After surviving storm, Chuck Pagano won't look back

• Thursday at training camp: Practice, 1:55-4:40 p.m.; Colts City, 12:30-5 p.m.

ANDERSON — Four years ago Chuck Pagano stared death in the face and lived to tell about it. During the worst of it, he spent 20 hours a day in bed. The chemo sapped him. It tested him. But he kept coaching, poring through film on his iPad, texting his players advice for game days. The cancer wouldn’t win. He beat it. He returned.

Last winter, Pagano stared a different kind of death in the face. His Indianapolis Colts coaching tenure was doomed, dead in the water. “They can fire you, but they can’t eat you,” he admitted in early December. By January, the day after his team finished the season 8-8, he was telling players he didn’t know if he’d be back or not. But deep down, he had a hunch. He walked into team owner Jim Irsay’s office that afternoon expecting to be let go.

Seven hours later he was saying this: “I’ve had a lot of great days in my life, but none better than this.”

Go figure. Chuck Pagano lived to tell about it. Again.

The man knows a thing or two about defying the odds.

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He’s a coach who has been given a second chance — as rare a thing in today’s NFL as a run-first offense. It began Wednesday at Anderson University, his fifth training camp as coach of the Colts. Pagano is armed now with something he didn’t have a year ago: job security. Last August he was a lame duck coach shouldering the weight of Super Bowl expectations. Now he has a contract that stretches through 2019.

The man can exhale.

Thing is, he won’t.

“You know as well as I know, this is day-to-day, week-to-week, regardless,” Pagano said before the team’s first practice of 2016. “It’s a bottom-line business … I don’t think of it as, ‘Hey, I’ve got security now.’ The biggest myth in life is you think you have time when you really don’t.”

He knows that more than most. Since taking the Colts’ job in January 2012, Pagano has been tested personally and professionally. He fought off leukemia in 2012. And even in the worst of it last winter, when his job was on the line, he never lost a sense of perspective. When you’ve spent nine weeks battling cancer, losing a football game — or a job — doesn’t seem all that bad.

Yet after that stunning news conference on the frigid night of Jan. 4, he has done little looking back. Best day of his life? Pagano has made no mention of it. On to 2016. Given that second chance, he is driven to make sure this fall isn’t nearly as dreadful as the last one.

“We all learned a lot,” was about all he’d say Wednesday about 2015.

The tone around here has changed. The expectations, too. Pagano overhauled his coaching staff and welcomed 12 new assistants. There are new coordinators on both sides of the ball. Last season they started in the spotlight. This year they chase it.

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And 24 hours in, Pagano has been Pagano. You’d think 2015 never happened. He wore a shirt Wednesday with one of his trusty cliches on the back: “Humble and Hungry.” The humbling came last season. The hungry defines their pursuit.

Even in the worst of times last year, like the Colts’ three-game losing streak in December that cost them a playoff spot, Pagano never flinched. He never lost his players, and ultimately, that’s why he never lost his job.

Mike Adams is a 13-year league veteran. He has played on teams that went 2-14 and teams that went 13-3 and reached the Super Bowl. He has seen it all.

“Man, that was tough,” Adams said Wednesday, “but he kept his cool, which was surprising to me because some coaches don’t stay the same. You’d see a panic in those coaches. You would see things change. ‘We can’t do this … we have to do this … Oh, no, we have to do this.’

“Chuck stayed the same, and that’s what I admired about him.”

Then Adams makes a valid point: Who were the Colts going to lure to Indianapolis if Pagano was kicked to the curb? He has won 41 games in four seasons and been to the playoffs every year Andrew Luck has been on the field. That’s the type of success most NFL teams crave. Ask Cleveland. Or Detroit. Or Buffalo.

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That consistency, coupled with the fact the Colts mustered eight wins last year with Luck sidelined for more than half the season, was one of the principal reasons Irsay gave him a second contract. Irsay has spent a lifetime in the game. He knows how difficult it is to win in this league. He remembers how little the team won before Peyton Manning arrived in 1998.

“Who else would be better?” Adams added. “If they let him go, who would be better? What track record is better than his? I wouldn’t trade that. If someone might’ve come in, they might’ve thought rebuild. Then I’m gone. (Robert) Mathis is gone. It’s a new regime, they want their guys in. We’re older guys. That’s how it works.”

It never got there. Irsay decided that day in January that Chuck Pagano deserved another shot. No coaching search. No rebuild.

Pagano stayed. Adams stayed. Mathis stayed. Still, plenty changed in the offseason. What didn’t was the head coach.

This is Chuck Pagano’s team, same as it was a year ago.

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

Thursday at training camp: Practice, 1:55-4:40 p.m.; Colts City, 12:30-5 p.m.