An open letter to the Indianapolis Colts

First appeared on September 30th, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

Dear Indianapolis Colts,

I just wanted to drop you a line to say thanks. Thank you Jim Irsay for not coming out of the stands at halftime Sunday in Nashville to fire Chuck Pagano, despite the fact every single Colt Fan, and probably a few who’ve spent time at a Pagano family reunion, fully expected you to do so.

Thank you Andrew Luck for deciding at some point in the Fourth Quarter that "spreading the ball around" doesn't mean sharing it with the other team. And while I’ve got your ear, rumor has it you were one pick away from Fans starting a movement to sign Out of Control Beard Andrew Luck to the roster. This means I’ll need you to keep hitting your targets, because Out of Control Beard Andrew Luck is so creepy a cheesy commercial is the only place I ever want to see him.

Thank you coaches for drafting Phillip Dorsett to electrify the return game only to make the decision to play Griff Whalen in front of him. I understand it’s common practice for rookies to learn from vets, but I’m fairly certain taking a knee and fair catching a football are both things Phillip learned at a very young age.

Thank you front office, coaches and players for not squelching the talk of dysfunction within the brass of the franchise. For, if you were in fact planning to go 0-16 before Sunday, at least those lonely, tortured and completely inadequate souls in the part-time-pretend sports media would have something interesting to write about.

Thank you offensive line for mixing up your strategies of drawing a holding penalty on any play that garners more than five yards with blocking absolutely no one. We understand this is a delicate balance and hats off to you for maintaining it for a full 60 minutes.

Thank you Pat McAfee for both being Pat McAfee as well as taking a chance on Sunday when everything was going completely wrong. And while your converted fake punt was almost immediately rendered irrelevant by another Luck interception, we still applaud anyone willing to stick their neck out while everyone around is busy shoving their heads in the sand.

Thank you Robert Mathis for enduring 10 surgeries and a grueling rehab schedule just to get back on the field. For even when all I had hoped for was crumbling down around me in a fury of turnovers, missed tackles and holding penalties, just seeing 98 getting after the quarterback again was enough to give me a spark of hope.

Thank you Dwight Lowery for being the only defensive player to actually get off the bus before the Fourth Quarter on Sunday. Your Pick six fooled me into believing my old team was back and then, upon returning to the belief my old team was in fact still enjoying quiet time in a lounge chair on a private Mexican beach, you intercepted another pass and saved me.

Finally, thank you to all the Colts. Despite waiting until the fourth quarter to do so, thank you for finally showing the fight, toughness, grit, execution and emotion I’d been expecting to see from you in the first two games. And while it remains unclear how people will remember me, one thing’s for sure, because of your efforts Sunday nobody has given up on me yet.

Thanks Again

Your Season


© 2015 Eric Walker Williams

Pep Hamilton, Meet Andrew Luck

First appeared on November 6, 2014
in The Lebanon Reporter

As Joe Colt Fan watched his team destroy the Giants on Monday Night Football, there were many positives for him to dote on. The offense was clicking, the defense ground up the Giants and Pat "boomstick" McAfee continued his stellar special teams play. Lost in the shuffle however, was one small U-turn that has completely transformed the Colt offense.

When Pep Hamilton was asked to write the Colt offensive playbook, his declaration they would become a “power running team” caught many off guard (and by many here, we mean everyone but Pep Hamilton). And while most first time NFL coordinators would tailor their offense around the strongest pieces they have, like say maybe a 6’4 lumberjack of a quarterback who happens to be a number one overall pick blessed with an uncommon natural play-making ability, Hamilton shocked the world by choosing to go against the grain.

It’s true we as red, white and blue blooded Americans love celebrating those who find success in unconventional ways, but in this case success and the Colts as a “power running team” are mutually exclusive. Coming in to play Monday night, the Colts rushing attack was ranked 15th in the NFL; a position that doesn’t warrant the descriptors “power” or “running team”.

Then, somewhere along the way to Monday night, Hamilton’s approach changed. We may never know if his recent revelation, the one better known as the decision to focus the offense around Andrew Luck instead of an ill-conceived vision for becoming a “power running team”, came because Hamilton realized Luck is a rare talent, or he simply wanted to keep his job.

For all Joe Colts Fan knows Hamilton woke up one day, still fully committed to developing his “power running team”, only to slip on the bathroom floor and hit his head on the tub. Perhaps it was the ensuing case of amnesia that led Hamilton to call Chuck Pagano for advice on the Colt Offense. It’s quite possible Pagano told a foggy Hamilton, “Well, Pep, I don’t know much about coaching that side of the football, but seems to me the ball should be in Andrew’s hands 90-95% of the time.”

