Essentially, he dodged the question of how they can fix the slow starts. Everything else was thus rendered moot.
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Luck, meanwhile, wants to get rid of the memories of last season, when he only played seven games and the Colts missed the playoffs.
Detroit Lions kicker Matt Prater (5) kicks the game winning field goal in the four quarter of the game at Lucas Oil Stadium.
The Colts come in with an offense that should be ready to break out.
“Well, that’s a great question”, Pagano said after an bit of a pause.
“I’ve been cleared for a while now, close to after the season, so I feel pretty good”. The Colts played an injury-report game with their quarterback during the week but his arm look fully healthy, with four completions of at least 30 yards including a 51-yard bomb to Phillip Dorsett.
“I think I’ve improved”, Luck said. And while it may have gotten off to a good start, it did not end well for Caldwell or the Colts.
“We wanted to get the guys in the huddle, get a play called”, Pagano said.
He found tight ends Dwayne Allen and Jack Doyle for three touchdowns. But after the squad came back from the locker room to begin the second half, the defense fell apart. Moore wound up with a game-high 13 tackles. Matt Stafford is back behind center and will be out to prove he is among the league’s elite signal callers and while he is without his favourite weapon since he entered the league there are still plenty of options to work with led by Golden Tate. The end result was that Caldwell got another shot at being a head coach, as he was hired by Detroit in January 2014. That left Detroit with all three timeouts for the final offensive possession. “It is big. We aren’t the (AFC South) division champions”. “We can go back and say, ‘You know what?”
“We have to get it done”.
Luck refused to second-guess his coach.
“Sure, you would like to score at the very end and win the game with zero seconds on the clock, but we had to score and take the lead when the opportunity was there”.
What the Lions accomplished Sunday evening showed the whole issue of clock management, in a league as ferociously balanced as the NFL, can be as complicated as Final Jeopardy. Prater, though, shanked the extra point, leaving Detroit with only a six-point lead. Pagano was a bit more inclined to second guess. Better to give up the three yards and keep the down box moving. That nine-play drive covered 85 yards. The Lions outlasted the Colts.
Against the Lions, the Colts rushed for 82 total yards on 19 carries – an average of 4.3 yards per-carry. The Colts went 4-3 down the stretch without Luck but were not the same team.
“Missed tackles”, Robert Mathis said of what unglued the defense on Sunday.
Fast starts have not been the norm in the Luck era. Ameer Abdullah and Theo Riddick did combine for three touchdowns in Sunday’s game against the sieve-like Colts, but Washington’s presence as a goal-line vulture is a threat to both backs’ weekly touchdown probability. Sep.
The bad start wasn’t limited to the defense.
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The Colts haven’t opened at home since 2013, and they have trips to Denver and London in the first four weeks. “We wanted get a different personnel group in there, and we made a decision to call a timeout, regroup, and get back to the line of scrimmage”. Behind a veteran running game and a sneaky-good receiving core, the Colts put up the best fight they could. Indy trailed 14-0 before Luck finally got in sync by finishing the first half with two scoring drives to make it 21-10. He’ll join free agent addition Patrick Robinson and a pair of guys signed this week – Darryl Morris and Rashaan Melvin – in the defensive backfield.
