I want to give special thanks to Paul Kuharsky of ESPN.com today for his shout out to Blue Blood.

The book had a different tone than the blog -- it’s less edgy and more straightforward. It’s also quite thorough. And I think any Indianapolis fan would enjoy Dunlevy's detailed recounts and remembrances of the important games, developments and personalities for the team since the franchise’s relocation in 1984.

This is a good observation by Kuharsky.  The book is certainly less 'edgy' than 18to88.com.  That's by design as I was aiming at a larger, broader audience than the rough and tumble blog world.

Anyway, if you haven't checked out the book yet, please do.  If you want a signed copy, you have a couple of chances to get one the next two days, or you can write me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .  I leave for Argentina on the 9th of August, so make sure and write before then!

Just a reminder to our Fort Wayne/Northern Indiana readers to come out to Buckets tomorrow night for the Estel Walker Show on FM 100.1 in Fort Wayne.  We'll be talking and signing Blue Blood!

We'll be at Buckets Sports Pub on 6282 West Jefferson in Fort Wayne from 6-7 PM.  We'll sign some books, sell some books, and talk some Colts football!

Here's a promo for the show running on FM 100.1

ALSO:  INDY READERS DON'T FORGET FRIDAY!

On Friday,  from noon-2 pm I'll be at Teapots N Treasures at 7 Market Street (almost right on the Circle).  The owner, Donna, has books on sale now, so if you are downtown, stop in and say hi. The nice thing about this signing is it's extremely chick friendly, so impress your wife or girlfriend by saying you are taking her to a down town antique store for a book signing.  By the time she figures it out, it'll be too late!

The eyes of the NFL are once again on the contracts of Peyton Manning and Tom Brady, but this is not the first time it's happened.

Let's flash back to 2004.  Peyton Manning was just coming off his first MVP award and had led the Colts to the AFC Championship game.  He was set to be a free agent, but the Colts applied the franchise tag (uh, duh), and then negotiated the biggest deal in history.  Manning hauled in $99 million for the 7-year deal, including $34.5 million guaranteed.  At the time, people said that he'll probably never actually see all that $99 million (just because that's the way NFL deals usually work).  The other prevailing opinion was that the move would cripple the Colts toward the end of the deal and that they wouldn't be able to compete.

The next offseason, three time champion Tom Brady signed a 6-year $60 Million deal hailed as "team friendly".  In fact, some people used their contracts to argue that Brady was actually the better player and that he 'cared more about winning' (even though for four of the first five years Manning's deal had a better cap figure).  Now, five years later he's engaged in heated talks with the Patriots to get a new contract.

Let's examine what each team got for their money:

*With a year to go on both deals, this number will drop.  It's calculated on the total cost of the deal, not money paid to date.

How much did the Colts get from Manning over the length of this deal?  Consider that for the first 20 seasons the Colts were in Indianapolis, they appeared in the playoffs 7 times.  They won three division titles.  They won no conference titles.  They had just four 10 win seasons in the 20 years before Manning's contract.

Most of what people said about the deals proved untrue.  The Colts remained competitive (to say the least) despite the big contract.  The Patriots failed to win another Super Bowl and have gained a reputation as a team that doesn't pay its players.  Manning didn't fold under the 'pressure' of the biggest contract ever, immediately winning the MVP award the year after singing his deal.

Tom Brady's deal, for all its team-friendliness, has turned the relationship between team and player sour, as Brady (rightly) feels the team never spent that money he left on the table and now is unhappy about playing for a base salary of just a couple of million dollar this season. Brady feels like the team has been less than stand-up with him, and the team is unhappy with his lack of participation in offseason workouts. The Patriots, in year six of Brady's deal, are not considered prohibitive favorites to win their division, and many wonder if the team has lost its way.

Meanwhile, the Colts and Manning are quietly renegotiating another mega-deal which Jim Irsay promised will be the richest in the NFL.  The parties are all operating from a position of trust, and no one has the slightest question that a deal will be reached.  The Colts are prohibitive favorites to win the AFC South again, and are among the top contenders to make the Super Bowl again.

It's funny how life turns out.

The question has been asked recently if the 2010 Colts wideouts might be the best in franchise history.  While I link Oehser's article, he's not by far the only one to raise the issue.  Given the fact that the Colts run four deep, not counting Dallas Clark, it's a valid question to examine.  I debated whether or not to include Clark in this discussion, and ultimately, I've decided in favor of including him.  Clark isn't used like a conventional TE, so it's only reasonable to treat him like a wideout for the purposes of this comparison.

