My observations on the commentary, which was brought to our attention by KingRichard, here.

On the author's portrayal of Robert Nixon and his personal veracity: I find it interesting that the author seems to make the claim that the detectives in the case are firmly sold on Nixon's story, which in the author's words in this commentary, are deemed "credible and [making] sense."  Now, ignoring Nixon's own history, as well as the ballistics and injury reports, he can certainly be both credible and wrong.  And certainly, detectives do not prosecute; yet the less-than-artful juxtaposition somehow implies that they're on Nixon's side.  In my observation, the police are not given to publicly siding with witnesses, especially in cases which have not been yet resolved.

On Marvin's gun(s): It is clear beyond crystal that the author has a strong problem with guns, and America's laws that relate to them.  The FN Five-seveN is not a banned weapon, is commercially available, the cartridges do not pierce armour; all despite the author's claim of it being "a military gun that only seeped into the civilian market because American gun laws are so lax."  Furthermore, the "sister weapon" P90, which apparently "looks like something out of Halo 3," is not a banned weapon either, and is available for civilian application.  Now, I'm not a gun person in the least (in fact, I don't care for them at all), but this is an obvious indication that the author has a bone to pick in the first place.

Dwight Dixon: This is where I began to get an angry, emotional reaction. Straight from the horse's ass: "If I'd had more space, I would have tried to humanize Dixon a little more."  My question: are you fucking kidding me?  No, I mean really; are you seriously fucking kidding me, or are you stupid enough to want to paint this man in the light of anything other than a career criminal?  This is THE be-all, end-all statement that strips away whatever minuscule shred of credibility this story might have had.

Marvin's statement: Okay.  Why exactly would Marvin make statements to the police without the approval of his lawyer?  Well, in my experience, one's lips are fairly loose (much like author's mother, I'm sure--HEYY-O!!) when you're innocent of that which you're being accused.  If someone accuses me of any kind of wrong doing, much less killing a guy, you'd best believe I'm going to stand up for myself.

Marvin's bar: I don't even see how this is relevant in any way.

It would be a different story, perhaps, were this article penned during a criminal trial of any kind; that it wasn't, I believe, is the most glaring evidence that it's a hack-job hit piece, plain and simple.  

My hypothesis for the entire reason this article exists can be described thusly: this guy is a Culture Nazi.  Those of you familiar with mainstream news media should know of these sort of people, and these sort of tactics well.  There's something, some part of American culture that they feel, deeply and with conviction, is Just Not Right.  They use vehicles such as Marvin's situation here to drive their agenda.  Prior to this <sarcasm>wonderful</sarcasm> article, the author wrote a book on fast-food culture, draped in the cloth of an examination of competitive eating.  This piece's motivation, I believe, centers around a desire to abolish gun culture and a destruction of the hero-athlete.  The former is clear by the author's own words, which I've already outlined above.  The latter is more interesting and less obvious.  By all appearances, this man is trying to passively destroy Marvin Harrison, much in the same way others have tried to destroy other high-profile professional athletes.  This doesn't actually have all that much to do with their crimes once you dig past the surface, and the reason I allege this is because that is the one thing virtually all these articles, novels, and documentaries have in common; that they're trying to destroy the reputations of wealthy, successful, influential athletes; again, irrespective of their actual crimes or transgressions.  How colourful a feather in the cap to take down a first-ballot hall-of-famer before he even receives his nomination.  Why, if you wrote that book, you could even get rich off it.

I think the biggest surprise to me of the entire media shitstorm that has grown around the fallout of the Jets game in week 16 is the lack of understanding of the Colts' organizational philosophy.  Perhaps that's partly the result of a similar lack of understanding of what makes the Colts different from the overwhelming majority of teams in the NFL.

Organizational philosophy in the corporate world is the framework and underlying identity of a business.  It defines the priorities and methods by which goals are accomplished, and benchmarks attained.  It informs the decision-making process from top to bottom, the recruitment of talent, and the shared values of each member of said organization.  It defines standards.  A clear and well-defined, consistent organizational philosophy is often the delineation between excellent organizations and the muddled, under-performing ones.  Some of the underlying theories can be found in the works of luminaries such as Aristotle and Niccolo Machiavelli, even in Plato's Republic.

