Jim Irsay not anticipating any changes at HC or GM....

[NewColtsFan]

 

OK.....   the headline can be amended....   IRAs does not anticipate any changes at HC or GM --- just yet.         In an interview with USA Today,  the Colts owner says he has no plans to make changes as of now,   but will wait until the season is over before making his final decision.     He wants to see how the last 3 games go.

 

This interview got boiled down by NFL.com and I don't think that story captured Irsay very well.      The USA Today story seems much more complete, as it should since they did the original interview with him.

 

Here's your read,  it's not long:

 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/colts/2016/12/14/jim-irsay-chuck-pagano-ryan-grigson-indianapolis/95451052/

 

 

 

[2006Coltsbestever]

27 minutes ago, NewColtsFan said:

 

OK.....   the headline can be amended....   IRAs does not anticipate any changes at HC or GM --- just yet.         In an interview with USA Today,  the Colts owner says he has no plans to make changes as of now,   but will wait until the season is over before making his final decision.     He wants to see how the last 3 games go.

 

This interview got boiled down by NFL.com and I don't think that story captured Irsay very well.      The USA Today story seems much more complete, as it should since they did the original interview with him.

 

Here's your read,  it's not long:

 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/colts/2016/12/14/jim-irsay-chuck-pagano-ryan-grigson-indianapolis/95451052/

 

 

 

If we go 6-10 I wonder what he will do?

[Crunked]

as a fan, I won't anticipate enjoying watching winning football then....stick to the process, as a fan you gotta have grit, I will keep chopping wood, and wait for a fellow fan to sharpen iron like man sharpens man with me....so what now what?

[Yoshinator]

I certainly hope Irsay is bluffing to keep everything low-key. You have to get rid of these guys at the end of the season. There's literally no rhyme or reason to when or why we do good or bad. We can dominate a bad team like the Jets 41-10, then the next week in a playoff type atmosphere against a division rival, not even show up for over half the game. I don't even think it's the talent anymore. Fire the coach, the coordinators, and the GM and start anew. We need some discipline and passion in this darn team. No one cares, no one is trying besides TY Hilton it seems. It's time for new blood and someone with a plan to take us to the promised land. 5 years and not one win over the Pats or Steelers. Simply unacceptable.

[grmasterb]

The Twittersphere is abuzz about Irsay not planning changes and how the Colts could be 10-3 had things gone their way, but this is the most telling to me:

 

“Look, if you can improve your franchise, even if you’re doing well, you’re going to make that move. You just are — at least I am. It’s about winning and winning the right way and trying to sustain success over a large period of time. We’re used to being in the playoffs. This is the first time in almost 20 years we (wouldn’t have) made the playoffs in back-to-back years. That’s extremely disappointing."

 

Does that sound like an owner who's sold on the regime he has in place?  

[Mjølner]

This statement sounded great to my ears. Nothing definite about keeping (them) at all.

[Yoshinator]

3 minutes ago, grmasterb said:

The Twittersphere is abuzz about Irsay not planning changes and how the Colts could be 10-3 had things gone their way, but this is the most telling to me:

 

“Look, if you can improve your franchise, even if you’re doing well, you’re going to make that move. You just are — at least I am. It’s about winning and winning the right way and trying to sustain success over a large period of time. We’re used to being in the playoffs. This is the first time in almost 20 years we (wouldn’t have) made the playoffs in back-to-back years. That’s extremely disappointing."

 

Does that sound like an owner who's sold on the regime he has in place?  

Nope, but I'll believe it when I see it. It's like being in the Bible days and experiencing the Flood firsthand. That's what the Colts are in. It's draining Luck of his career, and us fans of years of our football lives as well. Time is precious and limited. It's time to do something to stop the tragedy that befell this team in Pagano and Grigson.

[grmasterb]

Also, compare Irsay's statement yesterday to what he said after the first loss to Houston this season ("the right group of leaders"):

 

http://www.indystar.com/story/news/fox59/2016/10/19/jim-irsay-colts-right-group-leaders-texans-loss/92400618/

[grmasterb]

4 minutes ago, Jared Cisneros said:

Nope, but I'll believe it when I see it. It's like being in the Bible days and experiencing the Flood firsthand. That's what the Colts are in. It's draining Luck of his career, and us fans of years of our football lives as well. Time is precious and limited. It's time to do something to stop the tragedy that befell this team in Pagano and Grigson.

The key is whether Irsay feels he can "improve the franchise."  You don't fire people just for the sake of firing people.

[Jdubu]

I think much like last season, there has to be someone who can take the franchise and be a definitively better coaching staff out of the gate. We couldn't find that coach last year and we resigned an inferior coach in Pagano to another 4 years. Some point out it will be expensive for Irsay to cut Pagano since he just signed the 4 year deal. IMO, it's much like buying a stock in hopes of seeing it rise to an Apple like rise only to see it flounder and lose principle and continue leaking money. Do you keep the stock and ride it all the way down or sell the stock, take the loss of capital gains and buy into a better, more stable winning stock and make money again? While it sucks knowing you picked a defunct stock over a rising Apple stock in its early stage, waiting for the stock to hopefully rebound in 5 more years vs putting what money you have currently (A. Luck) into a better opportunity to produce money again, you have to do it. Pay the fees to sell it and buy again. If there isn't anything better this offseason, you may have no choice but to stay put and pra that continuity finally takes hold next season in spite of what you've seen occur over Pagano's last 4 years. 

[Yoshinator]

Just now, grmasterb said:

The key is whether Irsay feels he can "improve the franchise."  You don't fire people just for the sake of firing people.

At this point, you can't do much worse. Of course you could, but it's worth the risk at this point. Grigson I'm on the fence about, but I feel he was forced to draft the type of players he did last draft. If Irsay didn't intercept and force him to protect Luck, it wouldn't of happened. Pagano is a giant piece of trash as a coach, and there's no way around it. He is a talent killer. No one develops under him, almost no one gets better under his coaching. Besides Vontae, who was already talented and had mental and character issues, I can't think of a single defensive player that has gotten better under Pagano's tenure that we drafted. Anderson was already talented and he did well his rookie year, so Pagano had little to do with him. Pagano knows nothing about defense compared to what the hype said about him. He has to go, and Irsay needs to make the correct decision on Grigson as well.

[csmopar]

Anyone remember Jims comments during the last weeks of the Mora era? They were very similar to what he said in that interview just now. 

[Yoshinator]

1 minute ago, csmopar said:

Anyone remember Jims comments during the last weeks of the Mora era? They were very similar to what he said in that interview just now. 

I'll take your word for it, and hopefully this means something positive going forward for the state of the Colts franchise. We need change, that sums it up.

[Jdubu]

3 minutes ago, Jared Cisneros said:

At this point, you can't do much worse. Of course you could, but it's worth the risk at this point. Grigson I'm on the fence about, but I feel he was forced to draft the type of players he did last draft. If Irsay didn't intercept and force him to protect Luck, it wouldn't of happened. Pagano is a giant piece of trash as a coach, and there's no way around it. He is a talent killer. No one develops under him, almost no one gets better under his coaching. Besides Vontae, who was already talented and had mental and character issues, I can't think of a single defensive player that has gotten better under Pagano's tenure that we drafted. Anderson was already talented and he did well his rookie year, so Pagano had little to do with him. Pagano knows nothing about defense compared to what the hype said about him. He has to go, and Irsay needs to make the correct decision on Grigson as well.

I really strongly disagree with this bolder statement. You don't risk retooling an entire team over some prospect coach who is maybe just better than what you have. There is something to be said about continuity and I'd rather hold on to Pagano (nauseating saying that) over replacing with another unknown. We swung for fences and gambled on a hot coordinator name with Pagano and a name many thought in NFL circles of as the next GM to run a franchise and put them in charge of a new team without experience in running programs. Both have seemed to have a big degree of failure but IMO, naming another HC with a person who hasn't shown past success as a head coach or some revolutionary OC position with an offensive minded team, is just asking to replace and repeat the same problems. 

 

Im not as down on Grigson as some. He has shown the ability to find talent in 2 drafts of the 5 and I feel like he either got the big head after the first draft landing Luck and all the talk or he took the wrong approach of boom or bust with your first pick in each draft. If we had to choose 1 of the 2 who had to be changed, it would be Pags first and Chud next then Griggs. 

[Yoshinator]

6 minutes ago, Jdubu said:

I really strongly disagree with this bolder statement. You don't risk retooling an entire team over some prospect coach who is maybe just better than what you have. There is something to be said about continuity and I'd rather hold on to Pagano (nauseating saying that) over replacing with another unknown. We swung for fences and gambled on a hot coordinator name with Pagano and a name many thought in NFL circles of as the next GM to run a franchise and put them in charge of a new team without experience in running programs. Both have seemed to have a big degree of failure but IMO, naming another HC with a person who hasn't shown past success as a head coach or some revolutionary OC position with an offensive minded team, is just asking to replace and repeat the same problems. 