Or maybe Hamilton woke up one night, clad in striped one piece PJ’s complete with long sleeping cap, only to find the ghost of terrible first halves past had jangled his way to the foot of his bed to remind Pep how many times the Colts had been down double digits at halftime only to abandon the power running game and storm back on the arm and legs of Andrew Luck.

It’s of little consequence to Joe Colts Fan what predicated the switch because his life is now far too exciting to waste time on conjecture. Suddenly Joe Colts Fan’s phone is blowing up because Luck is an MVP candidate and the Colts are Super Bowl favorites. Let us not forget, they’re also the gold standard in the AFC South (OK, so maybe it’s entirely possible their position in the AFC South would remain unchanged even if Roy Rogers’ stuffed horse Trigger were taking snaps).

The moral is Joe Colts Fan shouldn’t get lost in the semantics of varying offensive philosophies. He’s always been a give me the facts kind of guy. And, as of this week anyway, the facts remain Luck is doing what Luck does best, making plays with the ball in his hands. So fear not Joe Colt Fan, for it seems your team has finally realized what you and those in your inner circle, including that one brother in law who says he played in high school but you suspect doesn’t know a football from a coconut, knew all along. Andrew Luck is a rare talent and a horse that should be ridden for four quarters.

© 2014 Eric Walker Williams

Welcome Home Peyton?

First appeared on October 25th, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

Welcome Home Peyton, it’s good to see you again. We’ve missed you so much we decided to give you a 39-33 beat down on national television. OK, so maybe “beat down” goes too far when describing Sunday night, but surely it wasn’t the coming home party Manning envisioned.

The guys “coming home” after all. When was the last time you went home and got punched in the face? (all apologies to Anthony Weiner, this isn’t about you). This was supposed to be a smile for the cameras before tossing ten touchdowns and making Jim Irsay eat the biggest plate of crow since Skip Bayless ridiculed the Colts for letting Manning go to draft Andrew Luck kind of night.

But it wasn’t. Instead it became the Colts making Manning look ordinary despite the fact he was on pace to have the greatest season in NFL history. There was no moment Manning looked comfortable. From the video tribute where he made the Spartan-like gesture of removing his helmet to acknowledge the fans, to the first drive, to Robert Mathis and his sack-fumble-safety, Manning looked rattled from start to finish.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Colts fans longed to see Manning light the scoreboard up, if only to come up short in the end. They didn’t want to see four sacks, countless wobbly ducks and Britton Colquitt taking the field seven times.

They wanted a shootout at the OK Corrall between Andrew “The Kid” Luck and “The Sheriff”. What they got instead was a dominating Colt defense and a victory that somehow left them feeling sorry for the greatest quarterback in NFL history.

The hype machine had us drooling with anticipation. To welcome him home, we envisioned the city of Indianapolis replacing Lady Victory with a bust of Manning while the State legislature would lobby Washington to make Indiana the 18th state. Jim Irsay would cough up enough coin to commission a statue of Manning while Roger Goodell would make an appearance to knight “the Sheriff” beforehand.

Manning would take the field on a litter toted by the Broncos Offensive Line while the London Symphony Orchestra (accompanied by a nattily clad Jim Nabors) cranked out their own rendition of “Back Home Again in Indiana”. From the stands wives would faint into the arms of their husbands, thrusting them once again into the eternal struggle of woman vs. beer.

Meanwhile children in Manning Colt jerseys their parents are too cheap to replace, would sob uncontrollably as if the jumbo-tron had just revealed Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny are both fictionalized products of an unstable economic model based upon consumerism.
This was the welcome home Manning was to have, the welcome home he deserved.

What the Colts gave him Sunday night flies in the face of everything ‘Hoosier Hospitality’ stands for. And so we’re left to ponder just how much of Manning’s ineffectiveness was a product of the Colt pass rush and secondary play, and how much of it was his inability to move past the fact he was playing in Indianapolis again.

Is it possible the man who tried for so long to mask his emotions, was so overcome with them that it actually impacted his play? All these years Defensive Coordinators charged with stopping Manning have lost time pounding their heads against the wall while chain smoking cheap cigarettes when the answer was right there in front of their faces.

The best way to attack Manning is not with an exotic blitz package or Nickel coverage, rather it’s to strike straight for the heart. For after Sunday night, this appears to be his lone vulnerability.