Since becoming a Colts fan (essentially Manning's first year; I was raised on the Bears, although baseball was always my first love), I've considered us fortunate to have executives who rebuilt the Indianapolis Colts enterprise around a strong organizational philosophy, which we fans have come to know as The System.  When I talk about The System to friends and acquaintances, I sometimes catch myself speaking about it almost like it's gospel.  I've noticed others in the blogosphere feel the same.  Without it, we would not have the team we have right now, or at any point in the last decade; in a league designed to make the good teams bad and the bad teams good, we've defied that to produce the winning-est team in modern NFL history.  Without it, we would not have the best scouting department in professional football; we draft effective, intelligent, high-character young men and mold them into pillars of community.  Without it, we would not have Peyton Manning.  Our philosophy has produced a historically significant, excellent team.  We have done this by staunchly adhering to the things our organization believes in, often bucking the so-called conventional wisdom: Manning over Ryan Leaf, Edgerrin James over Ricky Williams, undrafted starters littering the field on Sundays, spurning free agency, favoring technique over size... the list goes on.  We value things that work within our system; anything else is chaff on the wheat.  And on, and on.

We have known, for example, since at least 2005 (if you'll recall, that was Jim Sorgi's personal best season) that health was paramount once the post-season was a guarantee.  Individual benchmarks are nice, and we try to squeeze them in if possible as a reward to the players who are performing at the All-Pro level, but we're not going to keep pounding the rock with Joseph Addai next week so he can gain the 172 yards he needs for his third 1,000 yard season.  As a coach, you'd have to be wildly incompetent to gamble the health of your players by chasing phantoms.  And really, that's what this whole 16-0 thing really is: a mythological beast.

Was there any better proof than the '07 Patriots that an undefeated regular season is completely meaningless?  There are even fewer guarantees in the post-season than in the regular season, and by the time the Superbowl rolled around, the Pats' o-line was swiss cheese in the teeth of the Giants' pass-rush.  One of the best offensive lines in football couldn't keep Tom Brady off the turf.  That's the conclusion I drew, and that's the conclusion Bill Polian drew: nobody in the world will give one single solitary fuck that you went undefeated all the way until the Superbowl.  Just today, intrepid "blogger" Paul Kuharsky (I actually like the guy, but the idea that ESPN employs bloggers is ridiculous) linked a video of Tedy Bruschi slamming us for calling off the troops.  Hey Tedy, guess what?  YOU DIDN'T GET THE JOB DONE, YOU BRAINLESS FUCK!  And then Mark Schlereth has the gall to talk about our constant 12-win seasons with only one ring to show for it.  Jesus.  Again, as people who actually know what the hell they're talking about will tell you, the reason we don't have more rings is because we didn't have the right people healthy when we needed to.  Like playing our starters in the game would've helped that cause.  Meanwhile, the '72 Dolphins grow more irrelevant by the year.  If I met Mercury Morris today, I'd humor him with an, "Oh, you won seventeen games?  All in the same season?  Who's a special boy!"  Then I'd pat him on his addled head; the poor dear doesn't realize that it's been done in the NFL since.  By a team that, if I remember correctly, Tedy Bruschi was on.

And that, my friends, is the larger point: it's an arbitrary number.  Hypothetically, were we to go 19-0 this year, how is that more or less impressive than when the league inevitably takes on an eighteen-game regular season, and some team wins out through to their first playoff game?  Do we, in that little imaginary world, then have to go 21-0 to prove we're the top team in history?  Is the team that wins 21 in a season better than the team that wins 19?  If, again hypothetically, we won week 16 and 17, and then won our divisional round game, we'd have done what the '72 Dolphins did; it just happens they were given a trophy at the end.  And there can't possibly be a single sane person in the world who thinks that team would win half the games against one of today's teams, not even the Rams.  To me, the 23 straight regular season wins and 117 wins on the decade are, in fact, more impressive and goal-worthy records.  Why?  There's a very real chance they may never be broken.  As we've seen over the last few years, teams are getting closer and closer to undefeated seasons with some frequency (though admittedly we were a few of those teams).  In fact, with the wisdom of hindsight, I'm actually relieved we didn't go all-out for the undefeated season.