 

Im not as down on Grigson as some. He has shown the ability to find talent in 2 drafts of the 5 and I feel like he either got the big head after the first draft landing Luck and all the talk or he took the wrong approach of boom or bust with your first pick in each draft. If we had to choose 1 of the 2 who had to be changed, it would be Pags first and Chud next then Griggs. 

Basically here's how I see the Pagano situation. You have a Penny, Nickel, Dime, Quarter, Half Dollar, and Dollar coin. Pagano is a Nickel. There is room to fall if you trade your Nickel in and get a penny coach. However, the likely scenario is that you will get a coach of equal stature or better. Pagano isn't bottom of the barrel, but he's close. Agree on Grigson that I'm not hugely down on him. He can scout talent to a degree, but his hand has to be forced by Irsay to do the right thing, or he'll go all Rogue and do a Dorsett type pick in the first round.

[UKColt13]

I wonder what happens if we end up going 6-10 or 7-9. It seems Pagano is looking more and more defeated in pressers as he goes on. If he were a boxer, his corner should have thrown in the towel a round or 2 ago.

 

Mathis coming out and saying the team is 'not mentally tough' is huge. TY has come out said that the team 'layed down' for the Texans. This tells me that the players are aware that there is a culture problem within the team and Irsay is smart enough to know that that will not change without new faces and new personas in charge.

 

I have been a vehement supporter of Pagano up until the last month or so. But honestly, I think Pags and Grigs have lost the locker room, and not before time. They've certainly lost the last bastion of the Indy media, Bob Kravitz finally caved. I don't really care how many garbage time wins we get. I don't want to wait 5 years for Grigson and Pagano to accidentally put a good team on the field.

[Yoshinator]

1 minute ago, UKColt13 said:

I wonder what happens if we end up going 6-10 or 7-9. It seems Pagano is looking more and more defeated in pressers as he goes on. If he were a boxer, his corner should have thrown in the towel a round or 2 ago.

 

Mathis coming out and saying the team is 'not mentally tough' is huge. TY has come out said that the team 'layed down' for the Texans. This tells me that the players are aware that there is a culture problem within the team and Irsay is smart enough to know that that will not change without new faces and new personas in charge.

 

I have been a vehement supporter of Pagano up until the last month or so. But honestly, I think Pags and Grigs have lost the locker room, and not before time. They've certainly lost the last bastion of the Indy media, Bob Kravitz finally caved. I don't really care how many garbage time wins we get. I don't want to wait 5 years for Grigson and Pagano to accidentally put a good team on the field.

6-10 I think we fire them. 7-9 it's anyone's guess. I think it's going to come down to if we're so bad that we lose to the Jags in week 17. If we do, Irsay may finally throw in the towel on these two bums.

[Jdubu]

7 minutes ago, Jared Cisneros said:

Basically here's how I see the Pagano situation. You have a Penny, Nickel, Dime, Quarter, Half Dollar, and Dollar coin. Pagano is a Nickel. There is room to fall if you trade your Nickel in and get a penny coach. However, the likely scenario is that you will get a coach of equal stature or better. Pagano isn't bottom of the barrel, but he's close. Agree on Grigson that I'm not hugely down on him. He can scout talent to a degree, but his hand has to be forced by Irsay to do the right thing, or he'll go all Rogue and do a Dorsett type pick in the first round.

I understand your logic, I really do, but I feel like taking another risk on an unknown quantity again and having to restart over may not be worth the risk into keeping continuity. If Irsay truly believes that all the injuries were mainly the reason behind all the. Breakdowns of the team, he will maintain continuity. If he feels the state of the team is more of a coaching and building of a team is due more to poor decision making, he could just make that type of choice and risk the change even if it means changing out for the penny choice 3 years from now. Let's hope whatever the choice is, we do well going forward. 

[grmasterb]

30 minutes ago, csmopar said:

Anyone remember Jims comments during the last weeks of the Mora era? They were very similar to what he said in that interview just now. 

 

For the record, Irsay said of Mora: "I have the utmost confidence in him."

[Yoshinator]

2 minutes ago, Jdubu said:

I understand your logic, I really do, but I feel like taking another risk on an unknown quantity again and having to restart over may not be worth the risk into keeping continuity. If Irsay truly believes that all the injuries were mainly the reason behind all the. Breakdowns of the team, he will maintain continuity. If he feels the state of the team is more of a coaching and building of a team is due more to poor decision making, he could just make that type of choice and risk the change even if it means changing out for the penny choice 3 years from now. Let's hope whatever the choice is, we do well going forward. 

I honestly think restarting is required to keep continuity at this point. Pagano has lost the locker room. Very few are buying into what he is selling now. I think it's about over for him. There's a lot of factors that have to be taken into account for this decision. Especially what the players think. A new coach is always scary, but I think ours has peaked, and at his current level, that's not a good thing. Pagano is a lemon, and there's nothing to be squeezed out of him anymore. It'll depend on who we can get, yes, but there's a treasure trove of college coaches and coordinators that would love this job. That'll be up to Grigson or the new GM and Irsay, should it come down to that.

[Jdubu]

15 minutes ago, Jared Cisneros said:

I honestly think restarting is required to keep continuity at this point. Pagano has lost the locker room. Very few are buying into what he is selling now. I think it's about over for him. There's a lot of factors that have to be taken into account for this decision. Especially what the players think. A new coach is always scary, but I think ours has peaked, and at his current level, that's not a good thing. Pagano is a lemon, and there's nothing to be squeezed out of him anymore. It'll depend on who we can get, yes, but there's a treasure trove of college coaches and coordinators that would love this job. That'll be up to Grigson or the new GM and Irsay, should it come down to that.

You are preaching to the choir pretty much. I think Pagano is a pretty bad coach and has been. He was given a new opportunity to reset last year and given a new contract then followed that up with a team who didn't have its defensive backfield in the early games of the season, olineman shuffled around because of injuries, wr's missing games d/t injuries and dline injuries as well. I mean Pagano is going to argue that given the underlying talent with the back ups on this team and the injuries to his starters, that's a major cause of not being up to par. On top of that, Pagano may have been told, we are resetting and we are going to fix that oline in this years draft and next years draft is going to address the defense. You have a 4 year contract, if year 2 doesn't produce a deep playoff run, I'll replace you. You just don't know what was said in the contract discussions and planning. 

[Yoshinator]

1 minute ago, Jdubu said:

You are preaching to the choir pretty much. I think Pagano is a pretty bad coach and has been. He was given a new opportunity to reset last year and given a new contract then followed that up with a team who didn't have its defensive backfield in the early games of the season, olineman shuffled around because of injuries, wr's missing games d/t injuries and dline injuries as well. I mean Pagano is going to argue that given the underlying talent with the back ups on this team and the injuries to his starters, that's a major cause of not being up to par. On top of that, Pagano may have been told, we are resetting and we are going to fix that oline in this years draft and next years draft is going to address the defense. You have a 4 year contract, if year 2 doesn't produce a deep playoff run, I'll replace you. You just don't know what was said in the contract discussions and planning. 

That could be true, I said in an earlier post on here that Pagano can't develop defensive players, so he really doesn't deserve any benefit whether the starters were healthy or not. No one can improve in back to back years under him. He may get an extra year. We don't know our draft position and we don't know what players we are targeting. I hope we don't keep Pagano, but his supposed strengths and our needs may go hand in hand next year.

[csmopar]

1 hour ago, grmasterb said:

 

For the record, Irsay said of Mora: "I have the utmost confidence in him."

yep.

2 hours ago, Jared Cisneros said:

I'll take your word for it, and hopefully this means something positive going forward for the state of the Colts franchise. We need change, that sums it up.

Read the following, its long but worth the read. Now read Jim's interview linked in the OP again, tell me it doesn't sound similar.

That's a Mora

September 1, 2001
“A leader of men,” says Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay.

“A great motivator,” says team president Bill Polian, who hired Mora.

“He’s done wonders for us,” says his quarterback, Peyton Manning.

“The perfect father,” says son Jim, the defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody more disciplined—intellectually, athletically, emotionally or socially–than Jim,” says Jack Kemp, the quarterback-turned-politician who was Mora’s college roommate.

This month, Mora begins his fourth season in charge of the Horseshoes, and by many measures his tenure has been a success. Mora’s Colts orchestrated the NFL’s greatest single-season turnaround between Years One and Two, going from 3-13 to 13-3. They backed it up with a 10-6 mark last season and a second-straight playoff trip. Under Mora’s direction, Manning, running back Edgerrin James and wide receiver Marvin Harrison have evolved into what many esteemed observers regard as the most exciting trio in the NFL—the best since the Dallas Cowboys’ Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin.

But. There’s always a “but.”

