The Indianapolis Colts have managed to do the impossible over the last 20 years. They became one of the NFL’s marquee teams. Granted, a lot of that was due to the efforts of a particular quarterback, but even when he left, the Colts found another quarterback, and then when HE left, the Colts are still a presence and a good team which has been consistent and reliable for 10 or 11 wins a season. And I’m sure most of the people reading this also have some kind of passing familiarity with the Baltimore Colts, a storied NFL team that carried the Colts name before they moved to Indianapolis. But you clicked on this article because you’re wondering how the Colts’ stories in Baltimore and Indianapolis tie together. (And no, I’m not implying that they’re different teams. They’re the very same.) Well, the Colts are considerably younger than most people seem to assume they are, but they have one of those wild, crazy old school histories.
Wikipedia is telling me the history of the Indianapolis Colts can be traced way the hell back to 1913, when they were formed as an APFA team called the Dayton Triangles. After doing the thing there for a little bit of time, they moved over to New York City and became the Brooklyn Dodgers. Later they merged with the Boston Yanks, which effectively cancelled them. Then the Miami Seahawks of the AAFC folded, which led to them being replaced by a new team in Baltimore which was given the Colts name. They were dissolved for financial reasons in 1951, and in the meantime, the Boston Yanks also folded and the owner of the Yanks was given a new team the next season called the New York Bulldogs. Their name was changed a year later, then they were cancelled, and still later afterward, they were replaced by the Dallas Texans, and the Texans later became a strict road team without a proper place to play football and they were just cancelled and don’t ask me to elaborate or explain any of this shit because Wikipedia and because team disambiguations are fucking stupid and no I haven’t the foggiest fucking clue of what any of this has to do with anything.
And oh look, now Wikipedia is telling me that everything I just wrote in that last paragraph meant jack and shit because the NFL doesn’t consider the Colts a continuation of the line started by the Triangles. Which makes perfect sense because THEY BARELY EVEN FUCKING TOUCHED FUCKING BALTIMORE ANYWAY! Yes, the Baltimore Colts of 1953, the team that still exists today in Indianapolis, was an expansion team. Which means everything I just wrote is fucking pointless. Or at least the NFL considers it one, which is bullshit because the Colts started in the AAFC in 1947. They finished the season with a record of 2-11-1, showed significant improvement the next season by posting a 7-8 record which tied the Buffalo Bills for the division title, and went 1-11 a year after that. Back then, the Colts featured a certain starting quarterback named YA Tittle. When the AAFC merged into the NFL in 1950, the Colts became one of the survivors, even though there was considerable favor for the Bills over them. Either it wasn’t a good move or the Colts were never going to be given a fair shake by the NFL, because the team was dissolved after one year for going 1-11 again. But the fans had taken a shine to them, and the team’s marching band and fan club were up and running even though they didn’t have a team to rally behind. So two seasons later, NFL commissioner Bert Bell challenged the city of Baltimore to buy up 15,000 season ticket packages within six weeks to get a new NFL team. Baltimore reached the quota in a month and three days. So now THIS is where all that Dayton Triangles bullshit comes into play. The league sold their rights to Baltimore and the city got to keep the Colts name and the Triangles colors of blue and white. THIS is the team we know and love.
The Baltimore Colts-as-we-know-them first took the field in 1953. At least three-fourths of the information offered in this Wikipedia paragraph is just about the various names given to their stadium and some information about it. Not offbeat, relevant information, either – just run-of-the-mill stuff. After reading it three times, I was finally able to cull the information about the Colts going 3-9 in that first season. In 1956, the team faced a serious setback when its starting quarterback, George Shaw, was injured. At the time, the immediate backup was an unproven fellow by the name of John Constantine Unitas. The only professional football action Unitas had ever seen to that point was a mopup appearance against the Lions in the second game of that very season. Unitas had thrown all of two passes. He completed one. Which didn’t count because it was an interception. But Unitas took that ball and he… Threw an interception which got returned for a touchdown! Then he botched a handoff which was fumbled and recovered by the other team! The Colts lost 58-27. But fortunately, Unitas bounced back quickly and got his game sorted out. In the remaining eight games of the season, he threw nine touchdowns, set a rookie record by completing 55.6 percent of his passes, and won half the remaining games. Unitas was given the job full time and in his first full season in 1957, he led the league in passing yards and touchdowns while the Colts posted their first winning record in history, 7-5.