In a very real way, the Patriots were the victims of their own hubris.  They came out with this aim of humiliating every opponent they could, at every available opportunity, only to be brought low by an "inferior" team; a team which, by the way, Tom Brady publicly insulted at the press conference.  Passing on fourth down with monumental leads; seriously, how less sportsmanlike could you possibly be?  I always got the feeling that Bill Belichik wanted to stick it to every other team in the league in the wake of Spygate.  Do you remember your Greek mythology?  That's like Achilles killing Hector for revenge, then stripping him naked and dragging him behind his chariot; we all know what eventually happened to Achilles (hint: it has to do with him being killed in the back of the ankle).  There's a reason hubris is a recurring theme in ancient mythology and scripture: when the mighty revel in their might, they're ripe for defeat.  The Saints--just this year!--lost the first game after they announced that they were going to strive for the "perfect" season.  Pride goeth before the fall.  Josh McDaniels, offensive coordinator of the 2007 Patriots and current head coach of the Broncos, taunted the Chargers' linebackers during on-field warm-ups, allegedly telling them, "We own you!"  The Broncos were then drawn and quartered to the tune of 32-3, at Denver; this was the Broncos' fourth straight loss, and a mere five weeks after defeating his mentor, Belichik, itself a game which culminated in an embarrassing, nearly orgasmic display of repeated fist-pumping by McDaniels on the field just seconds after the clock ticked to zero.  Icarus tried to fly that high once, also.

Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, there's a disconnect between what a sports fan wants to see and what's actually good for the team.  This is a fact that can, if you really think about it, be traced directly back to the Roman empire's Colosseum.  We as football fans want to see our warriors go to war.  We want the blood of the enemy on their uniforms.  We want to see massive, one-sided blowouts.  We want to see things that are completely unrealistic in the current landscape of the National Football League.

Bill Polian knows this.  He speaks frequently about the "bubble" that exists around the organization; the team and front office are inside that bubble, and everyone else is on the outside.  This isn't some declaration of isolationism, it's a stark truth that very, very few people ever seem to realize.  This fact is affirmed every time some idiot sports writer scribbles out his rough draft (almost assuredly in crayon), often practically libeling a team or individual, or a situation about which he knows nothing.  We who read this blog regularly know these people well: they are called out constantly, and rightly so, by BigBlueShoe, Shake (also Bake), et al.  They get their stupid little articles wrong because they're bombastic, reactionary, and most of all simply want to take a shit on a team for losing a game.  It seems to me that we fans also forget at times that we're privy to even less in the way of the decision-making process of our coaches and our general manager (who I guess is now just our team president?).  Which makes it nothing more than idle speculation in most cases.

Before I delve further into this subject, it may be salient to note that I am not what you'd call a "company man."  I've been an iconoclast quite literally my entire life.  In fact, I sometimes jokingly refer to myself as being counter-counter-culture, because I'm contrarian of the contrarians.  So this is not an issue of simply putting all my faith into the pic-a-nic basket of Bill Polian; it's an issue of happening to agree very resolutely with this team's organizational philosophy.  That bit of Peter King-esque, semi-biographical quasi-nonsense out of the way, back to the issues.

I'm not entirely sure how many of you took notice this past draft, but the only person to my knowledge that predicted the first round anywhere near 100% accurately was our own Bill Polian.  Given the the nearly chaotic unpredictability of that first round, it's a perfect illustration of how downright scary ahead-of-the-game our drafting process is.  That is a result of The System.  This was Polian's quote, belonging also in context of the methodology used to select Donald Brown:

"Interestingly enough, everything went exactly as we thought it would (in the draft’s first round). I think there were only two picks that we didn’t have." 

Again: in an academic sense, what we do in the draft escalates the bell-curve.  We strike gold with a frequency that would indicate we have some kind of gold-sniffing dog.  Yet for whatever delusional reason, we have a small contingent of Colts fans who all but demand Polian address the free agent market.  This is an annual occurrence.  It's an expectation amongst some fans that their team make an attempt to sign whatever free agent they want the most.  Our philosophy is a better idea; thus, that expectation amongst our fans is unfounded.

As Colts fans, we do have some rather silly expectations.  I guess that's what happens when you have the best player in the game lining up under center every week.  I guess that's what happens when you go to the playoffs every year.  You get spoiled.  And make no mistake, we're absolutely spoiled rotten.  Because our team makes it look easy, we lose sight of how difficult it is to win games in the NFL.  Same of winning the division, same of getting into the post-season.  I think we also lose sight of  how difficult it is to stay healthy in the NFL.  