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© 2013 Eric Walker Williams

Andrew Luck: This is Your Life

First appeared on August 30th, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

Dear Annoying Person whose life is so important you don’t have time to push your shopping cart to the corral and choose instead to abandon it in the empty parking spot one good stiff breeze away from my previously unscratched door, you annoy me. You remain the only effective argument for tougher gun laws and something tells me if your life was really so important that you couldn’t spare thirty seconds to push your cart an extra twenty feet, you probably wouldn’t have been in the Kroger parking lot to begin with.

If I had to guess, the brain trust at ESPN is comprised of highly decorated scholars in well pressed suits who can quote to the line the current value of their stock options. Men who rake in obscene amounts of money and wear crooked smirks that squeal “We control half the media world”. Still as polished and accomplished as these men are, at the end of the day, they remain the same ones who leave their cart unattended next to your car in the Kroger parking lot.

ESPN thinks if they beat you over the head with something long enough (A ROD, Brett Favre, Johnny Football) you will eventually come around to caring about it. They cater to the sensationalized and stories relevant to major television markets. For years the Colts dominated the NFL regular season and yet were rarely the lead story on SportsCenter.

Peyton Manning shredded defenses and shattered records as the little franchise that could went on to win double figure games in 12 out of 14 years. Meanwhile the talking heads in Bristol yawned. Manning tosses nine touchdowns (including one to himself) in a 35 point come from behind win and SportsCenter grants it token coverage before inundating us with updates about Tom Brady’s hangnail or the bad plate of sushi he had in New York.

I suppose this milk has long since spoiled and the proper thing to do is tell Andrew Luck that no matter what he does, as long as Robert Griffin the III is upright and able to strap a helmet on, the backseat is a place young Andrew should learn his way around.
Welcome to your life Andrew Luck. You take a 2 win team to the playoffs, throw for more touchdowns and a thousand more yards than the NFL Rookie of the Year and ESPN responds by spending millions on the production of “RG3: The Will to Win” and promotes it relentlessly. It didn’t matter the Colts won more games despite a strength of schedule that ranked them ten places higher than Washington last year, ESPN’s response is to say the Colts are overrated and will take a major step backward this season.

Don’t let ESPN’s fear of covering Midwestern teams scare you young Andrew, there are plenty of hayseeds left out here in the sticks willing to climb down off our horses long enough to pat you on the back and tell you what a great job you’re doing. Take your big city money and go buy yourself a nice log cabin near Lucas Oil Stadium (I’ve got a cousin willing to clear the land if you need it).

The first lesson of playing professional sports in the Midwest is understanding the spotlight of the big media will only reach you when every team east of the Appalachians has closed its doors or global warming has become a reality and flooded the eastern seaboard. Meanwhile get to know the people who leave their carts unattended for one day they shall inherit the Earth from the ESPN brass.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams

Father Christmas has been good to Hoosiers

First appeared on December 12, 2012
in The Lebanon Reporter

It’s that time again. Time to brave the crowds, embrace our hunter gatherer roots and fight the animal tendency in all of us to hammer our fellow man in the face, all in the name of making the Christmas dreams of our bright eyed children come true.

And knowing full well you won’t be the father of a four year old who can’t find Indiana on a map, you settle on the Melissa and Doug Wooden Puzzle of the United States. A must-have of every toy closet, stately cornstalks of gold mark Nebraska and there’s Florida with its proverbial giant round orange while a lone Saguaro cactus stands guard over Arizona.

Yes a marvel of modern Elf ingenuity indeed. But what’s this? Indiana has no race car or basketball? In their stead, crouched over the crossroads of America, is some strange creature that appears half whistle pig, half beaver.

This is what the national impression of Indiana has come to? An overgrown rat? Hoosiers have a better chance of seeing Sasquatch roaming their backyards than this Capybara-like creature. Melissa and Doug’s official statement is they chose a beaver for Indiana “due to all the parks.” Really? It’s insulting; to Indiana and beavers.
One can only hope that, in the last two months alone, Sports Illustrated has done more to remake Indiana’s image than anything Melissa and Doug could ever do to trash it. In that time the editors of SI have chosen the images of Indiana’s Cody Zeller, Notre Dame’s Football Team and the Colts’ Andrew Luck to move their magazine. This alone proves sports historians would be hard pressed to find a better time to be a Hoosier.