When considering what year Indy featured its best receiving corp, 2004 jumps off the page.  Not only was it the only team to feature three players with 10 TD receptions and 1,000 yard receiving.  While it can be argued that the 2004 production had everything to do with Manning and/or the rule emphasis, I think we can all say that Marvin Harrison in his prime, Reggie Wayne in his prime, a healthy Brandon Stokely and Dallas Clark in his prime were a freakishly good unit.

So let's stack the 2004 guys up against FOA 2010 projections for the unit and also against each guy having a career year (10% better across the board than the players previous best season).

#1s: 2004 Marvin Harrison v 2010 Reggie Wayne

These are just projections, of course, but using the FOA 2010 numbers gives us a baseline to work from.  Actually, at first I tried just guessing his numbers, and without looking at FOA first, I came up with roughly the same projections.  The "career year" numbers for each player will assume the player will have a 10% better year than the best year of their career to date. Given how much the Colts spread the ball around that year, it's not surprising that Harrison's numbers would be slightly lower than the projection for Wayne.  In a vacuum, I'd still take 2004 Harrison over 2010 Wayne, but the projections favor Reggie.  Let's call this a point for the 2010 Colts.

#2s:  2004 Reggie Wayne v 2010 Pierre Garcon

First off, I assume Garcon will start the season at #2, though I don't expect him to finish there.  Here's a big shocker:  FO numbers hate Garcon.  We've known that for awhile.  They expect him to actually go backwards.  While I certainly don't hope that happens, frankly it wouldn't cause me to even bat an eye.  But let's say they get it wrong, and he takes a major step forward.  Even if Garcon is 10% better than last year, the numbers aren't all that overwhelming.  The best possible numbers you could hope to get from him would along the lines of 1,000 yards, 70 catches and 7 scores.  That would be a MONSTER third season.  He's still not really close to 2004 Wayne.  I lean more toward the FO numbers, but either way, 2004 wins big, it's just a matter of degree.

#3s: 2004 Brandon Stokely v 2010 Anthony Gonzalez

There are lots of assumptions here.  We are assuming that Gonzo is #3, though I think he winds up as the #2 by the end of the year.  These numbers for Gonzo are more or less similar to what he did his rookie year, so FO is assuming some significant regression for him. Still, they see him as having a similar, though more efficient, year to Garcon. The way I see it, even if he has a huge breakout season and vaults to the clear #2 WR on the team, he's not going to come close to the kind of numbers Wayne did in 2004.  As you can see, any comparison with Stokely's numbers is probably unrealistic.  There's just no way to mark this down as anything but a massive win for the 2004 Colts.

#4s:  2004 Brad Pyatt v 2010 Austin Collie

Uh oh, no one is going to like this.  FO HATES on Collie.  Basically, they can't figure out how he gets on the field enough to see any passes.  For the point of comparison though, it's a little skewed anyway.  The 2004 Colts ran a lot of 2 TE sets, so Pollard was actually fifth on the team in catches.  However, the exercise was supposed to compare the WR corp, so I had to drop to the 2004 Colts #4 WR which was either Troy Walters (who Peyton mentioned recently) or Brad Pyatt.  Pyatt caught 2 balls, and Walters only caught 1, so either way it's a big win for 2010 (even with a bone jarringly bad projection from Collie).

TE Hybrid:  2004 Dallas Clark v 2010 Dallas Clark

Well, here's no surprise.  2004 Clark had to split catches with Marcus Pollard who also wasn't much of a blocking tight end.  No matter how you slice it, a healthy Clark in 2010 will be far more productive than Clark was in 2004.

So the final tally shows that the 2004 Colts were better at the two and three spot by a wide margin.  The 2010 Colts are better at the Tight End role by a wide margin.  We can debate 2010 Wayne v 2004 Harrison.  Most of this debate comes down to how Collie plays.  If Collie has the kind of year FO predicts (11 catches, 1 TD), then the 2004 Colts win this debate.  If he has a career year, then it's possible the 2010 Colts could challenge for the best group ever.

While I understand that many fans will have a hard time accepting the FO projections, especially for Collie and Garcon, it is also important to realize that all these players can't possibly have career years at the same time.  Big seasons from 2-4 probably mean a reduction in the production of Wayne and/or Clark.

News that the owners are trying to impose a rookie wage scale as part of the new CBA has fascinated me.

