Photo : Michael Conroy ( AP )

Some people are fans of the Indianapolis Colts. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Indianapolis Colts. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.


Your team: You killed him.


Your 2018 record: 10-6. After a 1-5 start where it looked like new head coach Frank Reich was in way over his head (and he was), the Colts ripped off nine wins in 10 games, frogstomped the Texans in their house in the wild card round, and then got ritually sacrificed to Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs to close out their season. I have said on this site, many times, that Andrew Luck’s career was over and that this team was responsible for murdering it. I was genuinely pleased to be wrong about that. For one year.



We got one last, nice year of Andrew Luck. That was it. That was the apex you just witnessed, and it’s not a good sign that the signature moment of this era in Colts football was a doctored video of a Quenton Nelson block that got Nelson fined for leading with his head. This team always leads with its head. That’s why everything they touch dies young.

Your coach: Frank Reich, who looks way better with the Santa beard.


Looks like a fugitive Paul Ryan. Obviously, it’s nice for Colts fans to no longer have Chuck Pagano as head coach. But Frank, man … Frank has a touch of that Pagano sauce in him somewhere.

This guy is a humble guy. This guy is a competitor. He knows what he wants. This guy is a leader. This guy has so much stinkin’ juice, it’s unreal.


SO MUCH STINKIN’ JUICE, MAN. And these Colts, they’re not juice-free either, man. They got a lotta freakin’ pulp! It’s a struggle for so many NFL coaches to walk the line between Master Motivator and Guy Selling Audiobooks In A Megachurch Lobby. Pagano lined up Griff Whalen behind that line and let him get assassinated. Reich, given Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement, is poised to fall into a similar cerebral abyss at any moment. Meanwhile, enjoy this photo of special teams coach Bubba Ventrone!

NOT PICTURED: a neck


Looks like Steve-O and Clown from Spawn made a baby. They always take a photo of all the head coaches together at every annual NFL owners’ meeting. They should assemble all the special teams guys, too. Get them ass drunk, put them in ‘ 80s workout leotards, and have them hold up a bunch of Delta Upsilon signs. That’s a photo I would hang in my parlor.

Your quarterback: Uh oh……..


Yes, Andrew Luck is gone now, due to a diminished love of a game and due to what appeared to be spontaneous vestigial bone growth:


♫ The small little bone’s connected to the, uh, big large bone! ♫



God, Jimmy Irsay is such a fucking jackass. Other guys on the team, they also had the bone thing too! One of them had a baby bone, yeah! Unreal that the Colts have so many horrifying injuries when their owner has a stash of hyper-fentanyl stashed in his glove compartment at all hours. This wasn’t the only time the Colts had turned their franchise quarterback into a scavenger hunt for people willing to violate HIPAA laws, and apparently Luck had grown tired of it.


This will go down as a historic mishandling of a generational talent. The Colts lost Peyton Manning to neck herpes, went right into the tank, fell into Andrew Luck by sheer serendipity, and STILL managed to fuck it all up. In fact, the Colts suck so bad they brought poor Andrew Luck down to their level. It’s awful. It’s like watching a sequel to The Killing Fields.


In some ways, I’m happy Andrew Luck has been put down like Lenny from Of Mice And Men. I didn’t want bear witness to his next round of misfortune working in these conditions. Irsay was gonna lure him into a pit of poison-tipped iron stakes. GM and flip-flop enthusiast Chris Ballard insisted this wasn’t like all the other times the Colts failed to give Luck proper medical care…


And you know what? He’s right. It’s not 2017. It’s 2019 and you just became a non-team. From here, the Colts must now pioneer new horizons in self-sabotage, like spiking Jacoby Brissett’s water with radioactive waste. Why can’t NFL teams properly treat their players’ health? It behooves them to NOT fuck this up! And yet the Skins turn all their players into sausage meat and the Colts recreate HBO’s Luck only this time with humans dying during the production. They couldn’t even let Luck throw a Hail Mary when he was HEALTHY. Ruining him was their lifelong project.

What’s new that sucks: I guess there are other players on this roster still but who gives a rat’s ass? This is Indiana. It usually sucks in the same ways every year anyway. Guard Matt Slauson retired. Wideout Ryan Grant left the team and met his destiny as a useless Gruden Raider. Spencer Ware came in and got hurt right away, as is custom around here. The biggest move the Colts made was signing Justin Houston away from Kansas City, where he hadn’t registered double-digit sacks since 2014. A nominally decent pass rusher playing on a shitty defense? Justin, I think you’ll find yourself comfortable in these environs.


