Zak Keefer | IndyStar

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Dawn Mitchell/IndyStar photo illustration

It only took them a few hours to can the coach after the carnage of 4-12 finally, mercifully stopped. Chuck Pagano and his wife, Tina, shuffled into a room inside Lucas Oil Stadium on New Year’s Eve, not 90 minutes after his first win in two months and the very last of his six-year stay, and heard what they knew was coming. Pagano was out. The Colts’ offseason was officially underway.

Everything wouldn’t go to plan.

Seven months have passed. The Frank Reich Era beckons. The Colts are, by any objective measure, in a far better place: new coach, new staff, new feel, a star quarterback who can actually throw a football. On the eve of what promises to be a fascinating training camp, 15 revelations we learned about this franchise, at various times from various sources, since the last time they played a football game:

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1) Andrew Luck played hurt for two years, then tried to hurry his way back. It backfired. Big time.

They shied away from coming clean at the time – “There have been no setbacks,” was their go-to line last fall, uttered dozens and dozens of times. There were no setbacks until there was a really big setback. “Let me tell you,” General Manager Chris Ballard would reveal this spring, “Andrew pressed last year. He pressed to get back.”

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Indeed. Far more than the organization let on at the time. In subsequent conversations with Luck, the quarterback has owned up to this, a stubbornness and competitiveness and impatience that put his once-promising football career in peril. “I’ve gone and skipped steps before and paid for it,” he said in April. “If it sounds like I’m saying it’s my fault, I’m not going to argue with you.”

What he’s referring to: Luck began playing through pain in 2015, taking painkilling shots on a weekly basis, and did so throughout the 2016 season – some weeks, he barely made it to Sunday. Last fall, post-surgery, he chose to throw through significant pain in a desperate attempt to get back on the field. He has admitted some days were so bad that after workouts he could barely move his arm.

Instead of healing, instead of strengthening, his shoulder “revolted” – his word. Despite the team’s optimism, he never came close to playing. The docs gave him a cortisone shot in October; the team put him on injured reserve in November. As the losses piled up, Luck bolted for the Netherlands. There, he met his low point.

Asked a few months later if he ever considered this was it – if his football career could be over for good – Luck offered this:

“Yeah, sure, it’s crossed my mind,” he said. “But I don’t think that at all. At all.”

He has seemed renewed this spring, buoyed by a sense of assurance that the nightmare is now behind him. But the lessons – the hardest of Andrew Luck’s football life – remain fresh. “Your body, as I’m learning, will tell you, ‘No,’ in certain ways, and you’ve got to listen to it,” Luck admitted. “You can’t force things to happen, and I think I convinced myself that I could force things to happen. And I paid for it. I don’t want to repeat those, maybe, missteps. Some things just take time, and I’ve learned that.”

2) Jim Irsay still believes.

Matt Kryger/IndyStar

It wasn’t until 28 minutes into the New Year’s Day press conference to announce Pagano’s firing that Jim Irsay’s face grew red, his voice rose, and months of bottled-up fury began to pour out. It’d been a long, hard fall. A trying one. His word was worthless. “Will be ready for season!” Irsay had boldly vowed of his star QB back in January 2017, the first of many public missteps uttered from Irsay’s mouth about Luck’s recovery.

The kid never took a snap. The Colts barely won four games.

Irsay had been wrong about his QB. His fans were angry. He was too. He’d heard the rumblings, and knew there were people out there who believed Luck would never play football again. So he fired back.

“Andrew Luck is going to be back, and I mean back with a fierce fire in his eyes, I promise you,” Irsay fumed, at one point pounding his fists on the table. “He’s coming back. He’s coming back ... you guys don’t know the type of fever he has for success right now. It’s 107-degree fever towards success right now, the intensity he has.”

Irsay continued: “When you talk about me being an optimist, I am, but I’m a realist too. I’m going to look you in the eye. If we have something to talk about, I’m going to talk about it right on. I’m not going to BS anyone. Not going to BS my fans. Not going to BS you, because I don’t want it done to me. I’m telling you I don’t have any doubt in my mind that Andrew is going to come back ... that is a special kid, special! He was born to do great things in the National Football League. And he will do great things in the National Football League, alright? That is coming from someone who has witnessed this (league) for a half century, who was introduced to this game by Johnny Unitas slapping (me) on the shoulder and saying, ‘Son, move your ass,’ in the training room.”

It’s not just Irsay who believes Luck will be Luck again. Let me remind you...

3) Last fall, teams actually tried to trade for Andrew Luck. Seriously.

And Chris Ballard ... laughed at them.

They called before the trade deadline last fall, gauging the Colts’ interest in swapping Luck for what Irsay described as “an unprecedented number of draft picks, all with a (first-round) pick behind them.” Remember: This was late October. Luck was nine months removed from his shoulder operation and nowhere close to playing. Still, Ballard brushed them off.

