Stephen Holder

stephen.holder@indystar.com

INDIANAPOLIS — We may never know whether the timeout called by Colts coach Chuck Pagano in the final moments of the team’s season-opening loss to the Detroit Lions on Sunday was the difference in the game.

But this much we do know: It certainly didn’t help his team’s chances on a day when the injury-riddled squad already had so much going against it.

And that’s why questions about taking a timeout with 1:15 left and the Colts at the Lions’ 12-yard line continue to dog Pagano a day after the game. The decision preserved some time on the clock for the Lions, who were able to march 50 yards after the Colts scored a go-ahead touchdown two plays later, enabling Detroit to kick a game-winning 43-yard field goal with four seconds remaining.

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Pagano offered the following explanation:

“We wanted to get the guys in the huddle and get a play called,” he said. “Yeah, we can look back and say it would’ve been nice to bleed a lot more time off the clock. Looking back on it, could we have burned more time off the clock? Yeah, but we had some personnel issues. We wanted to get a few other guys, a different personnel group in there, and decided to call a timeout there and regroup and get back to the line of scrimmage.

“We felt like it was more important at that time to get back, get gathered, get a call in and get settled because we still needed the touchdown. We felt like they still had to go however far they had to go to get in field goal range and we can close it out.”

Pagano’s not wrong. Certainly, the Colts scoring a touchdown was paramount to running time off the clock. And had something inconceivable happened — a fumble, a loss of yardage, etc. — having extra time on the clock would have been quite valuable.

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But there is one problem with Pagano’s explanation. Taking the timeout in and of itself was, arguably, not the worst offense. But when the Colts called the timeout was highly questionable. After the previous play, a pass to T.Y. Hilton for no gain, the Colts immediately called timeout. Pagano could have opted to bleed the clock a little more — it was still running — before taking a timeout with less time on the play clock. If the goal truly was to regroup and get the right personnel on the field, the timeout could have been taken later.

Meanwhile, as the Colts were working through the scenario on their sideline, Detroit coach Jim Caldwell was debating his timeout usage across the way.

He opted not to call one.

“We have systems and strategies in place that we kind of look at and numbers that we are looking at all the time and guys in the (coaches’) box that are looking at it … and trying to stay within it so we have enough time to score,” Caldwell said. “We don’t want to help them. If we give them another timeout, that is more time to look around and (Andrew Luck) is a pretty dangerous player.”

Follow IndyStar reporter Stephen Holder on Twitter: @HolderStephen.

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