On the surface, this is an idea we can all get behind.  No rookie should be counted among the highest paid players in the league, obviously.  The argument is that contracts awarded to the first 10 or so players in the draft are so lucrative as to actually disrupt the development of players (they aren't hungry) and that awarding such a huge contract to an unknown commodity can actually hurt the development of a team rather than help it.  This is an easy sell to the fans of course, primarily because fans hate big contracts.  With few exceptions, fans naturally want players to make less money, in part because they believe that high ticket prices are directly the result of high wages.

The league has been pushing the idea to veteran players arguing that less money for rookies means more money for veterans.  Many veterans are angry about the huge contracts paid to rookies who haven't 'paid their dues' yet, so as long as the overall piece of the revenue pie paid to players doesn't change, some players are ok with rookies making less.  That means more for them, in theory at least.

The union has responded by asking for free agency to begin after three seasons.  On the surface, it's a curious counter offer, but it makes sense.  The rookie wage scale would only have a major impact on the first round, and especially only on the top of the first round.  Like it or not, most NFL stars come from the top picks in the first round.  On the whole, if teams could control their young stars for up to five years at bargain prices, it would have the effect of chilling salary growth.

Think about it: big contracts for rookies are used by veteran agents to negotiate bigger deals for older players.  "You can't offer my guy that!" they say. "So and so (a draft bust from the Chiefs, let's say) makes more than that!  Your offer is insulting!".  Under the current system, bad players are overpaid, but the good players are paid correctly.  No one in Atlanta argues over Matt Ryan's deal, for instance.  However, if you impose a rookie wage scale, teams get good players on the cheap, but busts don't hurt as much.

Imagine that same contract negotiation with a rookie wage scale in place.  Star veteran is up for a new deal.  He's a good player, but not elite.  The team compares him to another player drafted in the top 10 who has made multiple Pro Bowls, but is still on his rookie deal.  They say, "You aren't as good as so and so!  He's only making $1.5 million a season!  Why should we pay you more than him?"  So, a rookie wage scale in this case would actually serve to hold down the salaries of veteran players.

It would also lead to a lot more Chris Johnson style holdouts.  Johnson got paid a deal that was way under market value thanks to his low draft status.  Obviously unhappy with the deal, he spent a contentious offseason trying to leverage himself more money that he felt he earned.  The situation eventually resolved itself, but not without some acrimony.  Under a rookie wage scale, elite top of the drafts talents would reguarly out perform their deals, and if they remained under team control for 5 years, lots of conflict will enuse.

All of this is why the Union wants free agency faster.  The life span of an NFL player is short.  If they can set players free faster, they'll have a better chance of securing that first big free agent contract.  It might hurt the Sam Bradfords of the world, but the Chris Johnsons and Antoine Bethea's of the world would love it.  It would give them a chance to get paid earlier in their careers, and also offset the effect of the rookie wage scale.  A four or five year vet would no longer still be on his rookie deal, thus negating a negotiating tactic management would otherwise have as I described above.

The downside for the teams is that they would have to make decisions on players, especially quarterbacks, very quickly in their careers.  Could you afford to let the number 1 overall pick sit for a year if you knew you only had him for three years before you had to decide whether or not to resign him?

The truth is that the current system is the best possible situation for the Colts.  Because the team routinely drafts near the bottom of the first round, they don't feel the effects of big salaries to rookies.  Plus, they get to mine the bottom of the draft for cheap talent that they control for five years.  While a rookie wage scale makes sense league wide, if the price of obtaining it is free agency after 3 accrued seasons, it could turn out to be the worst possible result for the Colts and their fans.

The bottom line is that while we all agree the system of draft pick compensation is broken, it's easy to see how even this apparently simple fix dramatically favors the owners in the long run.

It's just one more reason the league is headed toward a work stoppage.

Peter King talks quarterbacks today.

As part of his MMQB column, King tries to figure out who the best QB in the business is.  He invariably settles down to an examination of Manning and Brady:

One of the things I considered was the recent playoff records of Brady and Manning. While Brees is 4-1 in his last five playoff games, the two kings are struggling. Look at the last five playoff outings of Manning and Brady:

QB Last 5 Comp.% TD-Int Yards per att. Peyton Manning 2-3 .665 10-4 7.48 Tom Brady 2-3 .654 9-7 6.07

Again, why would you call those numbers for Manning "struggling"?  The numbers are great.  Are you worried about the 2-3 record?  Maybe that has nothing to do with the QB, PETE!  He also got the numbers wrong.  Manning's YPA is 7.74 in those games, and his rating is 97.4.  Why King didn't bother to print that, I don't know.  I can tell he did the calculation because he had all the components right there.  I suspect that King realized that if he posts that Manning has had a 97.4 rating and the Colts went 2-3 that the entire house of cards of blaming the QB for everything that happens in the playoffs would collapse around him.  Yeah, he's been "struggling in the playoffs" for sure.

