Pagano did self no favors
Colts clunker bad for coach on hot seat
Here was this awful afternoon in one sad slip of the tongue. Inside a tent that stood inside the bowels of the Los Angeles Coliseum, Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano tried to summarize his team’s fourth consecutive season-opening loss, a ghastly undoing of historic ineptitude.
“We got our (expletive) kicked,” Pagano lamented. “Credit the 49ers and coach (Sean) McVay.”
Problem is: It was the Los Angeles Rams who did the (expletive)-kicking. Not the San Francisco 49ers. On an afternoon of gross incompetence by his football team, the Colts coach put the cherry on top. He couldn’t even correctly name the team that just whooped his club up and down the field for three hours. Fitting. It was that kind of day. And it could be that kind of season.
Forgive Pagano for the blunder — it happens. But it never was supposed to be this ugly, this season opener without star quarterback Andrew Luck against a Rams team that won all of four games last season. The Rams were a favorable Week 1 opponent, even with Luck wearing gym shorts and a headset at the Coliseum. Right?
Then the Rams went out and beat the Colts 46-9.
Colts star receiver T.Y. Hilton fumbled. Starting quarterback Scott Tolzien handed out interceptions like they were Halloween candy, then was (mercifully) benched. The defense made Jared Goff — he of a paltry 63.6 passer rating and 0-7 record last season — look like a Hall of Famer. They allowed the Rams, they of the NFL’s worst offense the past two seasons, their fattest point total in almost three years. It was the Colts’ worst seasonopening loss in 32 years.
It was as bad as it could possibly get.
Situated squarely in the middle of the firestorm is Pagano, the sixth-year coach whose seat will predictably warm over the coming days as critics pile on and the speculation mounts.
Remember, owner Jim Irsay has offered no guarantee on Pagano’s future with the team past 2017. If Pagano and his coaching staff intended on stating their case that they belong here in 2018, Week 1 was an absolutely horrendous start. And he knows it. “(We were) dominated in this football game in all three phases, out-coached in this football game,” Pagano said. “It’s my responsibility and it falls on me. I didn’t do a good enough of a job getting this team ready to go.”
Typically, Pagano will shoulder the blame after losses; it runs in accordance with the accountability he preaches to his players. He took the fall for the Colts’ earlygame gaffe, when they decided not to challenge the ruling that running back Marlon Mack was out of bounds before the ball broke the plane of the end zone on a lengthy catch-and-run. Replays revealed Mack very likely broke the plane. Six there could’ve altered the tenor of this game.
Instead, the Colts blew it. Pagano blew it.
“That’s on me,” the coach said. “Tried to rush the ball and catch them off guard. I should’ve waited, let him look at that thing.”
A coaching fundamental: A coach should give his team, flawed as it might be, its best possible chance at success. Pagano didn’t do that. And it’s not the first time one of his mistakes has sunk this football team in recent seasons.
That glaring reality can’t sit well with the man who had to be utterly appalled as he watched the thumping unfold. Sure, Irsay has preached patience all offseason – he knows his Colts aren’t built to win right now. But this team wasn’t even competitive.
As the coach pointed out, it starts with him. Pagano was outschemed and outdueled by the youngest head coach in modern NFL history. (McVay is 31.)
It’s worth noting that Irsay, owner and chief executive of this franchise for 21 seasons and counting, has never fired a coach midseason.
But Pagano will be judged, Irsay and first-year general manager Chris Ballard have said, not so much on wins and losses but on development over the course of four months.
Does the team show substantive improvement from September to December? Does this retooled defense jell? Do the young defensive backs offer promise?
Perhaps most significant: Is there hope for the future?
But this felt like a new low, a harbinger of a very long and very bad season that’s just getting started, one Luck won’t even be able to save.
One that could also be Pagano’s last in Indianapolis.
Keefer writes for The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network.
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