If it had been known before the season that the Colts would give up 27 and 20 points in their first two games, respectively, most would have believed they’d be at least 1-1, possibly 2-0. Scoring points wasn’t supposed to be a problem for the team that boasted quarterback Andrew Luck and a Talent-Makes-Its-Own-Luck stable of playmakers, including running back Frank Gore, receivers Andre Johnson, T.Y. Hilton, Donte Moncrief, and Philip Dorsett, and tight ends Coby Fleener and Dwayne Allen.
But the Colts have scored only 14 points and seven points in consecutive losses. And they’ve turned the ball over a total of eight times.
After Monday night’s banner-raising loss to the Jets, coach Chuck Pagano came off as being hard on Luck. Luck was pretty hard on himself, too. Asked by reporters to identify some of the issues with the offense, Luck’s first two words were, “My play.” He eventually broadened the lens a bit, generally mentioning fumbles and penalties and pointing out that he didn’t want to take anything away from what the Jets accomplished defensively.
Still, as Allen said, this season wasn’t supposed to be about what teams do defensively to the Colts.
"[Y]ou can’t allow the defense to dictate what you do offensively,” Allen told reporters. “We have to dictate what the defense does.”
Allen, who like Fleener is in a contract year, came close to calling out Luck by pointing out that the ball has to be better distributed to the men who can make the plays.
“First things first is getting the ball into the playmakers’ hands,” Allen said. “It does no good to have all of these playmakers and not utilizing them.”
Luck resorted to coach-speak when discussing how to better engineer an offense that is averaging 10.5 points per game.
“Practice, got to practice better and then got to go out and do it on the field,” Luck said. “The beauty of sports is that you measure yourself every game. It’s sort of on to the next one unless it’s the end of the season. Focus now is have a great practice this week and try to go out there and see how we are. See how we are against our next opponent.”
And while Pagano and Allen may have arguably pointed fingers in Luck’s direction, Luck didn’t take the bait for blaming others. Bob Kravitz of WTHR.com asked Luck after the game whether he feels “sped up,” a shorthand reference to blockers not blocking well enough. Per Kravitz, Luck “looked off into the distance” before simply saying, “No.”
As Kravitz notes, that’s a far cry from Peyton Manning’s feather-ruffling reference to “problems in protection” after a playoff loss to the Steelers nearly a decade ago, and there’s a good chance Luck would never shift the blame to his linemen. It’s admirable, but still something is wrong with the team’s offense, and diagnosing the problem always begins with scrutinizing the quarterback.
As other quarterbacks from other teams were getting long-term deals in the offseason, I argued that the Colts should act now on Luck because it won’t get any cheaper to keep him. If the turnovers and lack of scoring continue, maybe it will.
And if those problems continue, the only good news is that, four years after the “Suck for Luck” movement was born, an enterprising businessperson in Indiana could make some walking-around money selling T-shirts that declare, “With Luck, We Suck.”