But Aikman, Smith and Irvin won three Super Bowls, and Mora has yet to get his talented threesome past the first round of the postseason. Last year, it took a miraculous finish and a set of highly improbable circumstances for the Colts—preseason Super Bowl contenders—to even make the playoffs. And there’s the 26-22 overall record.

Joining a moribund franchise that had never seen a winning season in its 19 NFL years, he directed the New Orleans Saints to four playoff berths. But every one of those four teams nosedived in the playoffs.

With 119 NFL victories, Mora ranks 20th among all-time coaches, but he’s the only one with zero playoff victories.

So, is Mora’s glass of Gatorade half full or half empty?

“If he hadn’t done a good job, his teams wouldn’t have been in the playoffs in the first place,” says Kansas City Chiefs head coach Dick Vermeil, whose relationship with Mora began when both were assistants at Stanford. “They’d better appreciate him in Indianapolis, I’ll tell you that.”

Some don’t. Many do, including those whose opinions count most.

“Last year, the coach of one of our opponents said it was over—the Colts weren’t going to the playoffs,” says Polian. “Everybody had written us off. But Jim hadn’t. He kept preaching to the team that if you continue to play hard and work hard, you’ll get better, and we’ll be stronger at the end than some of the other people we play. He wouldn’t let them give up. That run we made down the stretch last year was entirely due to Jim Mora. He took that team by the scruff of its neck and dragged it over the finish line.”

The big boss, Irsay, who has proclaimed a desire for his Colts to win not just one Super Bowl but three in a row, appears equally committed to Mora, who has two years remaining on his initial five-year contract. “I am in total support of Jim Mora, because that’s a critical element to having a successful franchise,” says Irsay. “In every meeting I have with Jim, I tell him that I’m here to support him.

“All I know is this: In New Orleans, Jim was picked as coach by Jim Finks, who will be remembered as one of the great general managers in NFL history. And here, he was picked by Bill Polian, who is in that same vein. Now we’ve just got to continue to work to give him the kinds of players he needs.”

Not everyone feels likewise—particularly after last season when the Colts limped into the playoffs and lost to Miami. Up by 14 points, the Colts were done in by a Dolphins team led by quarterback Jay Fiedler, who will never be confused with Dan Marino.

Critics can find plenty of reasons why, starting with Mora himself. Some–including a few players–think he’s a rough, tough, gruff SOB of a coach. Some, fans mostly, think he’s even more conservative professionally than his pal Kemp is politically. Some think that at 66, Mora’s too old, no matter that his looks belie his age. Some consider him an unrelenting disciplinarian whose heart—if you can find it—is made of hard, cold steel.

Mora seems unfazed, sounding eager as ever for the stresses and challenges of coaching an NFL team, especially one earmarked as a serious title contender. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that I want to keep coaching,” he says. “I’m not ready to quit; I don’t feel any older than I did 10 years ago. In fact, I feel better than I did 10 years ago. And no question I’m a better coach. If not, I’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time.”

 

Mora doesn’t believe he’s wasted time when it comes to professional matters. His personal life, though, is another story. His career has distanced him from his wife of 40 years, Connie, as well as from his three sons and eight grandchildren, whom he adores. But the ex-Marine fends off inquiries about his family life with a verbal stiff-arm that Edgerrin James would appreciate. “I’m not going to get into it,” he says flatly. “Whatever’s happened in my [personal] life is my own fault. I don’t blame anyone.”

Nor is he proud of his status as the NFL’s oldest head coach, although he should be: It speaks to his perseverance and longevity in a cutthroat profession. “The only time it becomes a grind,” he says, “is when you’re losing. But that’s the way it is with everybody. I don’t care whether you’re 25 or 65–losing is the hardest part of the job.”

He fairly spits out the words. Just the thought of losing stokes his competitive fires. That intensity has been a trademark since his youth in Los Angeles, where his father, Mario, was a television film editor and his mother, Helen, was a homemaker. A younger brother, Dick, worked in the vitamin business and lives in Orange County. A younger sister, Marilyn, lives in Houston. Morals father, now 91, lives in Costa Mesa, California. Mora’s mother died in 1992.

No one in the family pushed Mora into football. In fact, he’s not even sure how he got to this point in his career, because there was no plan. That’s right: The guy who spends hours diagramming the X’s and O’s applies no such structure to his own life. “It just happened,” Mora says.

“It” started at University High School in west Los Angeles, where Mora was an excellent receiver and defensive end. Though an “all-city” player, he wasn’t dazzling enough to attract offers from California’s major colleges. Through a family friend, though, he heard of an 1,800-student NAIA college called Occidental, located in the L.A. suburb of Eagle Rock.

At Occidental, he met a quarterback whom he had played against in high school: Jack Kemp. The two hit it off instantly and went on to become fraternity brothers (Alpha Tau Omega), roommates and football co-captains. They were joined by Ron Botchan, who’s now an NFL umpire and a veteran of five Super Bowls. As best friends they played football and did pretty much everything together, including double- and triple-dating.

“A wild evening for us was to go out cruising in Pasadena,” recalls Kemp. “But we never went to bars, and there was no carousing. I don’t want to say we were goody-two-shoes, but it was the ’50s, and we all had a very strong work ethic.”

“I was a straight arrow,” Mora remembers. “During football season, I wouldn’t even drink a Coke. We weren’t hellraisers by any means.”

While at Occidental, Mora—and Botchan—joined the Marine Platoon Leaders program. After they graduated in 1957 they were commissioned as second lieutenants and sent to Quantico, Virginia to begin three years of active duty. Mora was trained as an infantry officer, but in those days, military bases fielded football teams and often attracted topnotch talent coming out of the colleges.

Soon Mora, from little Occidental, found himself alongside–and against-players from the major conferences in the country. And in addition to taking on military opposition, Quantico played college teams such as Boston College, Boston University and Holy Cross. “I started out as an eighth-string tight end and ended up starting,” Mora says.

During his required three years of active duty, Mora played one season at Quantico and two at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. When his military commitment ended, he returned to southern California and was contemplating a career in teaching and coaching when he learned of a job opening at his alma mater. A new coach, Vic Schwenk, needed one assistant. Mora got the job-which paid all of $500 per season—and coached the offensive and defensive lines. He also taught physical education at San Fernando Junior High while he and Connie began raising their sons Jim, Michael and Stephen.

Before his fifth year at “Oxy,” Schwenk resigned to become a full-time scout for the Los Angeles Rams, and Mora was hired at age 29 to become the head coach. He was happy. He was successful. His second Occidental team went 8-1 and finished 10th in the 1965 national small-college rankings.

The team’s performance drew the attention of John Ralston, then coach of Stanford (and later of the Denver Broncos), who tried to hire Mora as an assistant after his second year at Oxy. Mora, however, couldn’t get out of his contract. Still interested, Ralston called back the next year, and this time Mora was free to go.

“The dean of the faculty told me I was making a major mistake,” Mora recalls. “He said I could stay at Occidental the rest of my life, have tenure on the faculty, coach, settle in the community and have a nice life. But I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got to give it a shot.'”

 

Thus began an odyssey for Mora and his family. His stint at Stanford lasted only a year, after which, at the behest of his former Marine football buddy Chet Franklin (now with the Oakland Raiders), Mora joined Eddie Crowder’s staff at the University of Colorado. Six years later, when Crowder resigned, Mora was hired by Vermeil, who’d become head coach at UCLA. Mora stayed at UCLA only one season, then became defensive coordinator for the University of Washington in Seattle. There, Mora was instrumental in recruiting future NFL quarterback Warren Moon.

In 1976, Seattle had gained an NFL expansion team, the Seahawks. Mora was tiring of the recruiting grind and the amount of time it required him to spend on the road. His sons were now in junior high and high school. So when the Seahawks had an opening for a defensive line coach in 1978, Mora applied–and soon found himself in the National Football League.

In 1982, another opportunity “just happened.” Ron Meyer left SMU to become coach of the New England Patriots. One of his assistants who had worked with Mora at Colorado called him regarding a position for a defensive coordinator with NFL experience.

“That turned out to be the toughest move I ever made,” Mora says. “My family was in a comfort zone in Seattle, and we loved it there.” Taking the job was a 3,000-mile leap of faith. During his year with the Patriots, their defense ranked fifth in points allowed in the AFC. Again, Mora was content. Again, the telephone rang. It was Carl Peterson, a former staffmate at UCLA who had just become general manager of the Philadelphia Stars in the USFL, a start-up professional league. George Perles had been hired as their head coach, but left within weeks of the start of training camp to go to Michigan State. Was Mora interested? “No,” he replied. “Don’t bug me.” But Peterson persisted. “I finally said, ‘What the hell, I can always go back to the NFL if this thing (the USFL) doesn’t make it,'” Mora says.

The league didn’t make it, folding after three years. But Mora’s teams had played in three title games and won two. Mora was a hot property, attracting bids from the Eagles, the Cardinals and the Saints.

