edge about because it's something like this. This pass rush is just pathetic. The Colts have to do something about that. The Ted Monachino's got to

earn his paycheck right here and find some really good blitz packages. He's got to find some solid coverages and he's got to find unique ways to get pressure on these quarterbacks. And if it, by God, if it's got to be Mike Adams and the Colts are running with three safeties, then do it. It doesn't really matter. But the Colts have got to find something because Robert Mathis isn't doing anything. Eric Walden, we've talked about it. He's not a pass rush specialist, but he's got the sacks for the year.

That doesn't mean that's his job or that that's his strong point. So the Colts have a lot of room to get better. They've also, both the players and the coaching staff, the Colts travel to Houston next Sunday night on primetime at 830 to play the Texans, where the Colts have kind of dominated them over the past several years, just the same. And then they'll come back the following Sunday at one o'clock and play the Titans in Tennessee. So the Colts right now, just their next two weeks could be four and three going into week eight. They need that because they're going to be playing the Chiefs and the

Packers in the following two weeks. And the Colts cannot afford to have any hiccups in the rest of their season. So Colts did come away with a win on Sunday. They've got a lot of room to get better. They've got a lot of work to do all around the roster, the coaching staff included, and everybody else in between. But the Colts did break out a win. They're now 2-3. They can go for the, which will ultimately be a tie in record with Houston next week.

But with their win, they would ultimately have a half game lead in the division. And the Colts need that desperately. So that is all I've got for you today on this Monday, October 10th. Thank you for joining me on Locked On Colts. Visit me on Locked On Colts on Twitter, the Facebook page, and check out today's pigskin, who is also a partner of the Locked On Podcast Network. And you can see my work there as well. So with that, I will talk to you all on Tuesday on Locked On Colts. You are Locked On Colts, your daily Indianapolis Colts podcast.

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