Chuck Pagano on the Colts: 'We've got a long way to go. We need work.'

INDIANAPOLIS – The glass half-empty status of your Indianapolis Colts: The franchise quarterback hasn’t thrown a pass to his receivers since the first of the year, the franchise center is on the shelf indefinitely, the first-round pick hasn’t seen the field a week, the offense hasn’t moved the ball in a month and the head coach is starting to get ticked off.

The glass half-full status: It’ll get better. It has to.

Chuck Pagano sees it. How can he not? His football team is hurting right now, and it’s not just the injuries that are piling up. It’s the product on the field.

To this point, this team has done little, if anything, to make you believe 2017 will be better than 2016.

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Pagano’s Colts officially broke training camp Thursday, closing a sloppy three weeks with one more sloppy practice. Passes were overthrown. Passes were dropped. Assignments were missed. The Colts’ 2017 training camp, in one sentence: an unproven defense that’s still continuing to gel won darn near every practice, and that’s mostly because the offense couldn’t muster much of a fight.

Point is: Even Andrew Luck — great as he is — might not be able to save this team.

While Luck continues to inch closer to a return, starting center Ryan Kelly heads in the opposite direction. He’ll have surgery on an injured foot and will miss at least the start of the regular season. Two critical receivers — Donte Moncrief and Phillip Dorsett — have been in and out of the lineup throughout camp. Malik Hooker, the first-round pick at safety, was sidelined all week with his third different minor injury. Stud safety Clayton Geathers, still recovering from offseason neck surgery, remains a bystander at practice. He'll miss the first six games. Maybe more.

And a defense returning one viable starter from 2016, cornerback Vontae Davis, was at full health for less than half of training camp. The offense was, at best, incomplete. At worst, a disaster.

Consider a few plays from Thursday’s workout. Early on, in 11-on-11 work, T.Y. Hilton curled to the back of the endzone and found himself wide open. Scott Tolzien airmailed him. Only way Hilton was catching this pass is if he magically grew 10 inches taller.

Tolzien, to his credit, clawed back. He fired back-to-back touchdown strikes later in the workout, including one to Hilton. He hopped to his feet and flung the football into the sky. It was like he wanted to scream, “FINALLY!”

For the offense, it’s been that kind of camp.

Tolzien struggled throughout. Phillip Walker, an undrafted, undersized rookie out of Temple, struggled throughout. Stephen Morris hasn’t seen more than a dozen snaps in two weeks. Put bluntly, the quarterback position has not been a bright spot.

And Pagano doesn’t seem pleased. Not particularly about the quarterbacks, but his team in general. He was edgy Thursday, his responses curt, his frustration evident. Though the Colts are technically breaking camp — the players are allowed to leave the hotel they’ve been staying at since July 29 — he stressed to them after Thursday’s workout that this team must remain “in camp mode.”

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Pagano said. “We need work, that’s it.”

Asked about his team’s overall progress over the past three weeks, Pagano spent the better part of a minute meandering through the revamped defense. He likes the new talent they brought in. He’s excited to see it, fully intact, finally on the field together. He then delved into special teams. “The long snapper has a chance to be a real good one,” he said.

And only then did he circle back to the offense. It was obvious. There’s not a lot of good things to say about it.

“We’ve been stung by injuries and continuity and it hurts,” Pagano said.

Pressed about two of the offense’s critical pieces, wide receivers Moncrief and Dorsett, each missing chunks of time during camp, the sixth-year coach was succinct.

“We need them out there,” he repeated once, twice, then a third time.

The dings just keep coming, and this offense keeps taking a beating. Second-year receiver Chester Rogers missed time this week. Backup tight end Erik Swoope just had knee surgery. Moncrief’s been limited to individual drills since returning from a shoulder sprain last week.

Maybe the Colts shake the injury bug before the Sept. 10 opener in Los Angeles, and maybe Luck is out there, camouflaging this team’s holes like he’s done since the day he arrived. He won 33 games in his first three seasons with flawed rosters, a leaky offensive line and an inconsistent defense. He’s played Superman before.

But can he be Superman right away? Not likely. He hasn’t practiced with the team since Week 17. Owner Jim Irsay wouldn’t commit to Luck returning to the field for Week 1 – “Could be Sept. 10, could be Sept. 20,” he said after Sunday’s discouraging preseason loss to the Lions.

With Luck in limbo, the Colts are too. Simple as that.

Right now, this is their reality: They’re down a starting quarterback and now a starting center, and it’s showing. Key pieces on the offense have already missed considerable time. The defense should be better than last year’s 30th-ranked unit, but until they take the field, there's no guarantee.

“Far from over,” Pagano said of his training camp mentality. That’s a good thing. His team has a ways to go.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.