We expect Peyton to go every week because that's what he's always done.  He really is an ironman, and what he's done in that regard is monumentally impressive.  But he's been injured and played hurt; everybody has.  It's a question of the degree to which he's hurt.  Peyton got knocked around a bit in the Jets game (by a Rex Ryan defense, I might add, who were fighting for their playoff lives), and yet we expect him to stay in there, risking injury for no tangible reward.  It's an unrealistic expectation given the circumstances.  We already had starters getting banged-up in that game, Joe Addai being one of them.  You can question whether we can win the Superbowl without Addai; you absolutely cannot question whether we can without Manning.  Think it's being paranoid?  Think it's too much worry, given that anybody can be injured on any play?  Why don't you ask a Bengals fan how it felt to lose Carson Palmer, once they finally were able to make the playoffs.  Why don't you ask a Pats fan how 2008 felt after the pre-ordained Superbowl MVP went down with a destroyed knee.  You think we can win this 2009 Superbowl without The Manning?  I thought so.

We expected our team to lose once our starters began coming out of the game.  People are throwing around accusations of waving the white flag, accusations of forfeit and cowardice.  Why don't you ask Curtis Painter if he strapped his helmet on for the express purpose of going in and losing that game.  Ask Ramon Humber if he decided to simply let Thomas Jones and Shonn Greene run at will.  Say what you will about the benching, but don't  dare accuse the players of throwing in the towel.  Our team didn't quit against the Jets.  The Titans quit against the Patriots.

It's not just the potential of injury to Manning, either.  Think of what we've lost this year already: our #2 receiver, who was primed for a breakout season; our starting SAM linebacker, who was perhaps having the season of his career up until the injury; half of our starting secondary, not including Kelvin Hayden's time in the "ruled out" category; our hall-of-fame kicker, who we don't even know is 100% at the present.  Each of our Pro-Bowl defensive ends have played hurt much of the year.  Given all of that, I can't possibly figure how reaching for "the grail" is more important than being handed the trophy.  It's an impractical and unrealistic expectation, it's very definitely not the right thing to do, yet everybody seems to believe it's a no-brainer to go for it.  Only in the sense of not having a brain if you do try to go for it.  If you leave Manning in to simply hand off the ball, you're still inviting injury to the 'backs and the linemen.  Can we win a Superbowl without Jeff Saturday or Ryan Lilja?  Is it acceptable to risk injury to Kyle DeVan and let Mike Pollack back into the starting lineup?

We expect Bill Polian to "give a crap" what fans think.  Well, here's another truth for you: Big Bill doesn't get paid to give a crap what we think.  He gets paid to build football teams and make both personnel and football decisions.  We have an entire department of people who are paid to give a crap what the fans think, and Polian is probably the one who hired them.  They're all very good at their jobs.  That's right: Bill Polian is so powerful he has a whole team of people crap for him.

Seriously, though, the reality is that Bill does give the aforementioned crap, otherwise he wouldn't do a radio and a television show every week.  But if you think for a second he's going to accede to the whims and wishes of the fanbase regarding football decisions, you're far removed from reality.  (Otherwise, we'd have had to deal with the on-again off-again career of one Ricky Williams.)  It's just another unrealistic expectation.  We're one of the best franchises in all of professional sports; why on earth would we change our philosophy mid-season, especially when the risk-reward analysis of what the fans want doesn't bode well for our post-season success?   

But the debate about this is both worthwhile and necessary.  You should be questioning Caldwell and Polian, and you should be voicing your opinions.  What you should not be, however, is reactionary and incendiary.  You should not be calling into question a man's character by adhering to what the team philosophy is.  You should question whether the goals are important or not, but you should not be a douche about it.

We're going to be in the playoffs, and we're probably going to be healthier than we've been in some time.  Let's see if we can perform according to the standard we've established over the last decade.

I'm not surprised to see the huge, draining display of emotion on this site.  We Colts fans are a passionate bunch, and that's been proven countless times in the Manning era, particularly over this extended stretch of excellence.  It's also very true that we're spoiled beyond belief, to the point that fans of 31 other teams in this league are incredulous at the reaction here.  Oh piss, we're 14-1.  Ask a Pats fan again how it feels to end 16-0 only to be dinged up to the point you can't perform at your peak level (I'm speaking here of the Pats' offensive line, specifically) to win The Big One.

