Some people are fans of the Indianapolis Colts. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Indianapolis Colts. This 2015 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.




Your team: the Indianapolis Colts. Oh, did I say Colts? Because I meant Snitches.

Your 2014 record: 11-5. Lost the AFC title game. LET’S HANG A BANNER!


Why not hang a banner for every year? Finish 4th in the AFC South and your banner can say OFFICIAL COMPETITORS. Such a strong showing.



Your coach: Chuck Pagano, who is in the final year of his contract and will go into this season as a lame duck coach because JIM IRSAY DOESN’T CARE ABOUT CANCER.

Deep inside Irsay’s soul, past the 80 shades of ruddy and the heady alchemy of six unauthorized prescription medications working their magic in his bloodstream, he probably wishes he had kept Bruce Arians. He probably wishes he had kicked Pagano to the curb and installed Arians as head coach in what would have been the most callous, bloodless move in sports history. Instead, he kept Pagano and let Arians walk, and will now send Pagano packing this winter, when such a move will be more socially acceptable, after this pissy team bows meekly out of the playoffs by committing eight turnovers against New England. Then Pagano and his old man can spend their free time fellating cigars:

What is he doing to that thing, man?

Your quarterback: This cannibalistic tree monster:


RUN, LITTLE GIRL! RUN! The Devil’s Bargain in Indianapolis is that you can be a Hall-of-Fame-caliber quarterback so long as you look like someone ran over your face with a salt spreader. Also: I’m getting a little bit tired of Andrew Luck’s whole “You guys! I’m such a dork!” routine, like so:


No one is that excited about tomatoes, much less tomatoes that are indigenous to stupid Indiana. When Mario Batali makes a Sicilian cuttlefish stew, he doesn’t cry out, “These San Marzanos simply won’t do! BRING ME A FORT WAYNE TOMATO.” This is all for show. Andrew Luck is a hairy mutant forest goblin who spends his free time baking people’s grandchildren into pies and eating those pies. And yet, sportswriters will fall for his shit EVERY TIME:


YOUR JOKING ABOUT TOMATOES IS NOT WELCOME IN INDIANA, SIR.

By the way, here were Andrew Luck’s game stats against New England: 12-33, 126 yards, 0 TDs, 2 INTs. In six playoff games, Luck has thrown 12 picks. He’s the Andy Dalton of the later playoff rounds.


What’s new that sucks:


Disposal, in this case, may mean “directly into Mr. Irsay’s hungry belly”. You might remember Irsay being arrested in the spring of 2014 with ALL of the drugs in his car. For that little episode, Roger Goodell fined Irsay $500,000 (OH NOES!) and suspended him for six games. Oh, but how he SUFFERED being away from his precious team for six weeks:

“It was really tough not being around,” said Irsay, whose suspension was lifted on Friday. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been in the locker room. The kind of owner I am, it’s very dear to me. So it was hard being away.”


Oh, poor YOU! If only there were some kind of mood-altering chemical to help you cope with being forced to hang out and be a rich guy for a month and a half. Again, the Indianapolis press ate all of Irsay’s bullshit up, like so:

Irsay missed the games themselves, but he missed the little things, too. Pregame prayers. Post-game speeches. The give and take with players and team staffers. All of that was off limits during his suspension under the terms handed down by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who also fined Irsay the maximum $500,000. “It’s just something you dearly miss,” he said. “We pray before the games together, holding hands. We pray after.”


Listen, the only praying that Jim Irsay is doing is to sweet 70s licks and bottles of expired Dilaudid. He’s a shady little shit, and I guarantee you that he missed being on Twitter WAY more than he missed praying with TY Hilton in the locker room. THE MAN HAS THE SOUL OF A POET. You can’t rob him of his right to express himself! Why, it’s like taking oxygen from him…


Jesus. On the field, the Colts brought in veteran name players Andre Johnson and Frank Gore and Trent Cole because GM Ryan Grigson is a fraud and a shitbag who has no skill in roster-building but can dazzle SI writers simply by choosing a coffee mug:

He walks into Café Patachou, in the Meridian-Kessler neighborhood of Indianapolis, and orders (a coffee). This is the kind of place where you grab a mug and fill up; most customers just pick the nearest one. Grigson, though, surveys them all before making his decision.


Yes, he had to watch tape and check that mug’s pad level before making his choice. Grigson has two signature moves in his tenure: 1) He drafted Luck, which a computer set to autodraft could have and would have done, and 2) He gave Cleveland a first-rounder for Trent Richardson in one of the worst trades in NFL history. Other than that, this team is stocked with garbage linemen and veteran retreads looking to glom a Super Bowl ring off of Luck, as if Luck is 39 years old and has only one season left to play. The offensive line is crap. The front seven is crap. Rookie wideout Phillip Dorsett is already hurt. What kind of bullshit roster is this to build around Luck? The Colts will get their asses waxed in the playoffs again because this team is wholly reliant on Andrew Luck being an indestructible lagoon creature. They’ll get to the AFC title game or something, and then this will happen:


Also, D’Qwell Jackson allegedly punched a pizza guy because he thought the dude took his parking spot. Respect the pizza guy, you jerk. And Reggie Wayne skipped town to join the Patriots. Let’s see how Indianapolis reacted to that:


Yep. Pretty much exactly what I expected. It’s this team’s fault that we had to spend all summer hearing about PSI levels. If there is ANY justice, they will lose 13 games and Irsay will be caught slipping greenies and Clomid to the defensive backfield. You assholes.