So what more do we have to do? Indiana hammers North Carolina and clearly has Kentucky’s John Calipari on the run (BTW John, you’re not fooling anyone, it’s not about capacity of arenas as much as it is your precious undefeated record at Rupp which you clearly understand Indiana will soil forever). Notre Dame runs the table and it still isn’t enough for national pundits to accept that maybe they’re just the best team in College Football. Meanwhile Andrew Luck has done nothing but prove his worth as the number one overall pick by making good decisions, throwing lasers and extending plays with his feet; all this while helping the surprising Colts sprint out to 9 wins.

Still in the national consciousness we remain sod-busting corn pickers who spend weekends ogling our cousins through the flickering television light. In one fell swoop Melissa and Doug has taken nearly 200 years of proud Hoosier tradition and reduced it to what appears to be a Grizzly Bear that’s had the gross misfortune of crossing paths with a Martian shrink ray.

So you bypass the puzzle and tuck a Tonka Truck tuck under your arm, sprinting towards the check-out line like OJ in a Hertz Commercial, leaping shopping carts and shoving pregnant mothers out of the way. And you do so because it’s the most wonderful time of the year and you’re a Hoosier; a gift you can never return. Hoosiers are proud of our deep fried Twinkies and lone Toll Road; even though it’s owned by a foreign country most can’t find on a map.

It will take more than a child’s puzzle and the worst artists’ rendering of a beaver since Grog first took to cave walls to ruin our holidays. For Hoosiers everywhere it’s time to celebrate who we are; and we do so knowing we have Indiana, Notre Dame and the Colts to speak for us. And speak they will.

© 2012 Eric Walker Williams

Luck Vs. Manning-Get used to it

First appeared on July 26,2012
in The Lebanon Reporter

So Andrew Luck is officially an Indianapolis Colt. Which means we can officially put an end to the Peyton Manning era and declare the Andrew Luck era underway; officially. Colts Fans start your engines and let the comparisons begin. It’s a train wreck we all see coming. We’re destined for a good old fashioned comparathon.

The next 10 years will be filled with everything Manning did that luck couldn’t. That is at least until Luck wins a Super Bowl and multiple MVP’s, sets almost every major NFL passing record, appears on 3 out of every 5 commercials you see on television, hosts Saturday Night Live and fathers twins of course.

The media are all hunkered over their laptops and notebooks like medieval gargoyles, fangs bared and jowls salivating. Prepare yourself for the constant bombardment of Luck versus Manning factoids they’re going to send our way. For they will continue to come like a leaking faucet until your brain is completely flooded with information that seemed relevant at the time but in actuality foreshadowed absolutely nothing.

The truth is Andrew Luck deserves better. He should be able to report for duty on West 56th Street without everything from the car he drives to the food he eats to the type of Christmas gift he buys the lady who answers the phones (gift card and jewelry if he wants to keep up with Manning) to be subject to inspection and comparison to Peyton.

It simply isn’t fair and anyone who uses it as fodder for discussion, or Heaven forbid a weekly newspaper column, should be tarred, feathered and have their eyelashes plucked out one at a time by a group of camera waving Japanese tourists chain-smoking Lark Classic Milds while wearing full Samurai regalia (not that I’ve had that nightmare or anything).

All these inevitable comparisons are pointless considering there just isn’t much the two have in common anyway. Its sheer coincidence that these two would both be born in the United States to NFL quarterback fathers before growing up to be over 6’3 and be blessed with laser-rocket-arms that would enable them to play major college football where they both set several records only to be hung with the nice guy tag in lieu of winning a Heisman before going on to become the first overall pick for the same franchise. It’s uncanny but not worth comparing.

It’s a fruitless foray into the land of Apples and Oranges to compare them and only a fool would do it. After all Luck is a Virgo and Manning’s an Aries; which of course tells us that Luck is by nature a bit more modest and shy than Manning who is full of fire and comes equipped with a dominating spirit. Perhaps it was this spirit, or the new restrictions of the NFL salary structure, that helped Manning net 48 million with his first contract while Luck just inked a deal worth 22.1 million.

And while numbers are both an acceptable and proven method for comparing like commodities in this case they’re simply not worth mentioning. After all Manning, who is 36 years old, set 28 Tennessee Volunteer records while Luck, who is 23, set just 14 at Stanford.

So while yours truly pledges to resist, nothing can stop the comparisons from coming; not even the Great Drought of Ought Twelve. The fact that people will compare these two for the entirety of Luck’s career is a sure thing; as sure as Brother Mitt will have transferred some of his off shore funds to purchase more hair product twice before you finish reading this.