Jim Finks, the GM who had just guided the Bears to the 1985 Super Bowl, was one reason Mora opted for New Orleans. “We just instantly hit it off,” Mora said.

Before Finks and Mora—who were backed by the bucks of new Saints owner Tom Benson—the Saints had been the “Saints,” a sorry lot forever mired in the muck of mediocrity. But with Finks drafting shrewdly, and New Orleans filling its roster with a number of ex-USFLers whom Mora knew, New Orleans quickly became an NFC West division challenger to the San Francisco 49ers.

Blessed with a stout defense and an uncanny kicker (Ben Davis High School product Morten Andersen), Mora guided the Saints to seven straight non-losing seasons, two division titles and four playoff berths. He cultivated not only success but an image as well, one that followed him to Indianapolis: tough, conservative, unyielding, curt with the media and generally not an approachable guy. “I got a reputation,” Mora admits. “And it was just like Jim Finks always told me: If you get a reputation as an early riser, you can sleep until noon, because you will always be thought of as an early riser.”

As long as he was winning, Mora’s image didn’t particularly affect him. But after seven good years, his team began reverting. Without Finks (who became ill with cancer, left as GM, and later died) the franchise became a rudderless ship and went 7-9 in both ’94 and ’95. Then, in the middle of the ’96 season, after a loss to Carolina that dropped the Saints to 2-6, Mora unleashed the famous “Mora meltdown,” in which he blasted his team, his coaches and himself in largely bleepable terms. A day later he resigned.

“After Finks left, we kind of got screwed up as an organization, but I’m not blaming anyone else,” Mora says. “It just wasn’t the same. We didn’t handle things well, and we faltered. There were personal things in my life that didn’t help, but I won’t go into that. It just got to the point where I couldn’t go out there one more day. It had been building for a couple of years and I fought it, but I just got to the point where I couldn’t do it. “So I quit. I’m not proud of the fact, but I knew I was hurting myself, my family, the team and the organization. It was horribly hard, because I knew what I was doing, and knew the repercussions. But I did it because it was what I had to do.”

As the meltdown became national sports-talk sound-bite fare, Mora “kind of went into a shell.” He applied for two head-coaching jobs (San Diego and St. Louis, the latter of which hired his pal Vermeil) and got neither. NBC called about a color commentator gig, and Mora said yes. It was a way to stay involved in the league and see how other franchises were run, and Mora enjoyed the experience. The pay was good and the pressure was off. But it wasn’t coaching.

Coincidentally, the last game Mora worked for NBC was a Colts game. Shortly thereafter, Jim Irsay dismissed Bill Tobin as vice president and Lindy InFante as head coach. He hired Polian and told him to go find “a leader” for a young team that would inherit the first pick in the NFL draft.

Through Peterson, now GM of the Chiefs, Polian heard of Mora’s interest. “I said, ‘Wow, give me his number,'” Polian says. Thus ended the search. “We needed someone who could point this team in the right direction, who would give them the kind of professionalism and discipline they needed,” Polian says. “Jim Mora filled that bill completely.”

 

Mora arrived in Indianapolis and quickly began to obliterate the stereotypes. Yes, he was demanding, but not unfairly so. Sure, he brought discipline, but he brought it to a team sorely deficient in that area. Conservative? Not with a quick-strike offense and a defense that liked to gamble and blitz. In the meantime, the media learned that Mora was anything but inaccessible and aloof, and that on occasion, he could even display genuine sensitivity and charm.

“I think discipline’s important—you have to be demanding and consistent and tough and fair. But I’m no drill sergeant, and I don’t coach that way,” Mora says. “Conservative? I don’t think I am, at least not to a fault. We’re scoring a lot of points here but we are having trouble stopping people. Does that make me conservative?

“I’ve also tried to do better with the media. In New Orleans, I didn’t do a good job dealing with the media. I was sarcastic. I was curt. I wasn’t a total *, but I could have been better, especially with the local guys.”

In other words, even at 66, you’re not too old to learn and even change. And of course you’re not too old to coach. Mora remains consumed by his profession. Though he has an apartment in a gated community on the northside, he often spends nights at the Colts complex sleeping on his office couch. He’d like to carve out more time: to finish any one of the four novels he’s halfway through, to sharpen his “crappy” golf game, to visit children and grandchildren out West, to take former Indy-car driver Derek Daly up on an offer of lessons at his high-performance driving school. And he wishes he had more time for people. “I don’t want people to think I’m something special or on a different level,” he says. “I’m just a guy like everyone else. When they say ‘celebrity,’ that bothers me. I’m a football coach. I just coach and live.”

So is Mora’s glass half full or half empty? Stare into it long enough and you’ll see reflections: of dismal seasons, of marginal talent, of a not-so-long-ago era when the closest the Colts ever got to the Super Bowl was the distance between a couch and a television. Granted, the current Colts crop hasn’t come close, either–not even as close as the Jim Harbaugh and Tony Siragusa crew in 1995. But contemplate the potential of Manning, James and Harrison, and just try to keep the corners of your mouth from turning up.

Was last season disappointing? Most assuredly. Was it Mora’s fault? Perhaps. But with two years left on his contract, and an offensive triad with more offensive punch than NATO, Mora hardly needs to start checking the walls for handwriting.

“I love Indianapolis,” he says. “It’s a wonderful city, and the people have been super. I want to stay here. I want to win. I want to win it all.”

 

http://www.indianapolismonthly.com/news-opinion/thats-jim-mora-colts-football/

[TDewar1987]

I mean what do they think he is going to say? 

 

"Yeah fam. Our staff is trash and I'm canning them in january."

 

 

[Yoshinator]

25 minutes ago, csmopar said:

yep.

Read the following, its long but worth the read. Now read Jim's interview linked in the OP again, tell me it doesn't sound similar.

That's a Mora

September 1, 2001
“A leader of men,” says Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay.

“A great motivator,” says team president Bill Polian, who hired Mora.

“He’s done wonders for us,” says his quarterback, Peyton Manning.

“The perfect father,” says son Jim, the defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody more disciplined—intellectually, athletically, emotionally or socially–than Jim,” says Jack Kemp, the quarterback-turned-politician who was Mora’s college roommate.

This month, Mora begins his fourth season in charge of the Horseshoes, and by many measures his tenure has been a success. Mora’s Colts orchestrated the NFL’s greatest single-season turnaround between Years One and Two, going from 3-13 to 13-3. They backed it up with a 10-6 mark last season and a second-straight playoff trip. Under Mora’s direction, Manning, running back Edgerrin James and wide receiver Marvin Harrison have evolved into what many esteemed observers regard as the most exciting trio in the NFL—the best since the Dallas Cowboys’ Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin.

But. There’s always a “but.”

But Aikman, Smith and Irvin won three Super Bowls, and Mora has yet to get his talented threesome past the first round of the postseason. Last year, it took a miraculous finish and a set of highly improbable circumstances for the Colts—preseason Super Bowl contenders—to even make the playoffs. And there’s the 26-22 overall record.

Joining a moribund franchise that had never seen a winning season in its 19 NFL years, he directed the New Orleans Saints to four playoff berths. But every one of those four teams nosedived in the playoffs.

With 119 NFL victories, Mora ranks 20th among all-time coaches, but he’s the only one with zero playoff victories.

So, is Mora’s glass of Gatorade half full or half empty?

“If he hadn’t done a good job, his teams wouldn’t have been in the playoffs in the first place,” says Kansas City Chiefs head coach Dick Vermeil, whose relationship with Mora began when both were assistants at Stanford. “They’d better appreciate him in Indianapolis, I’ll tell you that.”

Some don’t. Many do, including those whose opinions count most.

“Last year, the coach of one of our opponents said it was over—the Colts weren’t going to the playoffs,” says Polian. “Everybody had written us off. But Jim hadn’t. He kept preaching to the team that if you continue to play hard and work hard, you’ll get better, and we’ll be stronger at the end than some of the other people we play. He wouldn’t let them give up. That run we made down the stretch last year was entirely due to Jim Mora. He took that team by the scruff of its neck and dragged it over the finish line.”

The big boss, Irsay, who has proclaimed a desire for his Colts to win not just one Super Bowl but three in a row, appears equally committed to Mora, who has two years remaining on his initial five-year contract. “I am in total support of Jim Mora, because that’s a critical element to having a successful franchise,” says Irsay. “In every meeting I have with Jim, I tell him that I’m here to support him.

“All I know is this: In New Orleans, Jim was picked as coach by Jim Finks, who will be remembered as one of the great general managers in NFL history. And here, he was picked by Bill Polian, who is in that same vein. Now we’ve just got to continue to work to give him the kinds of players he needs.”

Not everyone feels likewise—particularly after last season when the Colts limped into the playoffs and lost to Miami. Up by 14 points, the Colts were done in by a Dolphins team led by quarterback Jay Fiedler, who will never be confused with Dan Marino.