What has always sucked: Thanks to the Colts, Pacers, Notre Dame, and IU, this state leads the country in “we do it differently here; we do it the right way” sports sanctimony. This is probably why the Colts ended up complaining about those deflated balls to begin with. Sure, they got a hole charred in their asses against New England, but they lost WITH HONOR. Living in Indiana means being a shitbag and holding your head high about it.


Indiana is a perpetual small-time dump where you go to lord your values over other people because you have nothing better to do with yourself. It is the most direct route from Chicago to the Deep South. There are parts of Southern Indiana that are more Kentucky than Kentucky is. There are Jesus billboards EVERYWHERE. As a city, Indianapolis consists of 10 nice blocks surrounded by an ocean of SHIT. It’s the city IU grads go to when they didn’t get good enough grades to land a job in Chicago. The best town in Indiana is Pawnee, which does not actually exist.

As for the fans, these are repossessed football fans, taken from college teams and basketball fanbases that have fallen on hard times. They are fat and ugly and, in many ways, Andrew Luck is their ideal avatar. I mean, look at this guy:

That’s what everyone in Indiana looks like when they see a slice of fried sugar pie.


What might not suck: How it is that the Colts always stumble ass-backward into a great quarterback AND a division that is ALWAYS on the downswing? Has there ever been an NFL team that has been gifted six automatic wins per season more often? It makes me sick.

Hear it from Colts fans!

Amanda:

Our fans have the moral superiority of St. Louis Cardinals fans, except we aren’t as good.


Nick:

We get beat by 30+ points and we blame a barely deflated ball. Ryan Grigson looks like a sleaze-ball and Irsay IS a sleaze-ball. Luck is great, but Grigson and Pagano have no idea how to build a respectable defense and the offensive line is a sieve. We’ll lose by 30 in the playoffs to the Pats again this year, at which point we’ll come up with another lame excuse.


Scott:

I live/work about 40 miles east of Indy. Every season, my company gives away 3 or 4 pairs of tickets for every Colts home game. I’ve worked here 11 years and never won. Every year, the same 5 or 6 jean-short wearing inbreds win tickets to the prime-time games and end up leaving before the 3rd quarter starts because they haven’t had a Marlboro since they walked up the stadium steps. I swear to God, most of them still think Peyton Manning is throwing passes to Marvin Harrison. Colts fans are idiots.


Nick:

Luck is the entire team, but our owner prefers to spend the money on personal use elephant tranquilizers instead of an O-line. Fortunately, the AFC South consists of the Houston Oilers twice and a team that even LA doesn’t want. We’ll spend the regular season winning the division and lubing up for the vigorous annual January Brady fuck party. Fuck Tom Brady.


Matt:

WHY DOES GRIGSON HATE OUR DEFENCE [sic]? Our Defence still consists of Vontae Davis being the best CB in the NFL while no one notices and everyone else missing tackles, blowing coverages and generally being terrible. We need help at every level of the defence, yet we go receiver in the first round. How many times to the Patriots have to run roughshod over us before our management thinks maybe we should do something about it? On the bright side, following the pattern of how far we’ve gone in the playoffs under Luck, this season we will get trounced in the Super Bowl by one of the several NFC teams who are better than we are. Yay?

Zak:


Jackson:

1. I’ve seen more Peyton Manning jerseys at games after he left for the Broncos. You’d think the Broncos had moved here 2. We’ve been calling the almost-yearly AFC championship game against the Patriots a “rivalry” game, which is very generous given our record against them every time in it. 3. There are two types of Colts fans: rich white assholes from Carmel and Fishers in the northern suburbs (outside of Indianapolis), and poor white assholes on the southside suburbs (technically inside city limits but you wouldn’t know it looking around, what with all the stripmalls and poverty). They both say suspiciously coded things about how they’re glad the Colts don’t have any “thug” fans like Tampa Bay or Oakland. 4. We pretend Andrew Luck is still a rookie with rookie potential every year, stretching into his 4th year, when most QB’ would be considered half-way to retirement. 5. All the die-hard fans that I had known for 10 years of winning seasons suddenly disappeared after Peyton got injured and we went 2-14, then came back when we started winning again (the Pacers have the same problem, our city just has shitty fans). 6. All the die-hard fans claiming that they “stuck it out” with the team when we were losing that one year, when I know for a fact even the assholes with season tickets didn’t go to games. 7. All the die-hard fans even pretending that it’s hard being a fan of a team that constantly does well, as if they have some kinship with the fucking Browns fans or something. 8. Our complete and utter inability to be outraged by Irsay’s constant DUIs. You’d think being wealthy enough to hire 8 drivers would allow him to not drive while he’s coked up and drunk, but here we are. He is a piece of human garbage who put his enjoyment before the lives of others and received a slap on the wrist. 9. The fact that it was during a Colts game I was watching on tv when I was 16 that I realized, after dozing off and coming-to in the 3rd quarter with nothing having changed over half a game, that I hated watching football. 10. Fuck this team and fuck every Carmel kid who thinks they’re “repping” Indianapolis by wearing a Colts jersey even though they to cover their wallets whenever black person walks by them downtown.