In 1958, Unitas permanently stamped the league forever. He threw for 2007 yards and 19 touchdowns as the Colts won the Western Conference title. In the NFL Championship, Baltimore faced the New York Giants. It was the Giants who drew first blood with an early field goal, but Unitas, along with an array of powerful teammates like Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore, forgot about that. Baltimore put two touchdowns on the board and took a 14-3 lead to halftime. After the half, the Giants made an incredible goal line stand and finally got their struggling offense into gear. They drove 95 yards for a touchdown of their own, and later followed it with another touchdown from Frank Gifford. With less than two minutes left in the game, Unitas scrambled the Colts and managed to tie the game at 17 with a field goal as time ran out. This led to the first overtime in NFL history. When the Colts got the ball at the Giants’ 20, Unitas drove them to the one, where Alan Ameche ran for the game-winning touchdown. The title was Baltimore’s, and with 45 million people watching the game on television, football finally had a place among everyday conversation. In the 1959 season, Unitas worked his magic again, winning the league MVP as he led the league in passing yards, touchdowns, and completions. He also beat the Giants in the NFL Championship again, although with a 31-16 final, it wasn’t quite so dramatic that time.
The next few seasons saw the Colts fall out of championship contention. In 1963, head coach Weeb Ewbank left the team and was replaced by a young Don Shula. In Shula’s second season, the Colts posted a 12-2 record and returned to the NFL Championship, but got plastered 27-0 by the Cleveland Browns. The following season, they were playing a playoff game against the Packers and leading 10-7 with two minutes left. The Packers kicked a field goal which appeared to miss, but the referee said it was good, and the Packers won in overtime. That error necessitated a couple of tweaks in the rules: From that point on, the uprights would be 10 feet higher, and there would be two referees judging the field goals rather than just one. Generally, though, the Colts were a dominant team and a marquee team. And in 1968, they were more than even that; they were nigh unstoppable. They were so good that the injury of Unitas early in the season did nothing to stop them; they proved to be just as good with backup Earl Morrall, a 12-year journeyman who had played for four teams. Morrall led the league in passer rating with 93.2, and the Colts were second in the league in points scored. Morrall was good enough to keep the starting job for the remainder of the year even after Unitas was healthy. The Colts finished with the league’s best record, a 13-1 standout with the sole blemish being against the Browns. In the NFL Championship, the Colts avenged their loss against the Browns, hammering them 34-0. Season over!
Well, except this year it really wasn’t. The NFL had managed to get into a fight with the upstart AFL. The AFL was trying to bait them into a final winner-takes-all contest between the league champions, and since their assault on the NFL was working, the NFL finally caved two years before to defend its reputation. And in those previous two contests, the Green Bay Packers HAD defended the NFL’s reputation, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs and the Oakland Raiders respectively. But they didn’t get that far this time, so now it was the Colts’ turn, and the AFL “representative” (read: sacrificial lamb) this year was the New York Jets. The Packers of the previous two seasons were the famed Lombardi teams, but the Colts were heads and shoulders above even them. They were favored by the biggest line in history at the time. Hell, it still IS the biggest line in history. And ALL the media talked about was how bad the Jets were gonna get stomped. New York’s quarterback, Joe Namath, fed up with the chatter, made an off-the-cuff statement which will be chiseled on his grave: “We’re going to win the game. I guarantee it.” Well, that caused all manner of monacles to fall and break in wine glasses, and one sportswriter even said he would tell everyone what he thought of Namath on Sunday, AFTER he had played his first professional football game. Unfortunately, the Jets DID have a couple of things going for them: One was their head coach, who happened to be Baltimore’s old friend Weeb Ewbank. Another was the fact that AFL teams didn’t follow each other. They experimented and did new things in order to get an edge on each other. Hell, after what the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills had thrown at him, the Colts defense seemed remedial to Namath. When the Jets reviewed tape, the players asked the coaches to stop showing them reels because they feared getting overconfident and letting their guard down. (Namath DID have one notable champion in Vince Lombardi, though, who said Namath could win.) When the game started, everyone was surprised to see that it was the Colts who proved to be overmatched. The first quarter was played to a stalemate, but it was the Jets who led 7-0 at halftime and 13-0 when the fourth quarter started. With four minutes left in the third quarter, Shula finally yanked the stalling Morrall and put Unitas in. Unitas didn’t help very much. He managed to get the Colts on the board, but by the time he did, there were three minutes and 15 seconds left in the game, and the Jets had booted their third field goal just a minute before, so the score was 16-7. That was the final score. It was a monumental upset. History took its course with it, and common fan perception likes to say the AFL was legitimized then and there. That claim, however, is disputed by football historians and insiders who lived through it. When it happened, it was seen as merely that: A monumental, once-in-a-lifetime upset that would never happen again. It was written off as a strong upstart knocking down an insane favorite that was overconfident to the point of being off its game. It wasn’t until a year later, when the underdog Chiefs of the AFL knocked off the NFL’s favored Minnesota Vikings, that the AFL truly pulled even.