Personally, I felt shitty at the end of the game.  Who wouldn't, after seeing the way our guys looked on the sidelines?  I'll guaran-damn-tee you, though, that feeling would be amplified to a near-suicidal degree if we were to succumb to the same hubris that brought down the 2007 Patriots.  Obviously the worst, this feeling in our collective gut, is that it came on the final home game of the '09 season.  Oh wait, no it didn't!  We're assured to play at least one more game at home.  That's when the real NFL season begins; the only one that really, truly matters.  Isn't that the line we've been fed by the media, and the fan-bases of the Pats and Steelers both?  So if we're going to go 18-1, where would you rather have your one loss?  Which one is more of a gut-punch, or a middle finger, or whatever ridiculous rhetorical sentiment you attach to it?

Here's another reality for you: most all football players play hurt most of the season.  In the modern NFL, the smart teams are the ones that can walk that precarious tightrope of keeping your most irreplaceable players off the IR.  For the most part, we are one of those smart teams, and luckily so.  Wasn't it correctly pointed out by this blog that most of our playoff upsets were more the result of injuries than rust?  As a matter of fact, I believe one or two of those articles were penned by our esteemed blogger-in-chief.  (Shoe, I love ya man, I really do.  But to think you'd get caught up in the Polian-is-against-us bullshit saddens me.)  Here's the extension of the above-mentioned reality: we were playing a Rex Ryan defense today, one of the best in the NFL in addition to being one of the most punishing.  Now, who's to say whether someone like Reggie or Dallas or Joe wasn't dinged a little bit in this game?  It happens in every game, more so at the end of the season; isn't it the wiser decision to beat a strategic retreat when the meaningful battle is one the horizon?  The metaphor is apt: the course of an NFL season is very much like war, storming through enemies one after the other.  Now, if you yourself are at the command of our Colts army, and the sitrep is in that Addai took a shot that's lingering with him a bit, or that Reggie has tweaked an ankle, or any possible similar scenario, isn't the wise decision to pull back and direct those troops elsewhere?  Hank Baskett is an acceptable casualty; Reggie Wayne isn't.

And that's what's at the root of this: the fact is, we cannot win the Superbowl without Reggie, Dallas, Joe, Free, Rob, Brackett, and more peripherally a collection of others.  This has been proven to us year after year after year.  That's why Mathis and Frenchy didn't play, nor Jerraud Powers, nor Clint Session, nor Charlie Johnson.  We need these men healthy.  We rattle off victories better than any team in the history of the league, and we do it when we have the majority of our core players.  Every last goddamn one of you knows this; it's inarguable.  That's why when one of our major contributors gets hurt, we treat them gently.  It's the reason we waited on Anthony Gonzalez and Adam Vinatieri.  Gonzo's situation didn't pan out, but we would have been that much better if his talents were available to us; luckily it afforded us a measure of Austin Collie, who so far has proven himself the best receiver bargain in the last draft.  A lot of these guys could have, and likely would have played if we were fighting another team for the division crown, et al.

All these guys have been playing football since youth.  Players want to play, and they want to win; it's a major point of concern when you find a guy who isn't almost ruthlessly competitive.  Fans want to see their teams win football games.  But in the order of importance, players want to play in and fans want to see their teams win Superbowls above all else.  After winning one almost every player to a man reflects in the moment, stating that that ring, that trophy, that accomplishment, is something that no one will ever be able to take away.  You grow up wanting to play in the Superbowl, not in week sixteen.  Freeney said it best: they don't give trophies for 16-0.  Coming back to the '07 Pats, the most pathetic thing about that season, as Jeff Chadiha reminds us, is that there's a banner hanging in Gillette Stadium, commemorating the 16-0 season; all it will ever remind people of is the monumental sense of failure that comes with not losing a single game until the one that mattered most. 

The silliest thing about it all is that people are shocked--shocked, I say!--that this was going to play out in the fashion it did.  If you come to this website, you know this was coming, and to expect otherwise is tantamount to lying to yourself.  We've been talking about this for weeks.  Those of you at the Luke yesterday, you paid your good money to watch a football game.  You didn't pay to see a team win; there's no guarantee of victory in the ticket's fine print.  Otherwise there would be mass refunds in St. Louis and Detroit, to say nothing of the other horrible teams in the league.  Bottom line, we as a team have never, not once, ever insinuated anything other than health trumping the desire to win meaningless games.  I'm going to take a 14-1 team that's 80% healthy over a team that's 15-0 and 50% healthy any day of the week.  You've got a right to be pissed off, but it doesn't mean that you are right.  People talk about football immortality; what do you think winning a Superbowl is?  Get some perspective, please, and be rational.