Also, to aid in their successful efforts to drive Luck away from football permanently , the Colts brought in Panthers bust Devin Funchess. He’s as slow and fat as Kelvin Benjamin, only with a different name! So that’s cool. Essentially, this team will be relying on Brissett to be useful and on RB Marlon Mack to provide at least the illusion of a competent ground attack. I think they can definitely make the latter happen. The former? LOL maybe when my dick can do jumping jacks one day.


No one else is, kid. No one else is.

What has always sucked: Your owner. Your owner is like James Dolan if James Dolan spent as much on gin as he did on session musicians. Here’s Irsay in February:


And here he was during the playoffs:

Win three phases of the game: we’re team, team, team.

Well, that explains the Pagano hire. Jim Irsay can dab tears away from his beet-stained face and go through the whole spiel about how he’s his dad, only a good person, and it doesn’t matter. He’s still gonna be the same incoherent fuckup the league has always allowed him to be, and he won’t even be lucid when he accidentally pushes some other quarterback of his in front of an oncoming oil tanker next month. He already let Ryan Grigson run the team, and run Luck into the ground on principle because he thought Grigson seemed cool.


This is the mastermind of the whole operation. Jim Irsay is maybe the only person in the world I’d trust with the presidency less than Donald Trump. When society allows unremarkable men like Irsay to be obscenely rich and to become addicted to their own whimsy (among other substances), organizations like the Colts are the resultant collateral damage. They’re never gonna have their shit together. All their effort is strictly for show and nothing more. The Colts are now like half of Major League Baseball’s franchises where there’s ample evidence to suggest that all their failures are willful and that the fans are hopelessly confused if they think ownership cares about winning as much as they do.

And oh god, are these fans ever confused. I’m shocked they manage to park their cars when they get to the stadium. I’ve met cows with more general awareness. They thought Luck would remain upright and booed him when he finally decided he couldn’t. They think an aging Houston will become the second coming of a young Dwight Freeney. They think Eric Ebron will still keep catching the ball. They go the full Mike Pence anytime T.Y. Hilton does a touchdown dance. They probably want the old racist play-by-play guy back. He was just joking, you guys! These fans are P.T. Barnum’s dream: a stadium full of marks. Irsay won’t have to wait until the 2030s to get another new stadium with a private box where he can snort ground-up Pink Floyd guitar picks. These humps will gift him anything he wants forever, because they don’t know any better and never will. They’ll drink all the stinkin’ juice.


BTW here’s your little reminder that Indianapolis is the headquarters for the NCAA as well as a slew of Olympic orgs, like USA Gymnastics. It’s literally the headquarters of evil. It would be better off if the Earth swallowed it.

And for real, FUCK Mike Pence. Fuck him with a horseshoe. Same with Mother.

What might not suck: Well look, you’re not gonna get shut out 6-0 by the Jaguars again. That won’t happen. Oh god, or will it? OH GOD.


HEAR IT FROM COLTS FANS!

Daniel:

They should build a maze to a fake locker room and Keep Irsay from football operations all together. He’d never notice. Put a guitar at the end of it and he can drunkenly play to a room full of stuffed animals.


Bennett:

Luck made the truly courageous and correct decision to walk away when he did. This team sucks because the cretin Confederate-wannabe fans are going to turn this into a decade-long screed about “toughness,” like their fat asses could sustain anything close to the physical trauma Ryan Grigson (and by extension Jim Irsay) put him through. Irsay has had lightning strike twice and has largely squandered both. May his cursed guitar collection burn.


Jon:

Fuck this and fuck Luck for making what is *clearly* the correct choice for him and fuck football for making that th e case.


Justin:

Fuck Ryan Grigson with a stick of dynamite from now until the end of time. I’m drinking all of the alcohol and cyanide tonight.


Nicholas:

Being in an Indy bar Saturday night was attending a funeral. Strangers hugging, some openly weeping, many walking in a daze. Indianapolis didn’t deserve one, let alone two amazing QBs, but we’ll somehow get Tua and turn his body into a Lucas Oil Field stamp in record time.


John:

Always and forever fuck Hank Baskett.

Bennett:

Our biggest free agent signing was a Pink Floyd guitar. Jim Irsay has invested more money in filling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame than Canton.