Unitas was a great player, though, and the Colts were a great team. While they lost Super Bowl III, they got their chance again a couple of years later. In the 1970 season, the Colts got a new coach, Don McCafferty. The team spent the entire season rocking and stomping over the rest of the NFL that year, posting an 11-2-1 record in the newly-merged league. In the playoffs, they beat the Cincinnati Bengals handily, then defeated the Raiders in the first-ever AFC Championship. In Super Bowl V, the Colts met the Dallas Cowboys. In one of the worst, sloppiest, ugliest Super Bowls ever played, the Colts got the Super Bowl the Jets denied to them a few years earlier when they kicked a field goal with five seconds left to win 16-13. They made a return trip to the AFC Championship the next season, but lost to the Dolphins. Unfortunately, the team’s very soul, Johnny Unitas, was finally aging out of the sport. In 1972, all he managed to get out of the Colts was a measly 5-9 record. Unitas was effectively finished and everyone knew it. He wasn’t ready to walk away just yet, though, so the team ended up trading him to the San Diego Chargers. Unitas was a classic stoic tough, though, and he didn’t exactly jibe with either the Chargers OR the most beautiful city in the country. He played five games in San Diego, clashing with the staff, advising backup Dan Fouts in ways which went against what they were telling him, and saying he missed Baltimore and its awesome thundershowers. (I can relate to that last one.) Most importantly, though, he went 1-4 in five starts and was replaced by Fouts. Word is out on whose advice Fouts listened to, but he went on to one of the great quarterbacking careers of his own. Unitas, meanwhile, bolted back to Baltimore and his beloved thundershowers and officially called it a career during the 1974 preseason.
The Colts tried picking up the pieces of what they had been before by installing their new quarterback, Bert Jones! While Jones is just a footnote, he deserves to be known as a little bit more than that, because he was actually REALLY good. I think it was Bill Belichick who said he was one of the best pure passers in the history of the league. Ernie Accorsi, one of the NFL’s great general managers, said that Jones might be the greatest ever had he played under different circumstances. And John Riggins said Jones was the toughest competitor he had ever seen. When Jones was good, he was dominant. He was one of only three quarterbacks to post a passer rating of over 100 during the entire decade. (The other two were Roger Staubach and Ken Stabler.) In 1976, Jones threw for 24 touchdowns, 3104 yards, and that 102.5 passer rating. He was given the league MVP that year. Jones led the Colts to three straight playoff appearances. They lost all three in the first round, but for all intents and purposes, the Colts looked poised to not miss any steps with Unitas gone. After 1977, though… The injury bug bit Jones. The Colts were living and dying by Jones by this time – Jones took the team to another level when he was there, but when he was hurt, they barely knew what a football looked like. Jones tried to stick it out until he was healthy, but in 1982, he decided that time was never going to come and listened to his body.
By 1981, the Colts were an irrelevant football team. They were one of the worst teams the league had ever seen, giving up a record 533 points on defense and registering a pathetic 13 sacks TOTAL. There were only 12 times through the whole season when they were forced to return a punt. They followed up THAT epic performance by not winning a single game the following season. Yeah, I know: You thought the Detroit Lions were the first team to go winless in a 16-game season? Well yeah, they were. But the 1982 season was the Strike season, so instead of going 0-16, the Colts posted a “better” 0-8-1. That won them the first overall draft pick in the 1983 Draft! The consensus first overall pick that year was a certain John Elway! And what happened? Well, Elway was a fucking spectacular athlete who had been a two-sport star and was also being courted by the New York Yankees. And he did NOT want to play for the Colts. He used his talent as a baseball prospect as leverage to force a trade to the Broncos, where he went on to an iconic career. The Colts got the rights to a first round pick in 1984, which they used on offensive lineman Ron Solt. Solt, by the way, had a solid career which culminated in an All-Star selection in 1987. He also got into a contract dispute which got him traded to the Eagles in 1988, and was suspended in 1990 for steroid use.