Zac:

The only difference between Ryan Grigson and Matt Millen is that Grigson had an obvious franchise QB pick and didn’t screw it up.


Justin:

We suck because I downright hoped we would lose to Denver in the playoffs simply because I knew we would get our faces fucked into eternity if we went against NE. LeGarrette Blount is a fucking turd & can never see the field any other time of the season because he sucks so bad & is lazy and getting baked with an actual good RB. But when it’s time to play the Colts he turns into Barry Sanders & Jim Brown’s love child. I’m awaiting his bust in Canton solely based on his play against us. After getting starched in the playoffs, how do we stop this problem? We burn our first round pick on another shiny new offensive toy. Our offensive line is still going to be as useful as a mesh screen door on a submarine. Fuck our drunk, selfie taking owner for basically calling everybody out saying “Super Bowl or bust”.


Colin:

I went to college just outside of NYC from 2002-2006, in the height of the Manning-era Colts’ days of bull-dozing through the regular season only to get embarrassingly crushed in the playoffs where you, like, need a defense and a quarterback that doesn’t act like a sullen teen after every goddamn incompletion. Despite the fact that the school was in New York, the vast majority of the students were Patriot fans. Oh God how I wanted to gloat after a Colts playoff victory, but it never happened. Fuck—the games were never even competitive. It sucked. The first year I moved back to Indiana the team accidentally fielded a good playoff defense and we won the Super Bowl despite the fact that Peyton threw for like 30 yards. I was surrounded by cheering hillbillies and completely missed out on my opportunity to rub it in those smug-ass Patriot fans’ faces. Manning leaves, new regime takes over, and we get another once-in-a-lifetime QB. I figure we are destined to fix the mistakes of the past, right? A FIRST-ROUNDER FOR TRENT RICHARDSON and another bed-shitting against a Patriots team that proves that you-don’t-need-superstars-at-every-offensive-position-if-you-have-a-top-tier-QB-and-talent-on-defense later… and we draft a WR in the first round and sign Andre Johnson and Frank Gore. What the fuck? I’m serious. WHAT THE FUCK? Oh, and I just took a job in Boston.

Jeff:

They ruined any chance at having a legitimate argument about Ballghazi by getting completely destroyed in the AFC Championship game. They weren’t even the favorite team in the state until Peyton Manning’s second or third year (most people still rooted for the Bears).


David:


Brad:



Because there are assholes still showing up to games wearing Manning Broncos jerseys. Because our owner is a pill-popping billionaire that’s too goddamn stupid to hire a driver to haul his opiate-riddled ass around. Because we’ll win 12 games, mostly because we play in a division full of Mongoloids, and we’ll still have to go play in Foxboro where we’ll lose by 50 points as we always do.


Joseph:

90% of Colts fans defended Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson. That same group responded to Tom Brady deflating some balls in a game the Colts lost 500 to 0 by wondering what kind of example Roger Goodell was making for the kids if Tom Brady and Co. didn’t have to forfeit the game and get thrown in a Russian jail for the rest of their lives. In case you want some more info about Indiana, here are pretty much the only things people in Indiana are known for: Creating the KKK Thinking Bob Knight is an amazing coach even though he strangled his players Banning gays from eating pizza

Eric:

Do people not remember losing to the Patriots by a combined total of 87-27 last year? NBC is gonna show a dozen fat humps in $40 deflated football hats during the fourth quarter of another bloodbath in week 5. It will be a gif on this website within minutes, it will be embarrassing, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Also, fuck Mike Vanderjagt with a Shake Weight.


Andrew:



Last year we got blown the hell out by Jonas fucking Gray. By the start of the 3rd QTR, I witnessed a fist fight in the restroom that stemmed from an argument over Jim Caldwell and how good of a coach he was. One Colts fan sucker punched another Colts fan WHILE HE WAS MID STREAM over a former head coach. Then, within 5 min I walked back to our spot and walked straight into a Colts/Pats fans brawl that resulted in bloodshed and pepper spray right in front of the handicap seating area. The only thing that helped me sleep that week was the visual of that Pats fan being carried out with a broken nose/bloody face. We’ll go 5-0 to start the season, then we’ll get rawdogged by Tommy SmallBalls when he comes back in week 6. Then we will finish the season at 13-3 and lose in the Super Bowl because we deserve heartbreak. We are spoiled, overly confident ass holes. Fuck Reggie Wayne (until he retires a Colt), Fuck the Pats, and still Fuck Hank Baskett


Jeremiah:

Ever like something, but hate everyone else who likes that thing? That is literally everything that I like. I love Dr. Who, but I can’t stand talking to anyone else who likes it. The same goes for my love of coffee, beer, physics, and the Colts.


Submissions for the 2015 NFL previews are now closed. Next up: the Green Bay Packers.