Alex:

Although Ohio is coming on strong, Indiana is still the Alabama of the north. Sorry about Mike Pence.

Laura:

After building this offseason up as the first in years where Andrew Luck would be fully healthy, he missed all of OTAs with a calf strain, because of course he did. Our owner spent more on musical instruments this offseason than he did free agents.


Chase:

My only piece of Colts apparel is a “WE RUN THE SOUTH” shirt, which I purchased at my first Colts game right before the fake punt happened.


Corey:

Andrew Luck’s shoulder is the consistency of perfectly microwaved Eazy Mac.

Andrew:

Luck had one the league’s best O-lines last year. So basically they have to play out of their minds for his Million Dollar Man body to withstand another season, which with this team’s history probably won’t happen.


Chris:

Kurt Vonnegut once described Indianapolis as one day of the Indy 500, 364 days of mini-golf, and then the Indy 500 again. He’s not wrong.


Taylor:

Jim Irsay is an important part of Indianapolis’s infrastructure maintenance plans. Irsay, who is a powerful road wizard (asphaltomancer) like his father before him, takes the life force from thousands of screaming 40-something-year-old women in Manning jerseys (one third of which are Denver jerseys) and channels it into keeping strategic sections of Indianapolis’s roads pothole-free. Naturally this damage has to manifest somewhere, so he sends all the bad mojo to his starting quarterback in some kind of reverse-Dorian-Gray-thing. Andrew Luck isn’t actually an ironically-named QB with bones made of dry leaves, he’s the target of dark magicks that keep that one section of Massachusetts Avenue weirdly smooth. Irsay then goes out and hires actors to pretend to be bumbling offensive linemen so they can keep the whole thing under wraps.


Derik:

I swear, this team is in cahoots with BIG PHARMA. And no, I dont mean in the blatantly obvious way that our teams “2009 Blue Trust” is a poorly disguised off-shore shell company whose sole purpose is to build a fully stocked Oxy vault in Jim Irsay’s Lizard King Den. No, Drew, I’m talking about the kickbacks this team receives from Pfizer for stomachs full of ulcers, anxiety, blind rage, depression, BPD, and mind expanding elation this asshole team gives its fans every time they trip over the other teams dicks when they step on a football field. My heart cant take it. My emotions/actions during a colts game are as follows: Subdued dread Hesitant excitement Quiet optimism Relaxation Anger Fury Pet violence Binge drinking Absolute assuredness they will win More dread More anxiety Chest pains “WE SQUEAKED OUT A WIN!!!” Outward, obnoxious love Apologizing to my pet My aorta can’t take it. TRUE STORY: obviously, I live in Indiana. During a late December game, my friends and I were all at my parents house watching the Colts game. I can’t remember the exact game or play but they blew a huge lead and lost at the last second. I was so enraged, I got up and walked the 8 blocks to my apartment. It was midnight and 4 degrees outside. The only shirt I had on was my Dallas Clark jersey. Knowing after that debacle of a football game I just witnessed, my jersey could provide no warmth on the way home, so I removed it. My nipples weren’t even hard by the time I made it to my apartment. Must have been from all the prescription medication the team doctor had prescribed me. I hate this stupid team.

Michael:

I like to think that I am a pretty normal guy. I have a wonderful wife, kid, and friends that I hang out with on a regular basis. Everyone always says that I am always calm and collected and stress doesn’t get to me. Well, that all changes the moment that the Colts come on the television screen, Sunday afternoon. At the beginning of the season, I always tell myself that I won’t get caught up or angry with how the Colts do. I try to tell myself “I am just going to enjoy the game...win or lose.” But the very instant something bad happens, the crazy fan comes out. I can’t even count how many “Fuck you!”, “You gotta be fucking kidding me”, “This team fucking sucks” come out of my mouth during a Colts game. When my son was born, I gleefully told my wife how I can’t wait to raise our son as a Colts fan. This is when she told me that our son isn’t allowed to watch the Colts game with me, because of how I act. Only in recent years have my friends started to realize how crazy I am, when it comes to the Colts. The moment they say something about the Colts I tell them to “fuck off” or “go find something better to do with your life, and let me be in the Colts” It isn’t until later in the day, or the next day, do I realize how crazy I was an apologize to them. And everything repeats itself the following weekend. Fuck Bill Belichick. Fuck Tom Brady. Fuck Robert Kraft (but I really do hope to see that video)


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