Critics can find plenty of reasons why, starting with Mora himself. Some–including a few players–think he’s a rough, tough, gruff SOB of a coach. Some, fans mostly, think he’s even more conservative professionally than his pal Kemp is politically. Some think that at 66, Mora’s too old, no matter that his looks belie his age. Some consider him an unrelenting disciplinarian whose heart—if you can find it—is made of hard, cold steel.

Mora seems unfazed, sounding eager as ever for the stresses and challenges of coaching an NFL team, especially one earmarked as a serious title contender. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that I want to keep coaching,” he says. “I’m not ready to quit; I don’t feel any older than I did 10 years ago. In fact, I feel better than I did 10 years ago. And no question I’m a better coach. If not, I’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time.”

 

Mora doesn’t believe he’s wasted time when it comes to professional matters. His personal life, though, is another story. His career has distanced him from his wife of 40 years, Connie, as well as from his three sons and eight grandchildren, whom he adores. But the ex-Marine fends off inquiries about his family life with a verbal stiff-arm that Edgerrin James would appreciate. “I’m not going to get into it,” he says flatly. “Whatever’s happened in my [personal] life is my own fault. I don’t blame anyone.”

Nor is he proud of his status as the NFL’s oldest head coach, although he should be: It speaks to his perseverance and longevity in a cutthroat profession. “The only time it becomes a grind,” he says, “is when you’re losing. But that’s the way it is with everybody. I don’t care whether you’re 25 or 65–losing is the hardest part of the job.”

He fairly spits out the words. Just the thought of losing stokes his competitive fires. That intensity has been a trademark since his youth in Los Angeles, where his father, Mario, was a television film editor and his mother, Helen, was a homemaker. A younger brother, Dick, worked in the vitamin business and lives in Orange County. A younger sister, Marilyn, lives in Houston. Morals father, now 91, lives in Costa Mesa, California. Mora’s mother died in 1992.

No one in the family pushed Mora into football. In fact, he’s not even sure how he got to this point in his career, because there was no plan. That’s right: The guy who spends hours diagramming the X’s and O’s applies no such structure to his own life. “It just happened,” Mora says.

“It” started at University High School in west Los Angeles, where Mora was an excellent receiver and defensive end. Though an “all-city” player, he wasn’t dazzling enough to attract offers from California’s major colleges. Through a family friend, though, he heard of an 1,800-student NAIA college called Occidental, located in the L.A. suburb of Eagle Rock.

At Occidental, he met a quarterback whom he had played against in high school: Jack Kemp. The two hit it off instantly and went on to become fraternity brothers (Alpha Tau Omega), roommates and football co-captains. They were joined by Ron Botchan, who’s now an NFL umpire and a veteran of five Super Bowls. As best friends they played football and did pretty much everything together, including double- and triple-dating.

“A wild evening for us was to go out cruising in Pasadena,” recalls Kemp. “But we never went to bars, and there was no carousing. I don’t want to say we were goody-two-shoes, but it was the ’50s, and we all had a very strong work ethic.”

“I was a straight arrow,” Mora remembers. “During football season, I wouldn’t even drink a Coke. We weren’t hellraisers by any means.”

While at Occidental, Mora—and Botchan—joined the Marine Platoon Leaders program. After they graduated in 1957 they were commissioned as second lieutenants and sent to Quantico, Virginia to begin three years of active duty. Mora was trained as an infantry officer, but in those days, military bases fielded football teams and often attracted topnotch talent coming out of the colleges.

Soon Mora, from little Occidental, found himself alongside–and against-players from the major conferences in the country. And in addition to taking on military opposition, Quantico played college teams such as Boston College, Boston University and Holy Cross. “I started out as an eighth-string tight end and ended up starting,” Mora says.

During his required three years of active duty, Mora played one season at Quantico and two at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. When his military commitment ended, he returned to southern California and was contemplating a career in teaching and coaching when he learned of a job opening at his alma mater. A new coach, Vic Schwenk, needed one assistant. Mora got the job-which paid all of $500 per season—and coached the offensive and defensive lines. He also taught physical education at San Fernando Junior High while he and Connie began raising their sons Jim, Michael and Stephen.

Before his fifth year at “Oxy,” Schwenk resigned to become a full-time scout for the Los Angeles Rams, and Mora was hired at age 29 to become the head coach. He was happy. He was successful. His second Occidental team went 8-1 and finished 10th in the 1965 national small-college rankings.

The team’s performance drew the attention of John Ralston, then coach of Stanford (and later of the Denver Broncos), who tried to hire Mora as an assistant after his second year at Oxy. Mora, however, couldn’t get out of his contract. Still interested, Ralston called back the next year, and this time Mora was free to go.

“The dean of the faculty told me I was making a major mistake,” Mora recalls. “He said I could stay at Occidental the rest of my life, have tenure on the faculty, coach, settle in the community and have a nice life. But I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got to give it a shot.'”

 

Thus began an odyssey for Mora and his family. His stint at Stanford lasted only a year, after which, at the behest of his former Marine football buddy Chet Franklin (now with the Oakland Raiders), Mora joined Eddie Crowder’s staff at the University of Colorado. Six years later, when Crowder resigned, Mora was hired by Vermeil, who’d become head coach at UCLA. Mora stayed at UCLA only one season, then became defensive coordinator for the University of Washington in Seattle. There, Mora was instrumental in recruiting future NFL quarterback Warren Moon.

In 1976, Seattle had gained an NFL expansion team, the Seahawks. Mora was tiring of the recruiting grind and the amount of time it required him to spend on the road. His sons were now in junior high and high school. So when the Seahawks had an opening for a defensive line coach in 1978, Mora applied–and soon found himself in the National Football League.

In 1982, another opportunity “just happened.” Ron Meyer left SMU to become coach of the New England Patriots. One of his assistants who had worked with Mora at Colorado called him regarding a position for a defensive coordinator with NFL experience.

“That turned out to be the toughest move I ever made,” Mora says. “My family was in a comfort zone in Seattle, and we loved it there.” Taking the job was a 3,000-mile leap of faith. During his year with the Patriots, their defense ranked fifth in points allowed in the AFC. Again, Mora was content. Again, the telephone rang. It was Carl Peterson, a former staffmate at UCLA who had just become general manager of the Philadelphia Stars in the USFL, a start-up professional league. George Perles had been hired as their head coach, but left within weeks of the start of training camp to go to Michigan State. Was Mora interested? “No,” he replied. “Don’t bug me.” But Peterson persisted. “I finally said, ‘What the hell, I can always go back to the NFL if this thing (the USFL) doesn’t make it,'” Mora says.

The league didn’t make it, folding after three years. But Mora’s teams had played in three title games and won two. Mora was a hot property, attracting bids from the Eagles, the Cardinals and the Saints.

Jim Finks, the GM who had just guided the Bears to the 1985 Super Bowl, was one reason Mora opted for New Orleans. “We just instantly hit it off,” Mora said.

Before Finks and Mora—who were backed by the bucks of new Saints owner Tom Benson—the Saints had been the “Saints,” a sorry lot forever mired in the muck of mediocrity. But with Finks drafting shrewdly, and New Orleans filling its roster with a number of ex-USFLers whom Mora knew, New Orleans quickly became an NFC West division challenger to the San Francisco 49ers.

Blessed with a stout defense and an uncanny kicker (Ben Davis High School product Morten Andersen), Mora guided the Saints to seven straight non-losing seasons, two division titles and four playoff berths. He cultivated not only success but an image as well, one that followed him to Indianapolis: tough, conservative, unyielding, curt with the media and generally not an approachable guy. “I got a reputation,” Mora admits. “And it was just like Jim Finks always told me: If you get a reputation as an early riser, you can sleep until noon, because you will always be thought of as an early riser.”

As long as he was winning, Mora’s image didn’t particularly affect him. But after seven good years, his team began reverting. Without Finks (who became ill with cancer, left as GM, and later died) the franchise became a rudderless ship and went 7-9 in both ’94 and ’95. Then, in the middle of the ’96 season, after a loss to Carolina that dropped the Saints to 2-6, Mora unleashed the famous “Mora meltdown,” in which he blasted his team, his coaches and himself in largely bleepable terms. A day later he resigned.

“After Finks left, we kind of got screwed up as an organization, but I’m not blaming anyone else,” Mora says. “It just wasn’t the same. We didn’t handle things well, and we faltered. There were personal things in my life that didn’t help, but I won’t go into that. It just got to the point where I couldn’t go out there one more day. It had been building for a couple of years and I fought it, but I just got to the point where I couldn’t do it. “So I quit. I’m not proud of the fact, but I knew I was hurting myself, my family, the team and the organization. It was horribly hard, because I knew what I was doing, and knew the repercussions. But I did it because it was what I had to do.”

