Jim Ayello

Jim Ayello

Colts at Titans, 1 p.m. Sunday, CBS

You've had enough. The 2-4 Indianapolis Colts are an unmitigated disaster. Their latest meltdown Sunday night was the final straw in a season overflowing with disappointment. How could it have come to this? How could a team with Super Bowl aspirations transform into cellar dwellers in the dreadful AFC South? Someone needs to pay. Someone needs to lose his job. And that someone should be coach Chuck Pagano.

Sound familiar?

As IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel recently documented, this is a sentiment shared by many Colts fans. But does the idea have merit?

Is showing Pagano the door really the right call? What's the upside?

In short, it would appear that there is none.

According to NFL.com, since 2000 there have been 27 instances of a team firing its coach midseason. Those teams started the season a collective 72-173 (.294), while their replacements finished up 60-109 (.356). An improvement, sure, but one so minor it's practically irrelevant.

And here's the worse news if you're aboard the "Fire Pagano" bandwagon: None of these teams made the playoffs. Not one. Only two finished with a record at or above .500, and it's been more than 15 years since that happened. (See chart below.)

In other words, recent history shows us that tinkering with a flawed team is as useless as shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

If the Colts are in fact the .333 team they've played like so far, evidence tells us a new coach won't change anything.

So that brings us to the other option. Are the Colts better off keeping Pagano?

In short, probably. But not by much.

Last season, Washington, Seattle and Houston each started the season 2-4, while Kansas City began 1-5. All four made the playoffs.

The situation in Kansas City has the most in common with the Colts' current predicament. After falling 16-10 to the Vikings in Week 6, Andy Reid was gone. Toast. His walking papers just needed the i's dotted and t's crossed. At least, that's what Chiefs fans thought.

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But Chiefs executives opted to let their veteran coach try to find a way to get Kansas City, a 20-12 team over the previous two seasons, out of its funk. And that's exactly what he did. Kansas City shocked the league by rattling off 10 straight wins to secure a wild-card game berth, where the team would trounce the Texans 30-0 before falling 27-20 to the New England Patriots in the divisional round.

Of course, the Chiefs' situation is an absolute best-case scenario. Most teams that struggle out of the gate do not rebound as Kansas City did. Actually, most teams that struggle early in the season like the Colts don't rebound at all. In the past five seasons, only seven of the 53 teams that started 2-4 or worse finished .500 or better. And only five made the playoffs: the four in 2015 and the Tim Tebow-led Broncos of 2011.

Not great.

So where does that leave the Colts in regards to Pagano's future?

The data show it will take a minor miracle for the Colts to turn around their season and "get into the tournament," as Frank Gore put it. But it also shows the Colts have better odds of pulling off that miracle with Pagano in the building.

Follow IndyStar producer Jim Ayello on Twitter @jamesayello.

Colts at Titans, 1 p.m. Sunday, CBS