As if things couldn’t get any worse for the Colts, NOW it was time for them to play the fun game of football politics. See, the Colts had gotten to the point where they had been so bad for so long that fans weren’t coming out for games the way they used to. And by 1984, the relationship between the team and the city had deteriorated. Even so, the city did ask the Maryland State Legislature for a fuckton of money to get the Colts’ stadium renovated. You already knew that was coming, didn’t you? Yeah, the Colts wanted $15 million, only half of which would go to stadium upkeep. And the legislature didn’t get around to approving it until the following spring. What the city of Baltimore offered was a generous $15 million loan at 6.5 percent interest, but that was at the guarantee of 43,000 tickets per game sold for six years. The team owner, Robert Irsay, blew steam at Baltimore – he kept giving the fans what they wanted to hear, which was that his big wish was to stay. He also kept talking to other cities in secret. Naturally, word got out about those secret meetings, which pissed off Baltimore. When Irsay visited Indianapolis and saw the city building a nice new stadium for a football team, he was visibly moved. And the situation in Baltimore finally reached its breaking point when one of the city chambers gave the city the right to seize the team by right of eminent domain. Colts counsel Michael Chernoff later said, “They not only threw down the gauntlet, but they put a gun to his head and cocked it and asked ‘Want to see if it’s loaded?’ They forced him to make a decision that day.” Indianapolis was offering a $12.5 million loan, a $4 million training complex, and use of the brand new Hoosier Dome. Irsay agreed to the deal VERY quickly, and at 2 AM the day the team was due to be seized, 15 Mayflower moving trucks pulled up to the Colts stadium. Workers loaded them up with everything the team had. Each truck took a different route out of Baltimore and was escorted by state police to Indianapolis upon entering the Indiana borders. By 10 AM that day, everything was gone. There was nothing for Baltimore to seize, and the team was now Indy’s problem. Don’t feel too bad for Baltimore, though. Really, don’t. It took a decade and a half, but they got a new team, the Ravens, who are a two-time champion. If you should feel bad for anyone, it’s Cleveland, because it was THEIR team that moved to become the Baltimore Ravens.
Unfortunately, the move didn’t do anything for the Colts on the field. The team posted a 4-12 record for its first season in Indianapolis. In the following couple of seasons, the coach was replaced two or three times, and in 1986, the Colts ran the very real risk of becoming the first team to ever finish 0-16. They started 0-13 before winning their last three games. In 1987, the Colts did one of those three-team trades with the Bills and the Los Angeles Rams, and it netted them running back Eric Dickerson. They started to win more consistently with Dickerson in the backfield, finished 9-6 that year, which was good for the division title and their first playoff appearance in Indianapolis. In the playoffs, they were beat 38-21 by the Browns, but it was a good sign overall. Unfortunately, the team didn’t really have anything to build on, so while they did go 9-7 the next season, they also lost the division to the Bills. Indeed, the Colts started to fall in a very clean way: After that, they went 8-8, then 7-9. Those are, of course, records that come across as fairly respectable, but in 1991, they went all the way and posted a 1-15 record.
The Colts rebounded in 1992 and posted a 9-7 record, but that came with a weird – and very telling – little caveat: The team had only rushed for 1102 yards during the season. Total. That was the lowest output of any and all teams in the NFL for the ENTIRE DECADE. Dickerson had departed the year before, so he wasn’t around to improve the situation. But it wasn’t until the team went 4-12 in 1994 that they found a new keystone. They drafted running back Marshall Faulk first overall, and with him, they began a steady improvement which ran through the next few seasons. Unfortunately, they also fell back to a 3-13 record in 1997, which looked like another downturn in another regular up and down team history. But that also gave the Colts the right to the first overall pick of the 1998 Draft, and the 1998 Draft had a pair of hotshot quarterbacks who were prognosticated to be game-changers who would shift the balance of power to the teams that picked them. Those quarterbacks were Tennessee’s Peyton Manning and Washington State’s Ryan Leaf. Manning was the son of an NFL quarterback, Archie Manning, and he had been groomed from his infancy to be a marvel of technical quarterbacking. Leaf was the more powerful quarterback who had the more practical upside. The Colts did some close-up examining of the two of them, and sort of surprised people when they decided their man would be Manning.
