Doyel: Passive Pagano gives game away

INDIANAPOLIS — No excuses, Chuck Pagano was saying after this 39-35 loss to the Detroit Lions, and let’s honor that. There are no excuses for this letdown, this meltdown, when the Indianapolis Colts had their fingers wrapped around a season-opening victory — but sat back and watched the Lions take it.

And that’s what the Colts were doing in that final drive by Detroit, those absurdly easy 50 yards the Lions went in three plays and 25 seconds.

The Colts were watching.

That’s what the Colts wanted to do, if you can believe it. They didn’t want to attack. They wanted to watch, keep the football in front of them, see the ball and then go tackle the guy carrying it. And in a textbook somewhere, that makes sense.

But this game wasn’t played in a textbook. It was played at Lucas Oil Stadium, and in that building on Sunday the Colts defense was good at just one part of that strategy: They could watch. Man oh man, were the Colts good at watching. Tackling? No, the Colts weren’t good at tackling.

“The tackling sucked,” said safety Mike Adams. And he’s right.

“The defense played like (expletive),” said linebacker D’Qwell Jackson, and that is excrementally, I mean exceptionally, accurate.

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And again, no excuses. Pagano said that several times, and he’s right. The Colts went into this game with injuries ravaging their secondary, but that’s not why the Lions produced 448 total yards. Believe me, it’s not.

Lions running backs Ameer Abdullah and Theo Riddick ran for 108 total yards on just 19 carries, and that has nothing to do with the secondary. Abdullah and Riddick caught passes for 120 total yards on 10 catches, and that too has nothing to do with the secondary. Dare I say it, some of the most effective players on the field for the Colts were their defensive backs, even if I couldn’t pick some of them out of a lineup — or, truthfully, spell their names without looking them up.

Let’s see … Darryl Morris played cornerback for the Colts on Sunday. So did someone named Rashaan Melvin. They were not the problem.

The pass rush was the problem. Tackling near the line of scrimmage was the problem. And coaching was the problem.

Offense? Offense was not the problem. Andrew Luck was sensational in his first game back from injury. After a slow start caused by passive play-calling — see the trend here? — Luck lit up Detroit for 362 yards and four touchdowns in the final three quarters.

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Luck was so disgusted after the game — disgusted with himself, because that’s what Luck does — that he did something he never does: He acted petulantly.

Do I understand why Luck did it? Yes I do. But he did what he did, and here’s what he did: He walked into the postgame press conference, saw the Gatorade bottle sitting ceremonially on the podium — Gatorade, under the PepsiCo umbrella, has a $2.3 billion sponsorship deal with the NFL — and he took it down. Hid it from cameras.

Luck owns a stake in the sports drink company BodyArmor, a Gatorade competitor. He’s competitive, Andrew Luck. And he was ticked off. Down goes the Gatorade bottle.

If only the Colts’ coaching staff had that much moxie.

Instead, with the Colts leading 35-34 with 37 seconds left and Detroit on its 25-yard line, here’s what the Colts staff did: The same passive thing they’d been doing all game.

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To that point, Lions quarterback Matt Stafford had shredded their soft defensive strategy — four Colts rushing the passer, seven dropping into coverage — for 28 completions in 35 attempts (80 percent) for 290 yards and three touchdowns.

And so with the game on the line, here’s what the Colts’ brain trust decided to do: The same thing.

Four Colts rushing the passer. Seven dropping into coverage.

Guess what Stafford did? The same thing he’d done all day! He hit Riddick for a short pass that Riddick turned into 19 yards, then called Detroit’s first timeout. He hit tight end Eric Ebron for an even shorter pass that Ebron turned into 9 yards, then called Detroit’s second timeout. He hit receiver Marvin Jones Jr. for a short pass that Jones turned into 22 yards, then called Detroit’s third timeout.

Detroit had gotten into easy field goal range so quickly, it ran one more play to kill a few seconds off the clock. Eight seconds left now. Detroit kicked a 43-yard field goal, and that was that. Well, that and the Colts’ laughable attempt at a final kickoff return, which featured no less than three forward laterals before ending with an illegal forward pass from the end zone for a safety and the final score.

After the game I asked Pagano why he defended Detroit’s final possession the way he chose to defend it. Before sandwiching “I’m not going to make any excuses” around the following excuses — “We’re down to bare nothings,” he said. “You have Cro (cornerback Antonio Cromartie) out there who played every snap, you’ve got (Rashaan) Melvin out there who was on one other side” — he answered it like so:

“We tried to do what we thought gave those guys the best chance to succeed in that scenario,” he said. “I’ve done that a bunch of times and I’ve seen it work a bunch of times when they dump it to the (running) back and you tackle them and get them on the ground and it’s a 5-yard gain and they call a timeout and you have second-and-5.”

Sounds good, in a coaching seminar. In this stadium, on this day, with this Colts defense being unable to tackle that Lions offense? It sounds bad. It sounds scared. It sounds passive, not aggressive.

It sounds like the first loss of what could be a long season.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter:@GreggDoyelStar or atfacebook.com/gregg.doyel.