Unofficial Colts vs. Bengals Pre-game thread
 

AR looked great on 1st TD drive hitting Mitchell for a TD.

Latu also making his presence felt in with a sack.

Not so much on offense since then

A little concerning our first string offense can't do anything against their 2nd. & 3rd. stringers. Our O-Line is not impressive, very alarming considering.

I know there is no game planning for this game, so hope this is not what to expect, or it will be a long frustrating season.

Looks like AR and Mitchell are not on the same page yet. Mitchell looked good that first drive, since then stopped on one route and missed a very catchable ball. Frustrated AR a little bit.

O-line is disappointing for sure.

o


If the Colts play well in a pre-season game, it's a sign of things to come.

If the Colts play badly in a pre-season game, they're just getting the rust out, and they'll be OK when the real games start.

o

All I know is, their 2's and 3's beat our 1's handily.

ARs inconsistent accuracy is going to drive us nuts at times.

Game planning will help, but like that miss to Mitchell... That's a huge gain we left out there and it's going to be frustrating.

o


Going for it on 4th down in the final seconds of the first half was the right call. It's pre-season, and nobody cares who wins the game ...... I'll never understand head coaches that send their kicker out there to boot a 20-yard field goal in a pre-season game, because that does absolutely nothing to test the kicker.

o

Yeah, considering they played against backups the whole time our 1st string O was pretty much a shit show :cool:.

Starting offense was very disappointing. There was some plays by Alex Pierce though. The misses to Pittman , AD and Granson, just can't happen!

Shrader just banged a 56 yarder right down Broadway. I'd have a very short leash on Matt Gay

Unfortunately, Ballard paid Gay a ton of money. Shrader does look pretty damn good though. Everything is right down the middle with him.

And Shrader hits another from 41 that looked like it would have been good from 55+.

Yeah, per OTC it would be a $9.9M cap hit, but since it would be a post June 1st cut I think $4m of that would be pushed to next year. Hopefully Gay quits sucking ass :cool:

I was very disappointed in AR.

I think most teams played their starters in game two rather than game three. To me that makes more sense, playing your starters against 2nd and third stringers and looking like shit is not much of a moral booster! Plus if you do well, you wonder if it was only because it wasn't against their starters. Anyway, 17 days until the first game is too long in my opinion, I'm not sure what to expect against Houston, but I will be surprised if all of a sudden we are really good when we haven't looked so great so far! Another wasted preseason, I'm not sure how much our starters benefitted from any of it?

From what I’m seeing this team is still gonna revolve around JT

I suspect AR will do a lot more running in the regular season, which will change how the offense looks.

He’s got a strong arm, but not a great arm. He’s very inconsistent, and doesn’t seem to be able to keep calm. I am not sure he has a good grasp on the routes that he’s throwing to.

dude needs to get his feet right. not sure if he will ever fix it but yeah, he will probably always be annoying with inaccuracy

still I think he will be really fun to watch. McNabb was annoying with his accuracy but as fun to watch

It's like pulling teeth trying to find how many practices we've had/how many we have remaining (per the CBA) before the Texans. But they, especially AR, need full speed, game-like reps. They get 14 total in the preseason.

Steichen can do magic. It doesn't take much for things to look way different. With the full arsenal available, there's a lot of clay for him to work with.

If you haven't, check out Brett Kollman's breakdown about the difference between the defenses PHI faced vs. what IND faced because of Minshew. We should see something we haven't before. I'm excited to see how it goes.

For sure. That Mitchell pass I was talking about was exactly that. Just fundamentals making him sail an easy pass. He has the ability to make stupid difficult passes.

If he could just nail down the easy shit, he can be lights out good.

Coats!

Got a link?

Ah, don't make me work on a Saturday. I think it was somewhere in the beginning of their Bootleg Football preview of the team. It was called "Colts are very, very good" or something on YouTube.

One of us posted a thread for that vid here.

@Racehorse, this is the gist of it (I'll try not to butcher it)...


The Frank Reich tree had the three teams (Colts, Eagles, Panthers) that had the highest rate (over 50%) of running any single formation. In this case, it's 2x2, so 2 receivers on each side of the field.

2x2 leads to seeing a lot of Cover-3 theoretically, so they line up 2x2 trying to see Cover-3 because RPO's work best against that defense. IND and PHI are #1 and #2 in RPO.

BUT, the Colts and Eagles actually saw very little Cover-3. Eagles got Quarters and the Colts got Man-Coverage. Because Minshew was not a running threat, the coverage could turn their back on him and stick to receivers. You can't play Man against Jalen Hurts or Anthony Richardson, generally.

So the idea is, what Steichen actually wants to do, is face Cover-3 and Quarters like he saw in PHI. So he needs the running threat to avoid Man and also the deep ball threat to beat creeping safeties.

Minshew had neither of those qualities. AR has both. So what we run should look different because what defenses we show us should look different. And Steichen is very good at adjustments and using motion, which PHI struggled with after he left.