Manning proved to be a wise choice. He was THE wise choice, and it’s not just because Ryan Leaf imploded quickly and turned into one of the great busts in history. Manning devoured tape and practiced to prepare for every possible gameday situation. In a way, it was serendipitous that the Colts would end up with him; Johnny Unitas had been the prototype of the modern quarterback, the first of his kind that every quarterback since was based on. Manning would prove to be the position’s ultimate evolution. Manning even developed to such an extent that he was able to call a significant number of his own plays, although he didn’t do that to the extent that quarterbacks did way back in the old days. But that took a year of rookie yips. He did throw for 3739 yards and 26 touchdowns, but the Colts still repeated their 3-13 record from the year before. After that, though, those two numbers turned around. The Colts went 13-3 and went to the playoffs, but lost to the Titans.
Still though, the team had instantly gone marquee. Manning alone made them into a force, and with talent like Marvin Harrison and Edgerrin James, they were difficult to stop. To beat the Colts, teams had to outscore them, but that was difficult. At least in the regular season. The playoffs are a different beast, so when Peyton Manning spent his first several years in the league losing playoff games, he picked up the dreaded “choker” label. But the problem was more on the team’s defense than anything. They were like a screen door on a submarine, even after Tony Dungy was hired to coach in 2002. And they also didn’t look as good as they were because Manning’s spiritual rival, Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, had fallen into a comfortable situation and basically started out winning Super Bowls. Manning and Brady developed a great rivalry, and Colts/Patriots games became must-watch football. But even after Manning finally started winning in the playoffs, he still had trouble with the Patriots, and the road to the Super Bowl always went through New England. They got a break in 2005, when they had to play against the Steelers instead. But the Steelers took a 14-3 lead to halftime, and it took a roaring 15-point fourth quarter for them to get into the game. And even then, the Colts got a terrible break. Late in the game, Pittsburgh was in the red zone, about to score a touchdown that probably would have put the game away. But their running back, Jerome Bettis, fumbled the ball near the endzone and Indy’s Nick Harper recovered it. Harper had gotten around everyone too and looked in the clear when Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger made a desperation dive at him and caught his shoe. The Colts had the ball, and Manning did get them down the field and into position with time running out to tie the game with a field goal. But Indy’s normally sure-footed kicker, Mike Vanderjagt, hooked the kick REALLY wide to the right. The Colts lost, 21-18.
In 2006, things finally broke the Colts’ way. The team went 12-4, but they ended up in the Wild Card Game. They stomped the Chiefs, 28-3. Then they posted a 15-6 victory against the Ravens. And in the Conference Championship, who else could they play against but the Patriots? The Patriots were up 21-6 at halftime, but after that was Manning Time! The Colts made a furious comeback, posting 15 points in the third quarter and 17 in the fourth while the Patriots couldn’t get their momentum back, and the Colts finally walked off with a 38-34 victory over their nemesis. Compared to THAT, the Super Bowl was never going to be anything but a bore, and it was made worse by the shape the NFC was in. In the older conference, the Chicago Bears hit an early peak at a time when the conference had a power void. Even the fans in Chicago knew it was Peyton Manning’s year, and they took it with a resigned acceptance. While Chicago’s star kick returner Devin Hester ran the opening kickoff for a touchdown and you can never say the Bears gave up, the Colts still walked off with a painless 29-17 victory. It was one of the least memorable Super Bowls ever played, and the only historical footnote worth mentioning is the fact that it was the first Super Bowl to pit two black coaches – Dungy and Chicago’s Lovie Smith – against each other.
The Colts got another shot in 2009, returning to the Super Bowl but losing to the Saints after Peyton Manning threw a pick-six to Tracy Porter when trying to score a touchdown that would have put the Colts back on top. That was sort of an unofficial close to the era. Yes, the team was still competitive and fun to watch, but they weren’t quite a contender anymore. The always-suspect defense started getting just plain bad, and when Manning got hurt in 2011, the team could only muster enough firepower with Curtis Painter, Dan Orlovsky, and Kerry Collins to win two games. Worse was that Manning had signed a new contract extension just before the season, and the league was also faced with a lockout from March to July that prevented Manning from using the team’s training room to recover. The Colts decided to let him go after the 2011 season because they decided it was time to try a rebuilding project. It was just their luck that in that very draft, they happened to get access to Andrew Luck, another generational quarterback talent! Yes, he did turn the Colts into a good team again, but by the time he came along, the team had forgotten how to, you know, build. They let Luck carry everything without doing anything to patch the team’s numerous holes. And someone had overlooked the fact that, unlike Manning, Luck wasn’t a football savant – he had outside curiosities that he wanted to explore before football took enough of a toll on him that he’d never be able to do anything again or appreciate what he COULD do. Although he never did anything to disrespect the team or the city, Luck saw the writing on the wall after the 2018 season and decided to take his money and his still-capable body and walk away from football. The Colts haven’t been nothing without him, but they ain’t good either.
