CoachLite

I have no idea how it will all shake out, but I have my popcorn ready.

There are no owners in the NFL that are perfect people. Some owner's demons are more public, some not so much, but they all have them. There's much more to the free agency issue and the Colts than most are aware of. There are a lot of intangibles most will never consider. That said, there is more to almost every aspect of any organization that most will ever be aware of. Those are often the things that matter most.

You can't measure what is "right" in a vacuum, or just by "feel". It takes so much more than that. The Colts front office performance is judged in relationship with all the other teams in the NFL. Just trying to objectively align the different perspectives of the scouting and coaching staff requires more sophisticated evaluation methods than what we saw in the video. It doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling, but I understand this is the way a lot of organizations work.

Defenses are judged relative to their offenses and achievement of their defensive strategy. Notice, nothing was said about winning and losing, directly. I've seen defenses win and lose football games, just as I have seem good defenses play on the losing side. The Colts signing their own players doesn't tell me much. The Colts bringing Bradley back tells me more, and I'm not encouraged by what that is telling me. I think the game of football is far more complex and complicated than most people believe. The tendency for many is to think in terms of plug-and-play solutions based on subjective personal opinion. That's not a winning ploy in my book. I guess we'll see what happens as it plays out on the field?

It's amazing how two people can watch the same thing and come to very different conclusions. Last year, the Colts defense was mediocre at best.

The game is bigger than any one player - and that includes the quarterback.

With pick #15, we'll know what we did 2 weeks from today.

I say "so-called artificial intelligence" because there is only intelligence or not. Generative and transformers AI used in LLMs are not intelligent, they only act like an intelligent agent, sometimes. It's the difference between a surgeon and an actor who plays a surgeon on TV.

I hope Anthony Richardson learns the lessons that Robert Griffin III never learned. Even very talented quarterbacks can be eaten up by big, powerful men focused on destroying him.

To the point @NewColtsFan made, there is no chart that can tell you whether to go for it on fourth down. All that chart tells you are the probabilities averaged over many games where the conditions that permitted an outcome (the context) are 'forgotten'. Only an * (pardon the judgmental term) would solely rely on a chart for making decisions. The outcome of any probable event is only realized in the current context. A good coach pays far more attention to the contexts at that point in the game than what some piece of paper he's holding in front of him says. That's what concerns me about so-called 'artificial intelligence' too, and I work in AI everyday. It's not AI, it's people who use (or abuse) it.

How can you measure the effects of "great timing" and "good luck"? Frankly, the game of football, the game of business and the game of life is far more complex and complicated than most people know or will ever believe. For example, you cannot optimize any system where humans are part of that system (and Colts are a system component in the system of NFL football) by optimizing each part of the team. One weak part of that system is called the constraint. If you fix that component, the constraint 'moves'. Some people use big honkin' computers to model this 'theory of constraints' to make boat-loads of money (or win football trophies). The rest are simply lambs being led to slaughter.

My point is not to blame the Scouting Department, directly. IMO, blame is a worthless effort. My point is that we, as fans, are not privy to how the decisions are being made - and that's OK. My concern is that many decisions are team (group) decisions where one group (the owner, this or that coach, some specialty department, the GM) holds more 'political' sway over the others, and that group isn't performing up to potential, and within the Colts there is no way to evaluate which section is the problem. This only leads to finger-pointing, and "fire the SOB". Furthermore, I'm concerned that many decisions are made 'by-the-seat-of-their-pants' (ad hoc). That's a killer because there is no objective way of evaluating performance, let alone objectively evaluating the evaluation process itself (the term I've used in the past is a rubric). For those who've had some experience in these matters, they will see why I'm suspect of the way analytics are used within the Colts, and in football in general. Seems to me they were sick the days they taught that in school, or they failed the test on that subject.

If you want me to guess a the number of wins, I'd say 7 - 8, slightly below .500 (based on before the draft given our draft position).

The one obvious department I had great hopes for, and was totally disappointed, was the Analytics Team. Analytics should not be confused with magic or fortune telling, but if you don't know the difference, they look the same.

Nope. Some employees are like cockroaches. They are survivors, not performers. People tend to stay with the devil they know. That goes for departments more than just the Scouting Department.