As the meltdown became national sports-talk sound-bite fare, Mora “kind of went into a shell.” He applied for two head-coaching jobs (San Diego and St. Louis, the latter of which hired his pal Vermeil) and got neither. NBC called about a color commentator gig, and Mora said yes. It was a way to stay involved in the league and see how other franchises were run, and Mora enjoyed the experience. The pay was good and the pressure was off. But it wasn’t coaching.

Coincidentally, the last game Mora worked for NBC was a Colts game. Shortly thereafter, Jim Irsay dismissed Bill Tobin as vice president and Lindy InFante as head coach. He hired Polian and told him to go find “a leader” for a young team that would inherit the first pick in the NFL draft.

Through Peterson, now GM of the Chiefs, Polian heard of Mora’s interest. “I said, ‘Wow, give me his number,'” Polian says. Thus ended the search. “We needed someone who could point this team in the right direction, who would give them the kind of professionalism and discipline they needed,” Polian says. “Jim Mora filled that bill completely.”

 

Mora arrived in Indianapolis and quickly began to obliterate the stereotypes. Yes, he was demanding, but not unfairly so. Sure, he brought discipline, but he brought it to a team sorely deficient in that area. Conservative? Not with a quick-strike offense and a defense that liked to gamble and blitz. In the meantime, the media learned that Mora was anything but inaccessible and aloof, and that on occasion, he could even display genuine sensitivity and charm.

“I think discipline’s important—you have to be demanding and consistent and tough and fair. But I’m no drill sergeant, and I don’t coach that way,” Mora says. “Conservative? I don’t think I am, at least not to a fault. We’re scoring a lot of points here but we are having trouble stopping people. Does that make me conservative?

“I’ve also tried to do better with the media. In New Orleans, I didn’t do a good job dealing with the media. I was sarcastic. I was curt. I wasn’t a total *, but I could have been better, especially with the local guys.”

In other words, even at 66, you’re not too old to learn and even change. And of course you’re not too old to coach. Mora remains consumed by his profession. Though he has an apartment in a gated community on the northside, he often spends nights at the Colts complex sleeping on his office couch. He’d like to carve out more time: to finish any one of the four novels he’s halfway through, to sharpen his “crappy” golf game, to visit children and grandchildren out West, to take former Indy-car driver Derek Daly up on an offer of lessons at his high-performance driving school. And he wishes he had more time for people. “I don’t want people to think I’m something special or on a different level,” he says. “I’m just a guy like everyone else. When they say ‘celebrity,’ that bothers me. I’m a football coach. I just coach and live.”

So is Mora’s glass half full or half empty? Stare into it long enough and you’ll see reflections: of dismal seasons, of marginal talent, of a not-so-long-ago era when the closest the Colts ever got to the Super Bowl was the distance between a couch and a television. Granted, the current Colts crop hasn’t come close, either–not even as close as the Jim Harbaugh and Tony Siragusa crew in 1995. But contemplate the potential of Manning, James and Harrison, and just try to keep the corners of your mouth from turning up.

Was last season disappointing? Most assuredly. Was it Mora’s fault? Perhaps. But with two years left on his contract, and an offensive triad with more offensive punch than NATO, Mora hardly needs to start checking the walls for handwriting.

“I love Indianapolis,” he says. “It’s a wonderful city, and the people have been super. I want to stay here. I want to win. I want to win it all.”

 

http://www.indianapolismonthly.com/news-opinion/thats-jim-mora-colts-football/

Yep, it sounds very familiar. This could be the calm before the storm. If we lose out, I think Jim will bite the bullet and fire Grigson and Pagano. Good read!

[csmopar]

Just now, Jared Cisneros said:

Yep, it sounds very familiar. This could be the calm before the storm. If we lose out, I think Jim will bite the bullet and fire Grigson and Pagano. Good read!

yep, if we split 8-8 though, i think pag and grigs stay.

[Yoshinator]

1 minute ago, csmopar said:

yep, if we split 8-8 though, i think pag and grigs stay.

Unfortunately, I think you are right. I think we'll go 7-9 personally, and it'll come down to an Irsay decision.

[csmopar]

1 minute ago, Jared Cisneros said:

Unfortunately, I think you are right. I think we'll go 7-9 personally, and it'll come down to an Irsay decision.

im not sure will even get to that lol

[coltsva]

How was Pagano a hot coordinator prospect? He was a coordinator for one year with UNLV in 1991, one year with North Carolina in 2007, and one year with Baltimore in 2011. There was zero evidence that he had any knowledge or ability in building a defense or running a team. Now there is enough evidence to the contrary. Show him the door.

[grmasterb]

3 hours ago, csmopar said:

Anyone remember Jims comments during the last weeks of the Mora era? They were very similar to what he said in that interview just now. 

 

I appreciated Mora's brutal honesty, even when he called Peyton to the carpet before his famous "Playoffs??!!" rant.  None of this chopping wood, iron sharpens iron, stick to the process nonsense.

[1959Colts]

If Grigson and Pagano don't get fired this year, it's only a matter of time before they do.

This culture of underachieving, that we have sadly, all grown so used to, is not going to somehow, magically, just change under the leadership of Grigson and Pagano.

The question is... How many more years of this crap will Irsay make us tolerate?

[rockywoj]

23 minutes ago, coltsva said:

How was Pagano a hot coordinator prospect? He was a coordinator for one year with UNLV in 1991, one year with North Carolina in 2007, and one year with Baltimore in 2011. There was zero evidence that he had any knowledge or ability in building a defense or running a team. Now there is enough evidence to the contrary. Show him the door.

That's the thing.  When he was first hired, I heard they hired Baltimore's DC.  Great I thought, Baltimore's defenses have been superb!  Wait, what's that, he was only DC this last year, having very little to do at all with building the great Ravens defenses?   Ugh, now I am dubious.

 

My dubiousness from 5 years ago now has turned to complete disappointment.   NOTHING about our defense for the past five years is formidable.  Add to that the fact that our offense, which should be prolific, has been disappointingly plodding at best and painfully predictable, and I think there is enough of an established 5 year record of coaching failure.

 

For the first three years of this regime, I looked past all of the questionable coaching due to the year over year over year progress of taking it a step further each year.  Now, however, the resume is established and things are going backward.  I just really see no prospect for optimism moving forward.  For this reason, I really think the Colts need to move forward under a new coaching regime.

 

As for Grigson, imho he's made 3 blunders (3 first round pick mistakes) and missed on quite a few FAs, but by the same token, a lot of his bigger FA moves have been undone by injuries.  I am not as sold on him having to go. I really do like this past draft of his and he has also made quite a few good value moves over the years, which most people ignore for the mistakes he has made.

 

Irsay was clear last offseason when he re-signed Pags and Grigs, though, in saying their fates are now tied.   Thus, if Irsay pulls the trigger and replaces Pags, I will be very surprised if he doesn't also pull the pin on Grigs.

 

 

[deedub75]

Pagano has clearly lost the locker room. Irsay can keep Pagano and get all new players who might initially buy into Pagano's so called process or Irsay can get a new coach and try to win with the players we have. 

[SilentHill]

I'm loving the subtle words by Irsay, Fire them!

[deedub75]

12 minutes ago, rockywoj said:

That's the thing.  When he was first hired, I heard they hired Baltimore's DC.  Great I thought, Baltimore's defenses have been superb!  Wait, what's that, he was only DC this last year, having very little to do at all with building the great Ravens defenses?   Ugh, now I am dubious.

 

My dubiousness from 5 years ago now has turned to complete disappointment.   NOTHING about our defense for the past five years is formidable.  Add to that the fact that our offense, which should be prolific, has been disappointingly plodding at best and painfully predictable, and I think there is enough of an established 5 year record of coaching failure.

 

For the first three years of this regime, I looked past all of the questionable coaching due to the year over year over year progress of taking it a step further each year.  Now, however, the resume is established and things are going backward.  I just really see no prospect for optimism moving forward.  For this reason, I really think the Colts need to move forward under a new coaching regime.

 

As for Grigson, imho he's made 3 blunders (3 first round pick mistakes) and missed on quite a few FAs, but by the same token, a lot of his bigger FA moves have been undone by injuries.  I am not as sold on him having to go. I really do like this past draft of his and he has also made quite a few good value moves over the years, which most people ignore for the mistakes he has made.

 

Irsay was clear last offseason when he re-signed Pags and Grigs, though, in saying their fates are now tied.   Thus, if Irsay pulls the trigger and replaces Pags, I will be very surprised if he doesn't also pull the pin on Grigs.

 

 

 

In addition to Grigson's 3 first round blunders in 5 drafts with Luck being a no brainer, don't forget about the entire 2013 draft class. These blunders set the franchise back more than you think. 

 

They both should go. At this point, I'd welcome Polian back as long as he left his son at home. 