“Come on, I’m not taking those seriously,” Ballard said, laughing, a few months later. “We’re not trading Andrew Luck. I’m not putting that on my résumé.”

4) The backup quarterback the Colts almost signed in 2017? It was Josh McCown.

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For months, during the spring and summer of 2017 while Luck recovered from surgery, the fact that the Colts didn’t sign a capable backup quarterback seemed straight up baffling. They were really willing to hand the starter’s job off to ... Scott Tolzien?

They eventually did.

And everyone knows how that went.

One throw into Tolzien’s first and only start of the season, in Los Angeles in Week 1, Chris Ballard flung his pen in the press box in anger. That pick-six commenced the massacre that ended Rams 46, Colts 9. Former New England third-stringer Jacoby Brissett, in the building all of one week, was tapped the starter for Week 2. Tolzien stood on the sideline the rest of the season.

And Brissett likely would’ve never landed in Indianapolis if the Colts had signed that capable backup a few months prior. The free agent QB they had closed in on, according to multiple league sources, was Josh McCown, the league journeyman who’s started 73 games in his career, including 13 last season for the Jets.

Irsay hinted it came down to money with McCown. “We had a (salary) number. The guy wanted more than that number,” he said. “It just didn’t work out so we moved on.”

No, signing McCown wouldn’t have saved the Colts from the horrors of 2017. And, long-term, they made out for the better, acquiring a young, blossoming backup in Brissett who’s still on his rookie contract. But sticking with Tolzien, at least for the start, remains an egregious error, and that’s on Ballard.

5) Jacoby Brissett isn’t going anywhere.

If anything, Ballard learned the value of a backup quarterback last fall. Brissett wasn’t a Pro Bowler, but he kept the Colts competitive in a way Tolzien never would have.

So when Ballard’s phone buzzed this spring, multiple teams anxious to see what it would take for the Colts to ship Brissett out of town, Ballard held firm. No chance he was trading his insurance policy.

“You all know my feelings on Jacoby, I love Jacoby,” Ballard said this spring. “You talk about a guy in the locker room that gets it. I mean, he gets it. Bill Parcells told me that. He goes, ‘Chris, if he’s good or not, I don’t know. But everything you want in a quarterback, in terms of intangibles, he has. Unquestionably, he has it.’”

6) Oh, yeah, the whole Josh McDaniels thing...

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The contract was agreed to, the tweet sent out, Irsay’s private plane fueled up. Josh McDaniels had even picked out his suit for the following day’s press conference. New England’s longtime offensive coordinator arrived at 1 Patriot Place on the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 6 intent on cleaning out his office and telling his bosses he was taking the head coaching job in Indianapolis.

He’d never board the plane. An afternoon meeting with Patriots owner Robert Kraft and coach Bill Belichick swung McDaniels’ decision at the 11th hour. Chris Ballard’s phone buzzed that night. He stepped out of a draft meeting to answer. “I’ve got bad news for you,” McDaniels began.

Ballard wanted to get to the point. “I need a yes or no answer,” he countered. “Are you in or are you out?”

“I’m out,” McDaniels replied.

Ballard wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries. The conversation ended swiftly. “I didn’t want the explanation,” he’d say later.

He called his owner, Irsay, and told him the team was set to begin its second head-coaching search in five weeks.

7) ... and then Chris Ballard turned the embarrassment into his defining moment.

Fifteen hours after McDaniels turned him down, Ballard flipped what likely would’ve been his most embarrassing moment as a general manager – getting left at the alter by the first head coach he’d ever tried to hire – into the defining moment of his Colts’ tenure.

During a stirring press conference the next day, Ballard dished perspective and humility, then ended it with fire. More than anything, he seemed to ease the anxiety of shaken fan base. Then, just for good measure, he dropped the mic on his way out.

Unprompted, Ballard capped his 19-minute press conference with five words that sent Colts fans into a frenzy.

“The rivalry is back on,” he said.

The Colts visit New England on October 4.

8) Ballard stuck to his word – and kept McDaniels’ hand-picked DC despite not knowing who his head coach would be.

In an almost-unprecedented NFL dilemma, Frank Reich found himself a head coach for the first time, yet a head coach who had no say over who his defensive coordinator would be.

Josh McDaniels had hand-picked his DC – former Cowboys linebackers coach Matt Eberflus – and Eberflus happened to be in the building the night McDaniels pulled his U-turn, the contract already signed, the work underway. Ballard walked into Eberflus’ office and told him the Colts remained committed, regardless of whom they hired as head coach.

“It was done from that point,” Eberflus said later of any apprehension about his future.

When Reich and the two other candidates – Saints assistant head coach Dan Campbell and Bills defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier – sat down with Ballard for their interviews, they were told the Colts planned on honoring Eberflus’ contract, as well as two more assistants they’d come to terms with under the assumption McDaniels would be taking over: defensive line coach Mike Phair and offensive line coach Dave DeGuglielmo.

