Someone said the Colts were getting old and I pointed out that Brady and Manning are basically the same age, and Moss is older than Wayne, etc and that the Colts are a younger team than the Pats. People keep saying the window is closing around for the Colts, what key player from 2006 besides Marvin Harrison isn't on this team and in his prime? Booger McFarland?
Valid point. I think the whole "Colts are getting old" angle is overplayed, kinda like how people still insist that the Pats have an aging D even though they only have a couple of starters over the age of 30. That's just what fans of other teams do. FWIW, if you go back to my first post on the first page of this thread, I said pretty specifically that I didn't think the Colts were on the decline.
As for why people talk about Manning aging more than Brady, it's probably because of the statistical trends. Manning's stats have been trending downward significantly for a few years, whereas Brady's spiked. Plus Brady has significantly less wear-and-tear on him, considering that a) he didn't start full-time at Michigan and b) he didn't see NFL playing time until 2000. He has a lot less football mileage on his body than Manning does. That said, obviously Brady's relative aging is all a moot point until we see how well he's recovered from his injury.
I also said that if it was "pathetic" the Colts lost to an 8-8 team, (and that's quoting a Pats fan who was insulting my team), what do you call a 30-10 loss to an 8-8 team? Of course the excuses came out "no Brady no Brady no Brady". The Pats won 11 games without Brady and had one of the best offenses in the league WITHOUT BRADY. So how come an 8-8 team destroyed them?
I wouldn't call it pathetic, although it certainly doesn't bode well for the Colts. For some reason, the Chargers match up really well with them, and pretty much always beat them. It is what it is.
As for why did they 'destroy' the Pats? Teams change over the course of the year. Especially when you have a QB who's starting for the first time since high school. The Pats were outright *bad* for the first few weeks after Brady got hurt. It was a pretty brutal combination of the OL not being able to create a pocket and Cassel having no pocket presence. Cassel was sacked 23 times in his first 5 starts. Trust me, it was ugly.
Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if Belichick had listened to all the mediots out there and signed Chris Simms or something, but he had his own vision for the path forward. He was going to let Cassel take his lumps early, so that by the time they really needed him to come through he'd be able to. And he was right: the Pats were peaking just in time for the playoffs, only to miss them outright because of a historic fluke; any other year, 11-5 makes the playoffs. I'm not bitter about it, not trying to claim that they should have made it, none of that. I'm just saying that they were so bad those first couple of weeks because they needed Cassel to learn on the job, and he did. That's why I'm still kinda pissed that they didn't make the playoffs. Not because of some abstract concept of merit or anything- just because of the simple observation that they were a damn good team by the end of the year. They absolutely murdered the Dolphins the second time they played them, and if you ask me they wouldn't have rolled over for the Ravens like the Dolphins did. That would have been a real game.
Anyways, going back to the beginning of the season, like I said- the Pats were bad. They were playing a JV quarterback with the varsity, because they weren't playing for that game- they were playing for having the best team possible come playoff-time. Luckily for us, the Jets and the 49ers were so bad that they still couldn't capitalize on it, and we beat them anyways. Along the way, though, we suffered some ugly losses to San Diego and Miami. I can't emphasize enough, that, that that was a different team. It was even more extreme than the Colts at the beginning of the season vs. once Manning got his legs back.
So why does the 30-10 beatdown by the Chargers not really matter to me? Because by the end of the season, the Pats were a completely different team. Cassel went from a nobody who had just enough pocket presence to get sacked almost 5 times per game to an asset that warranted franchising, and who many, many people in the industry thought would fetch at least a first round pick in a trade.
In the remaining 11 games after the ugly start, the Pats went 8-3, with a 1 point loss, a 3 point loss, and a pretty ugly beating at the hands of the SB champion Steelers. If the Pats had played the Chargers in week 17, there's no doubt in my mind that we would have absolutely crushed them.
And no, it's no big deal losing a hof reciever, a Pro Bowl TE, and the Rookie who was replacing the HOF receiver and was third on the depth chart. Being down to the backups backup is no big deal when your offense is built around passing and you're playing the best team in the league.
Point taken, except calling Harrison a HOF receiver in the context of that game is kinda ridiculous. If the Pats signed Jerry Rice then didn't dress him for the game, could they say that they were down a HOF receiver too? At that point his his career Harrison was a marginal #2 receiver at absolute best (more like an adequate #3), and Gonzalez was a marginal #3.
My point is I see "we didn't have Brady" used as an excuse for a 30-10 beatdown from an 8-8 team. But mention the Chargers injuries in 2007 or the Colts injuries in 2007 and it's "they don't matter".
We're not talking about injuries in general. If we were, we'd bring up Neal, Maroney, Harrison, Adalius, etc. No, literally the only injury that warrants mentioning, to us, is Brady. You've watched Manning for the last decade plus, so you of all people should understand that losing a Manning or a Brady isn't even remotely comparable to losing anyone else.
Of course Pats fans don't like the Colts. It's not because you've beaten us 4 of the last 5 times. As much as I dislike the Colts, I dislike the Chargers and Steelers more, even though the Pats routinely trounce both of those teams. Hell, I dislike the *Jets* more than I dislike the Colts, and they're a joke. I don't like the Colts for one very specific reason: 2006 AFC Championship Game. That's it. I actually respect the team, mostly because I like Manning (although I'm no fan of Dungy or Polian).
And of course Pats, on a Pats fanboard, are going to all not like the Colts. For all the Colt-bashing that you seem to think goes on here, I see far more Patriot-bashing on Colts boards on the rare occasion that I actually go to them (last time was to get some perspective on the Dungy retirement, so I guess I'm overdue). The difference is that that doesn't bother me at all. I couldn't care less what a bunch of a Colts fans on a Colts fanboard think about the Patriots, and it would never even occur to me to register at one just so that I could spend dozens of posts being mad that a Colts fan would dare to not like the Patriots. It reeks of juvenile insecurity, and it's kinda pathetic.
