Insider: Did Sunday seal Chuck Pagano's fate?

Show Caption Hide Caption Colts' Chuck Pagano on 51-16 loss to Jaguars Colts coach Chuck Pagano talks about the team's 51-16 loss to Jacksonville, Sunday, Dec. 13, 2015. (Robert Scheer / The Star)

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

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – It was four years ago this month Jim Irsay exited this very stadium and made his way to the team plane, tears rolling down his face, a painful inevitability laid before him. It was over. He had no choice.

“I knew that it had ended,” the Indianapolis Colts owner would later concede.

It was the last game of the disastrous 2011 season. Irsay’s team had plummeted to a league-worst 2-14 record, which meant the rights to the top overall pick in that spring’s draft, which meant the chance to take Stanford prodigy Andrew Luck and not look back. It also meant saying goodbye to Peyton Manning and starting over.

So Irsay cleaned house, grueling as it was; a day later he fired Vice Chairman Bill Polian, the front-office architect responsible for the team’s most gilded era, and his son Chris, the team’s general manager. Coach Jim Caldwell soon followed. It was the NFL at its most cruel – one bad season had cost three men their jobs. Irsay had hit the reset button. The Colts would start over.

• BOX SCORE: Jaguars 51, Colts 16

On Sunday, Irsay exited the same stadium and walked to the team plane, undoubtedly wrestling with what he had just witnessed. His team had been humiliated worse than at any point in an already-humiliating season. A 51-16 loss? To the Jacksonville Jaguars? One can only imagine what was racing through Irsay’s mind after watching that. One can only imagine his fury.

Is it over? Is it time for the reset button?

Entrenched in the midst of Irsay’s ire is his embattled coach, Chuck Pagano, a man who over the final month of this season is fighting for his job. Problem is, his team is collapsing. Sunday’s debacle comes on the heels of last week’s debacle; throw the two together and Indianapolis has been outscored by 70 points in consecutive games. The Jaguars – the mighty Jaguars – went on a 48-3 scoring run over the final 32 minutes Sunday. Not even the Golden State Warriors can say they’ve done that.

Compared to the postmortem a week ago in Pittsburgh, Pagano was noticeably more measured after this beating. The fire was gone. This time around, his voice was subdued, his face worn. He looked like a man who was beaten down. He spewed his trusty clichés – “blinders on, earmuffs on” – but they rang hollow. They felt forced. They sounded like they were coming from a man who has run out of answers.

“We’re all going to come under fire, all that stuff,” Pagano said. “We can’t do anything about that. We made this bed. It starts with me and everybody else. We’re in this together.”

He stuck to his glass-half-full mantra. He said he still believes. It’s the only way he knows.

“We’ve got three games left. We can turn this thing,” he continued. “This exact same thing happened in 2006 to this football team in this stadium. And those guys found a way to go back and get things fixed and they ended up winning the Super Bowl.”

Pagano’s comparison is misplaced at best, delusional at worst. Does he honestly believe this team can win the Super Bowl? After they gave up 42 second-half points to the Jaguars?

After that 2006 game, a 44-17 whooping in which the Colts yielded a franchise-record 375 rushing yards, they still sat at 10-3. This Colts team isn’t that Colts team. Not by a long stretch. Forget the Super Bowl; the only reason this team can still cling to playoff hope is because of the safety net that is the abysmal AFC South.

“But you can’t keep falling back on that,” tight end Coby Fleener said after the loss. “At some point, we need to take control of our own destiny.”

“I know we’re a hell of a lot better than we showed today,” linebacker Robert Mathis said. “We just gotta … dammit … do it.”

That 2006 team did it. They proved they had the mettle and the moxie to become a champion. This Colts team, now 6-7, has done nothing that tells us they’re going to do anything but continue collapsing.

Meanwhile, Pagano enters the home stretch, his fate looking more sealed by the week.

“All you can do is go back to work and keep fighting, and that is what we’re doing,” he said meekly.

Not insignificant is this: How the Colts are losing these games. Sunday's loss is the Colts' seventh by as many as 29 points under Pagano, final scores that irk Irsay to no end. How is a team this loaded with talent this routinely uncompetitive? It's a baffling question Pagano has yet to answer.

In the somber postgame locker room, his players leaned on many of the same platitudes – the season’s not over, they still control their own destiny, yada, yada, yada. Houston comes to town next week, and the division title and a playoff spot could very well be decided. It’s the Colts’ saving grace. They’re down to their final out. Only a Hail Mary will save them.

“I don’t give a (expletive) how we get in, all we gotta do is get in,” defensive end Kendall Langford said of the playoffs. “And then, it’s fair game.”

But leaning on the idea that a playoff spot will suddenly rejuvenate this team feels like fool’s gold, even if Luck returns. The Franchise won’t save the franchise. These holes cut deeper, much deeper, from the leaky roster built by the general manager to the coach whose career is now on life support; from the offense that can’t find the end zone to the defense that curled up in the second half Sunday and played dead, allowing a club-record 51 points from the Jaguars. Not to be excused is the shoddy special teams unit, which we can bank on giving up one monster play every week.

As it often does in this league, the onus – at least over the next month – falls on Pagano, the 55-year-old cancer survivor and lame duck coach who bet on himself this season by balking at the team’s one-year contract extension last spring. He waited and worked 28 years as an assistant across 12 stops for his shot – this shot. The foundation he built in Indianapolis? It’s crumbling beneath him. Asked if Pagano had lost the locker room Sunday afternoon, Pro Bowl receiver T.Y. Hilton turned away.

“Next question,” he said.

It’s clear these players are unfailingly behind Pagano. What’s also evident: The season, one that began with so much promise, is slipping away.

“At some point, the opportunities are going to run out,” Fleener said. “Hopefully our opportunities run out in February at the Super Bowl. That’s the goal and it always has been …”

Fleener’s voice trailed off for a moment, the implausibility of that statement hanging in the air.

“But that’s way beyond the scope of our focus at this point.”

Super Bowl? This team has more pressing needs, like stopping the bleeding. They've been outscored in back-to-back weeks by 70 points. The season is falling a part. No jobs are safe.

Is it all over for Chuck Pagano? For Ryan Grigson? Is it time for the reset button?

Only one man knows the answer.

What will it be, Jim?

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

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