So when Reich took over a week later, those were three coaching hires he didn’t have to make.

“That’s part of the reason I love this organization,” Reich would say. “That there’s that kind of integrity.”

9) Frank Reich can handle a curveball.

Robert Scheer/IndyStar

Speaking of Reich: Consider this question, from former Colts punter Pat McAfee, during the new head coach’s introductory press conference back in February.

“Do you hate or love Josh McDaniels for what happened?”

In other words: What’s it like to be a team’s second choice for head coach?

Reich thought for a second, then came back with this: “The backup role has suited me well in my career.” He nearly brought the house down.

10) The decision to fire Chuck Pagano was essentially made after the worst loss of the season.

By any measure, Sunday, Oct. 22 was the moment it truly ended for Chuck Pagano. His lifeless Colts were blanked 27-zip at home by a divisional opponent, the Jaguars, a team they used to steamroll with ease. It was the Colts’ first shutout loss in the regular season in 24 years.

It was a downright embarrassment, the nail in the coffin of the Pagano era.

But a midseason coaching change would do no good; so Irsay and Ballard, having all but made their minds up, waited patiently for Week 17, firing Pagano hours after the Colts’ win over Houston on New Year’s Eve.

Pagano, class to the bitter end, has since offered praise of his owner, his former GM and his old quarterback. “I love Andrew Luck,” Pagano said in early June. “He got me more years than I probably deserved.”

11) The defensive scheme change has forced the Colts to say goodbye to some good football players.

Defensive tackle Jon Hankins? Cut in March.

Defensive end Henry Anderson? Traded in April.

Cornerback Rashaan Melvin? Suiting up in Oakland very soon.

All, to varying degrees, were victims of the Colts’ shift from Pagano’s 3-4 scheme to Eberflus’ 4-3. Melvin’s departure, via free agency, leaves the Colts with gaping hole at the No. 1 cornerback position.

12) Quenton Nelson at No. 6? Easy.

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Four picks into the first round of April’s draft, the Colts’ draft room let out a giant sigh of relief. The Browns had pulled a stunner, grabbing Ohio State cornerback Denzel Ward at No. 4, meaning Indy would land one of its two most coveted targets: North Carolina State pass rusher Bradley Chubb or Notre Dame guard Quenton Nelson.

When the Broncos went with Chubb at No. 5, the Colts waited mere seconds to turn their card in. The whole room was giddy. Nelson, Ballard would say days later, was “the easiest pick that I’ve ever been a part of. By far.”

Part of the reason? Indy allowed 56 sacks last year, the most of any team in football.

Only one person outside the Colts’ war room knew of Ballard’s intention to draft Nelson – his son, Cash. The rest of his five kids were campaigning for Penn State’s Saquon Barkley. “Well, he’s not going to be there,” Ballard kept telling them, and he was right. Barkley went No. 2 to the Giants.

13) Ballard was tired of his team getting bullied.

And he responded, going all in on the fronts early in this year’s draft. Offensive guard in Round 1. Another in Round 2. Two defensive ends in Round 2.

Just listen to what Ballard had to say 48 hours after the draft: “I had some frustrating moments last year, where I just thought physically we did not match up against teams, especially within our division.” (Read: He means Jacksonville.) “If you remember last year, there were times when we were having to pick guys up off the street and they were starting (the following Sunday) and I didn’t want to go through that again.”

He continued: “I just thought at the end of the day, we needed to get our foundation right. It’s hard to sustain winning when your foundation, when your o-line and d-line, are not good.”

14) Ballard is demanding a tougher training camp.

... because, in his eyes, last year’s wasn’t good enough. “Look, we’ll get after it,” he said this spring. “I said it last year: We fell apart. I just underestimated a few things. That’s my fault. But you’ve got to spar, man. I mean, how do you get better at blocking people if you’re not going to be physical up front? How do you get better at tackling if you’re not going to tackle? I mean, those are things you have to do ... to me, camp is when you find out who is going to be with you in November and December when it gets hard, and you can see, after a really hard day, the next day who shows up.”

15) Adam Vinatieri is back for a 23rd NFL season – after a much easier contract negotiation this time.

This is how it went: Chris Ballard pulled his age-defying kicker aside at the end of the year, told him he wanted him back, and told him he needed to hire a coach first. The contract, a one-year deal, was signed in late February. Barring injury, Vinatieri will break the NFL’s all-time scoring record this fall in a Colts’ uniform.

“This process was substantially easier than it was two years ago,” Vinatieri said of the deal, referencing the somewhat-bitter back-and-forth he had with former Colts’ GM Ryan Grigson back in 2015.

He’ll begin the 2018 season 57 points shy of Morten Andersen’s record, and he figures to have a chance to break it sometime in November.