[theanarchist]

3 hours ago, Jared Cisneros said:

At this point, you can't do much worse. Of course you could, but it's worth the risk at this point. Grigson I'm on the fence about, but I feel he was forced to draft the type of players he did last draft. If Irsay didn't intercept and force him to protect Luck, it wouldn't of happened. Pagano is a giant piece of trash as a coach, and there's no way around it. He is a talent killer. No one develops under him, almost no one gets better under his coaching. Besides Vontae, who was already talented and had mental and character issues, I can't think of a single defensive player that has gotten better under Pagano's tenure that we drafted. Anderson was already talented and he did well his rookie year, so Pagano had little to do with him. Pagano knows nothing about defense compared to what the hype said about him. He has to go, and Irsay needs to make the correct decision on Grigson as well.

You really cant do much worse with Andrew Luck as your QB. Because even with the worst roster in the league, or bottom 5, he's still going to win you 6-7 games. Grigson, in my opinion and many others feel the same way, is 80% of the issue. This guy has blown more money, failed on more draft picks and free agents and just in general drug the overall quality of the roster into the gutter.

 

You go into a draft, a season, knowing that you have very little talent to rush the passer and yet you don't spend one single draft pick or free agent signing on a pass rusher? Everyone who is a Colts fan loves Robert Mathis, He's all time great Colt but everyone also knew that his career is essentially over. You have another guy in Trent Cole who is also done. Yet, you decide that your going to enter the season with these players as your best pass rushing options. I don't blame the coaching staff on the defense. The defenses lack of talent falls squarely on the job that Grigson has done or failed to do. I could go on and on about the lack of talent on the defensive side.

[OffensivelyPC]

1 hour ago, csmopar said:

yep.

Read the following, its long but worth the read. Now read Jim's interview linked in the OP again, tell me it doesn't sound similar.

That's a Mora

September 1, 2001
“A leader of men,” says Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay.

“A great motivator,” says team president Bill Polian, who hired Mora.

“He’s done wonders for us,” says his quarterback, Peyton Manning.

“The perfect father,” says son Jim, the defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody more disciplined—intellectually, athletically, emotionally or socially–than Jim,” says Jack Kemp, the quarterback-turned-politician who was Mora’s college roommate.

This month, Mora begins his fourth season in charge of the Horseshoes, and by many measures his tenure has been a success. Mora’s Colts orchestrated the NFL’s greatest single-season turnaround between Years One and Two, going from 3-13 to 13-3. They backed it up with a 10-6 mark last season and a second-straight playoff trip. Under Mora’s direction, Manning, running back Edgerrin James and wide receiver Marvin Harrison have evolved into what many esteemed observers regard as the most exciting trio in the NFL—the best since the Dallas Cowboys’ Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin.

But. There’s always a “but.”

But Aikman, Smith and Irvin won three Super Bowls, and Mora has yet to get his talented threesome past the first round of the postseason. Last year, it took a miraculous finish and a set of highly improbable circumstances for the Colts—preseason Super Bowl contenders—to even make the playoffs. And there’s the 26-22 overall record.

Joining a moribund franchise that had never seen a winning season in its 19 NFL years, he directed the New Orleans Saints to four playoff berths. But every one of those four teams nosedived in the playoffs.

With 119 NFL victories, Mora ranks 20th among all-time coaches, but he’s the only one with zero playoff victories.

So, is Mora’s glass of Gatorade half full or half empty?

“If he hadn’t done a good job, his teams wouldn’t have been in the playoffs in the first place,” says Kansas City Chiefs head coach Dick Vermeil, whose relationship with Mora began when both were assistants at Stanford. “They’d better appreciate him in Indianapolis, I’ll tell you that.”

Some don’t. Many do, including those whose opinions count most.

“Last year, the coach of one of our opponents said it was over—the Colts weren’t going to the playoffs,” says Polian. “Everybody had written us off. But Jim hadn’t. He kept preaching to the team that if you continue to play hard and work hard, you’ll get better, and we’ll be stronger at the end than some of the other people we play. He wouldn’t let them give up. That run we made down the stretch last year was entirely due to Jim Mora. He took that team by the scruff of its neck and dragged it over the finish line.”

The big boss, Irsay, who has proclaimed a desire for his Colts to win not just one Super Bowl but three in a row, appears equally committed to Mora, who has two years remaining on his initial five-year contract. “I am in total support of Jim Mora, because that’s a critical element to having a successful franchise,” says Irsay. “In every meeting I have with Jim, I tell him that I’m here to support him.

“All I know is this: In New Orleans, Jim was picked as coach by Jim Finks, who will be remembered as one of the great general managers in NFL history. And here, he was picked by Bill Polian, who is in that same vein. Now we’ve just got to continue to work to give him the kinds of players he needs.”

Not everyone feels likewise—particularly after last season when the Colts limped into the playoffs and lost to Miami. Up by 14 points, the Colts were done in by a Dolphins team led by quarterback Jay Fiedler, who will never be confused with Dan Marino.

Critics can find plenty of reasons why, starting with Mora himself. Some–including a few players–think he’s a rough, tough, gruff SOB of a coach. Some, fans mostly, think he’s even more conservative professionally than his pal Kemp is politically. Some think that at 66, Mora’s too old, no matter that his looks belie his age. Some consider him an unrelenting disciplinarian whose heart—if you can find it—is made of hard, cold steel.

Mora seems unfazed, sounding eager as ever for the stresses and challenges of coaching an NFL team, especially one earmarked as a serious title contender. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that I want to keep coaching,” he says. “I’m not ready to quit; I don’t feel any older than I did 10 years ago. In fact, I feel better than I did 10 years ago. And no question I’m a better coach. If not, I’ve wasted a hell of a lot of time.”

 

Mora doesn’t believe he’s wasted time when it comes to professional matters. His personal life, though, is another story. His career has distanced him from his wife of 40 years, Connie, as well as from his three sons and eight grandchildren, whom he adores. But the ex-Marine fends off inquiries about his family life with a verbal stiff-arm that Edgerrin James would appreciate. “I’m not going to get into it,” he says flatly. “Whatever’s happened in my [personal] life is my own fault. I don’t blame anyone.”

Nor is he proud of his status as the NFL’s oldest head coach, although he should be: It speaks to his perseverance and longevity in a cutthroat profession. “The only time it becomes a grind,” he says, “is when you’re losing. But that’s the way it is with everybody. I don’t care whether you’re 25 or 65–losing is the hardest part of the job.”

He fairly spits out the words. Just the thought of losing stokes his competitive fires. That intensity has been a trademark since his youth in Los Angeles, where his father, Mario, was a television film editor and his mother, Helen, was a homemaker. A younger brother, Dick, worked in the vitamin business and lives in Orange County. A younger sister, Marilyn, lives in Houston. Morals father, now 91, lives in Costa Mesa, California. Mora’s mother died in 1992.

No one in the family pushed Mora into football. In fact, he’s not even sure how he got to this point in his career, because there was no plan. That’s right: The guy who spends hours diagramming the X’s and O’s applies no such structure to his own life. “It just happened,” Mora says.

“It” started at University High School in west Los Angeles, where Mora was an excellent receiver and defensive end. Though an “all-city” player, he wasn’t dazzling enough to attract offers from California’s major colleges. Through a family friend, though, he heard of an 1,800-student NAIA college called Occidental, located in the L.A. suburb of Eagle Rock.

At Occidental, he met a quarterback whom he had played against in high school: Jack Kemp. The two hit it off instantly and went on to become fraternity brothers (Alpha Tau Omega), roommates and football co-captains. They were joined by Ron Botchan, who’s now an NFL umpire and a veteran of five Super Bowls. As best friends they played football and did pretty much everything together, including double- and triple-dating.

“A wild evening for us was to go out cruising in Pasadena,” recalls Kemp. “But we never went to bars, and there was no carousing. I don’t want to say we were goody-two-shoes, but it was the ’50s, and we all had a very strong work ethic.”

“I was a straight arrow,” Mora remembers. “During football season, I wouldn’t even drink a Coke. We weren’t hellraisers by any means.”

While at Occidental, Mora—and Botchan—joined the Marine Platoon Leaders program. After they graduated in 1957 they were commissioned as second lieutenants and sent to Quantico, Virginia to begin three years of active duty. Mora was trained as an infantry officer, but in those days, military bases fielded football teams and often attracted topnotch talent coming out of the colleges.

Soon Mora, from little Occidental, found himself alongside–and against-players from the major conferences in the country. And in addition to taking on military opposition, Quantico played college teams such as Boston College, Boston University and Holy Cross. “I started out as an eighth-string tight end and ended up starting,” Mora says.

During his required three years of active duty, Mora played one season at Quantico and two at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. When his military commitment ended, he returned to southern California and was contemplating a career in teaching and coaching when he learned of a job opening at his alma mater. A new coach, Vic Schwenk, needed one assistant. Mora got the job-which paid all of $500 per season—and coached the offensive and defensive lines. He also taught physical education at San Fernando Junior High while he and Connie began raising their sons Jim, Michael and Stephen.