By the way, Brady's rating over the same span is 82.3.

King rebounds by showing how Manning basically crushes Brady at most everything, but nothing he writes explains why he chooses either guy over Brees.  Generallly speaking, I'm pro-Brees, and if the kinds of standards most people use to evaluate QBs, Brees has to be no worse than #2 in the NFL right now.  I suppose King wants to see more, and his rankings are more legacy based, but then you have to have Favre over Brees.  Frankly the whole thing feels utterly arbitrary.

In recent days it has become clear that the owners are desperately hoping to add two more games to the NFL regular season.  It's become a point of some contention for the players union and apparently among some fans.  Before judging the impact of the idea, it's important to understand the roots of it.  The current CBA crisis is essentially about revenue, though the owners are trying to obscure the issue by bringing up a host of secondary complaints like HGH testing, a rookie wage scale, and an 18 game season.  However, when you strip it all down to its core, the only real issue is who is getting what money.

The 18 game season has been something the owners have considered for a long time, but really gained momentum after Roger Goodell saw the 2008 preseason.  If you'll remember, the 2008 preseason was particularly horrid, especially in Indianapolis, where Peyton Manning did not play.  The Colts opened a brand new stadium and promptly put a hilariously bad product on the field.  The truth is that preseason games are a crime against season ticket holders, and Goodell knew it.  People hate playing full price to two games that are quite simply unwatchable.  However, the owners LOVE the extra revenue they generate with preseason games and won't ever voluntarily give that up.

There seemed only one solution: drop one or two preseason games and replace them with regular season games.  This won't lead to any additional gate money, but it will lead to increased television revenue.  The extra TV money could then help off set the massive gap between what the players want to make and what the owners want to pay them.  Additionally, the thought was that the fans wouldn't mind for two reasons:

1.  Who is going to argue with more football?

2.  The value of a season ticket increases.  As much as some people want to complain that this move wouldn't help the fans, it's simply not true. Currently, season ticket holders pay full price for two games that are typically so bad that you can't give away tickets.  Have you ever tried to get someone to use your fourth preseason game ticket?  Trust me, you aren't getting any money back, and you're lucky if you can even find someone to use the ticket.  Even if an 18 game season led to increased ticket prices (which would violate most economic principles...more supply rarely leads to higher prices), at least you'd be able to resell them at regular season rates.  Under an 18 game season, season ticket holders would still pay for 10 games, but they would get 9 real ones instead of 8.

On the surface, it seemed like a golden plan.  It helps the league settle the revenue issue, and it gives the fans more football.  In the past two years, however, it seems that the debate has shifted to a different front: player safety.  As information about concussions continues to roll in, people are more wary than ever about exposing players to more games.  To this time, this remains the only valid argument against the 18 game season.  However, it's not as sound as one might think.

What impact trading two preseason games for two regular season games will have on the overall health of NFL players remains to be seen.  What's interesting, however, is that the union has begun lobbying against this plan with guns blazing, trying to paint the owners as uncaring about the physical risks the players undergo.  When the plan was first discussed, the response wasn't nearly so severe as it is now.

In fact, the entire issue has become little more than a political chess piece in the battle for the hearts and minds of the fans.  As much as some people might worry about things like records, numbers in the NFL have little value.  Few fans can rattle off any single season NFL records, other than perhaps the touchdowns thrown mark.  Records just aren't as hallowed in the NFL as they are in baseball because the men who built the NFL played much shorter seasons.  The NFL has had season of all sorts of different lengths from the beginning, and there is simply no tradition to keep the league locked into a 16 game season.  Arguing that fans don't remember anyone who played before 1980...well, that's just nonsense and hilariously insulting to the men who REALLY built the NFL. After all, pro football has been the most popular sport in the United States since the 1960s.

Will a longer season lead to more injuries?  It certainly leads to more opportunity for players to be injured, however it's foolish to claim that teams will look like MASH units by week 18.  After all, playoff teams currently play up to 20 weeks a season, and they aren't necessarily riddled with third string backups playing significant downs.  Besides that, if the only concern was more injuries, shouldn't the NFL CUT the current schedule back to a more traditional 14 or 12 games season?  After all, we'd see fewer injuries that way.