The Indianapolis Colts have retired the numbers of Peyton Manning, Johnny Unitas, Buddy Young, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan, Jim Parker, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti. As I pointed out earlier, Unitas was the prototype model of the modern quarterback. Manning was what it turned into. Young was the first black executive ever hired by the league, but he was only a Colt from 1953 to 1955. Moore made seven Pro Bowls and played for two champions in Baltimore. He was a running back and a wide receiver, and he rushed for 5174 yards and received for 6039. Art Donovan played from 1953 to 1961, making five Pro Bowls. Parker anchored the offensive line from 1957 to 1967. Berry was a split end who played in six Pro Bowls and led the league in receiving yards and receptions three times each and receiving touchdowns twice. And Marchetti played defensive end and offensive tackle in a career in which he made 11 Pro Bowls. Most of these guys have far more honors to them than just Pro Bowls, but I stuck with Pro Bowls because they’re an honor that everyone is aware of. They’re the most visible. The Colts make a strong case for having one of the greatest all-time teams in the history of the NFL. And Edgerrin James, Marshall Faulk, and Marvin Harrison haven’t yet received this honor by the team for whatever reason. Andrew Luck might deserve it too.
That list of numbers, though, also highlights one of the major issues with this team: Every player honored with a retired number – with the exception of Peyton Manning – played for Baltimore. And not JUST Baltimore, but Baltimore EXCLUSIVELY. Hell, of all of them, Unitas is the only player on that list who made it into the 70s. No one else played for Baltimore past 1967. And THAT issue serves to highlight a much bigger issue: The Indianapolis Colts are still stuck to their identity in Baltimore. Yes, yes, I know: The Cleveland Browns. But Browns fans have good reason to miss the first edition of their team. The current Browns only seem to be getting themselves together in the last couple of years. Until then, they were a laughingstock. They fluked into two or three winning seasons and only made it to the playoffs once while they watched their inherited team win two Super Bowls in their new home. Which is, you know, BALTIMORE! Yeah, the Baltimore Colts may be the NFL’s closest parallel to the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers moved out of Brooklyn in 1957 and managed to create an entirely new identity as the Los Angeles Dodgers. They’re a marquee team in baseball and have had a ton of success in Los Angeles, and the Dodgers were REPLACED full out by the New York Mets. And say what you will about the Mets, but they have a few generations of fans and, with five Pennants and two World Series titles under their belt, have been the most successful expansion team in baseball. But there are STILL rumors – mostly fan-fueled – that keep finding traction about this or that rich asshole planning to buy the Dodgers and move them back to their “real” home. Baltimore and the Colts are much the same way. Baltimore stole the Browns from Cleveland and turned them into a whole new team, the Ravens, and the Ravens have won two Super Bowls. And the Indianapolis Colts have a generation of fans locked down in Indianapolis. They had two bona fide legends in Marshall Faulk and Peyton Manning. They’ve won the Super Bowl. Most importantly, THEY’VE BEEN INDIANAPOLIS’S TEAM LONGER THAN THEY’VE BEEN BALTIMORE’S. Yet, a certain breed of fan clings to the idea that the Colts are the only true football team of Baltimore. Old players for the Colts – including Johnny Unitas – felt betrayed and refuse to have anything to do with the team. To the last, they all became Ravens fans. That can be understandable; they were people in the Baltimore community and identified as Baltimoreans rather than Colts. But pundits and other old school people who had no stakes in either the team or the city? Come on!
The Indianapolis Colts are one of those teams that seems to perfectly encapsulate everything about football. They’re also the final NFL team I had to write about, and while there are probably a handful of teams which would have been better to end my NFL series on, that’s all there are: A handful.
Pros
Always seem to luck their way into generational quarterbacks; always seem to be in must-watch football games these days; have a real history in both of the cities they’ve lived in; seem to have stability; have somehow managed to stay likable through a lot of things that would turn the entire NFL fanbase against them
Cons
Uniform schematics are boring and won’t change because everyone calls them “classic;” old fans never shut the fuck up about them leaving Baltimore; two of their generational talent quarterbacks were chased out of football early; team’s old guard from Baltimore won’t even acknowledge them
Should you be a fan?
Definitely. They may be the only nationally popular team that isn’t hated by the vast majority of NFL fans. Even fans of rival teams seem to like and respect them to some point.
everyteamever 