Before his fifth year at “Oxy,” Schwenk resigned to become a full-time scout for the Los Angeles Rams, and Mora was hired at age 29 to become the head coach. He was happy. He was successful. His second Occidental team went 8-1 and finished 10th in the 1965 national small-college rankings.

The team’s performance drew the attention of John Ralston, then coach of Stanford (and later of the Denver Broncos), who tried to hire Mora as an assistant after his second year at Oxy. Mora, however, couldn’t get out of his contract. Still interested, Ralston called back the next year, and this time Mora was free to go.

“The dean of the faculty told me I was making a major mistake,” Mora recalls. “He said I could stay at Occidental the rest of my life, have tenure on the faculty, coach, settle in the community and have a nice life. But I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got to give it a shot.'”

 

Thus began an odyssey for Mora and his family. His stint at Stanford lasted only a year, after which, at the behest of his former Marine football buddy Chet Franklin (now with the Oakland Raiders), Mora joined Eddie Crowder’s staff at the University of Colorado. Six years later, when Crowder resigned, Mora was hired by Vermeil, who’d become head coach at UCLA. Mora stayed at UCLA only one season, then became defensive coordinator for the University of Washington in Seattle. There, Mora was instrumental in recruiting future NFL quarterback Warren Moon.

In 1976, Seattle had gained an NFL expansion team, the Seahawks. Mora was tiring of the recruiting grind and the amount of time it required him to spend on the road. His sons were now in junior high and high school. So when the Seahawks had an opening for a defensive line coach in 1978, Mora applied–and soon found himself in the National Football League.

In 1982, another opportunity “just happened.” Ron Meyer left SMU to become coach of the New England Patriots. One of his assistants who had worked with Mora at Colorado called him regarding a position for a defensive coordinator with NFL experience.

“That turned out to be the toughest move I ever made,” Mora says. “My family was in a comfort zone in Seattle, and we loved it there.” Taking the job was a 3,000-mile leap of faith. During his year with the Patriots, their defense ranked fifth in points allowed in the AFC. Again, Mora was content. Again, the telephone rang. It was Carl Peterson, a former staffmate at UCLA who had just become general manager of the Philadelphia Stars in the USFL, a start-up professional league. George Perles had been hired as their head coach, but left within weeks of the start of training camp to go to Michigan State. Was Mora interested? “No,” he replied. “Don’t bug me.” But Peterson persisted. “I finally said, ‘What the hell, I can always go back to the NFL if this thing (the USFL) doesn’t make it,'” Mora says.

The league didn’t make it, folding after three years. But Mora’s teams had played in three title games and won two. Mora was a hot property, attracting bids from the Eagles, the Cardinals and the Saints.

Jim Finks, the GM who had just guided the Bears to the 1985 Super Bowl, was one reason Mora opted for New Orleans. “We just instantly hit it off,” Mora said.

Before Finks and Mora—who were backed by the bucks of new Saints owner Tom Benson—the Saints had been the “Saints,” a sorry lot forever mired in the muck of mediocrity. But with Finks drafting shrewdly, and New Orleans filling its roster with a number of ex-USFLers whom Mora knew, New Orleans quickly became an NFC West division challenger to the San Francisco 49ers.

Blessed with a stout defense and an uncanny kicker (Ben Davis High School product Morten Andersen), Mora guided the Saints to seven straight non-losing seasons, two division titles and four playoff berths. He cultivated not only success but an image as well, one that followed him to Indianapolis: tough, conservative, unyielding, curt with the media and generally not an approachable guy. “I got a reputation,” Mora admits. “And it was just like Jim Finks always told me: If you get a reputation as an early riser, you can sleep until noon, because you will always be thought of as an early riser.”

As long as he was winning, Mora’s image didn’t particularly affect him. But after seven good years, his team began reverting. Without Finks (who became ill with cancer, left as GM, and later died) the franchise became a rudderless ship and went 7-9 in both ’94 and ’95. Then, in the middle of the ’96 season, after a loss to Carolina that dropped the Saints to 2-6, Mora unleashed the famous “Mora meltdown,” in which he blasted his team, his coaches and himself in largely bleepable terms. A day later he resigned.

“After Finks left, we kind of got screwed up as an organization, but I’m not blaming anyone else,” Mora says. “It just wasn’t the same. We didn’t handle things well, and we faltered. There were personal things in my life that didn’t help, but I won’t go into that. It just got to the point where I couldn’t go out there one more day. It had been building for a couple of years and I fought it, but I just got to the point where I couldn’t do it. “So I quit. I’m not proud of the fact, but I knew I was hurting myself, my family, the team and the organization. It was horribly hard, because I knew what I was doing, and knew the repercussions. But I did it because it was what I had to do.”

As the meltdown became national sports-talk sound-bite fare, Mora “kind of went into a shell.” He applied for two head-coaching jobs (San Diego and St. Louis, the latter of which hired his pal Vermeil) and got neither. NBC called about a color commentator gig, and Mora said yes. It was a way to stay involved in the league and see how other franchises were run, and Mora enjoyed the experience. The pay was good and the pressure was off. But it wasn’t coaching.

Coincidentally, the last game Mora worked for NBC was a Colts game. Shortly thereafter, Jim Irsay dismissed Bill Tobin as vice president and Lindy InFante as head coach. He hired Polian and told him to go find “a leader” for a young team that would inherit the first pick in the NFL draft.

Through Peterson, now GM of the Chiefs, Polian heard of Mora’s interest. “I said, ‘Wow, give me his number,'” Polian says. Thus ended the search. “We needed someone who could point this team in the right direction, who would give them the kind of professionalism and discipline they needed,” Polian says. “Jim Mora filled that bill completely.”

 

Mora arrived in Indianapolis and quickly began to obliterate the stereotypes. Yes, he was demanding, but not unfairly so. Sure, he brought discipline, but he brought it to a team sorely deficient in that area. Conservative? Not with a quick-strike offense and a defense that liked to gamble and blitz. In the meantime, the media learned that Mora was anything but inaccessible and aloof, and that on occasion, he could even display genuine sensitivity and charm.

“I think discipline’s important—you have to be demanding and consistent and tough and fair. But I’m no drill sergeant, and I don’t coach that way,” Mora says. “Conservative? I don’t think I am, at least not to a fault. We’re scoring a lot of points here but we are having trouble stopping people. Does that make me conservative?

“I’ve also tried to do better with the media. In New Orleans, I didn’t do a good job dealing with the media. I was sarcastic. I was curt. I wasn’t a total *, but I could have been better, especially with the local guys.”

In other words, even at 66, you’re not too old to learn and even change. And of course you’re not too old to coach. Mora remains consumed by his profession. Though he has an apartment in a gated community on the northside, he often spends nights at the Colts complex sleeping on his office couch. He’d like to carve out more time: to finish any one of the four novels he’s halfway through, to sharpen his “crappy” golf game, to visit children and grandchildren out West, to take former Indy-car driver Derek Daly up on an offer of lessons at his high-performance driving school. And he wishes he had more time for people. “I don’t want people to think I’m something special or on a different level,” he says. “I’m just a guy like everyone else. When they say ‘celebrity,’ that bothers me. I’m a football coach. I just coach and live.”

So is Mora’s glass half full or half empty? Stare into it long enough and you’ll see reflections: of dismal seasons, of marginal talent, of a not-so-long-ago era when the closest the Colts ever got to the Super Bowl was the distance between a couch and a television. Granted, the current Colts crop hasn’t come close, either–not even as close as the Jim Harbaugh and Tony Siragusa crew in 1995. But contemplate the potential of Manning, James and Harrison, and just try to keep the corners of your mouth from turning up.

Was last season disappointing? Most assuredly. Was it Mora’s fault? Perhaps. But with two years left on his contract, and an offensive triad with more offensive punch than NATO, Mora hardly needs to start checking the walls for handwriting.

“I love Indianapolis,” he says. “It’s a wonderful city, and the people have been super. I want to stay here. I want to win. I want to win it all.”

 

http://www.indianapolismonthly.com/news-opinion/thats-jim-mora-colts-football/

This is epic tl;dr.

[John Waylon]

The excuses are there. If Irsay is looking for optimism the excuses are there. New coaches, injuries, "a couple of bad bounces from 10-3"....

I'd be shocked to see it. Somehow pagano and grigson always seem to keep the benefit of the doubt on their side by finding some fishy silver lining.

*

[LJpalmbeacher2]

The season is OVER. Our record is 6-7 and we are 92% or something eliminated from any playoffs. What happens in our final 3 meaningless games should not matter at all.

The same way our last 2 meaningless games last season shouldn't have mattered. We unfortunately wound up 8-8, which bought us atleast one more season with pagano and griggs.

[coltsva]

Just a couple of bounces away from  3-10.