Of course, that won't happen.  Why?  Everyone wants/needs the money, and fans love football. Frankly, if the fans are unwilling to see the season trimmed down to fewer games, why should they care if it is lengthened?  Obviously, injury prevention is not so important that people are clamoring to shorten the season.  16 games certainly wasn't chosen out of any consideration for player health.  It would have to be proven statistically that players would suffer a greater rate of injury in game 18 than in game 16.  If players' injury rate is not any greater, and more injuries occur simply because of more opportunity, then there can be no objection to playing a longer season.

I suspect that whether one supports an 18 game season or not probably has a lot to do with whether you pay for season tickets or not.  An 18 game season would actually add value to the season ticket of a hard working fan.  Unless it can proven that injury rates rise dramatically from game 16 to game 18, there is probably no stopping a longer season.

I for one, won't miss that scintillating final preseason matchup with the Bengals every year.

All off season long, we've been debating how good the Colts receiving corps is and how good Collie and Garcon are specifically. Well, the Football Outsiders have a thing or two to say about that.

In discussing their new "Plus/Minus" stat, they use the Colts to discuss the issue of team context in evaluating raw numbers.  Plus/Minus is an adjusted statistic that shows how many catches a player had over the average for the number of times he was thrown to at various distances.  FO has determined that Plus/Minus depends heavily on context because the quarterback throwing the pass plays a big part as to whether the passes were caught.

Today, they discuss the Colts specifically to see which receivers were actually good, and which ones were only good because Peyton Manning threw the passes.

The bad news for Collie and Garcon?  They weren't actually very good last year.  On a raw basis, Pierre Garcon had a raw +/- of 0.2.  In other words, he basically caught exactly the number of passes that an average receiver would have running the same routes.  However, when you adjust for the fact that Manning was throwing him the ball, Garcon's number plummets to -6.4, worst on the team.  That means that on the season:

Pierre Garcon is another excellent example of how context can make a player with below-average hands look good. Garcon's plus-minus was about league-average relative to the distance and nature of his routes, but once you factor in the context of his offense, he was actually pretty mediocre at catching the ball in 2009. That blends well with DVOA, which saw Reggie Wayne and Collie well ahead of Garcon a year ago.

Actually, the news for Collie isn't much better.  Collie had a +/- of 3.4 (three catches better than average).  However, once you account for Peyton, that number drops to -2.8, ahead of only Jacob Tamme and Garcon.  Of Collie they said,

There were 465 qualifying targets thrown to the remainder of the Colts' players. On those plays, the rest of the team accrued 33.7 catches above expectation. On a per-play basis, that's 0.07 catches above average; because that's higher than Collie's average, it means that Collie was worse than his teammates.

Subtract the difference and multiply it by Collie's 86 targets and you'll find that the tune of his numbers has changed. While Collie was catching passes at an above-average rate according to both catch rate and plus-minus, adjusting the figure for his team context produces a plus-minus figure of -2.8, a figure below what his Colts teammates were producing.

Now, not all the Colts suffer in this metric.  Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark come out just fine.

Team-adjusted plus-minus tells a distinct story for the 2009 Colts -- Wayne and Dallas Clark caught a lot of passes at a well-above-average level, and everyone else was average or worse -- but the team's statistical signature isn't always so similar. In 2008, for example, Wayne's raw numbers declined, and his plus-minus figures were no different. He had a raw plus-minus of 10.4 on 124 targets; adjust that for the team rate, though, and he was only at 2.1. Anthony Gonzalez led the team, with a team-adjusted plus-minus of 4.4 catches above average on 77 targets.

In Wayne's dominant 2007 season, well, he was a one-man wrecking crew. His 18.3 raw plus-minus was met with mostly mediocre performances by the rest of the offense, producing a team-adjusted plus-minus of 16.7 that led the league. It's the second-best figure of the four-year stretch we have plus-minus available for, having been narrowly beaten out (16.74 catches above average to Wayne's 16.72) by a receiver in 2009. One of the main reasons why Wayne's figure is so high is because the only other Colts receiver with more than 50 qualifying targets that year was Dallas Clark, who had a raw plus-minus of -5.6 on 94 targets. After adjusting that for the team context, Clark was at a very disappointing figure of -9.5 catches, the worst figure in the league that year.

That all jives with what we know.  Clark had a bad thumb in 2007 and led the league in dropped passes, including the final damning drop of the season in the playoffs against the Chargers.

So, when it comes to evaluating 2009, Manning's performance with Collie and Garcon catching passes is truly remarkable.  Whereas by most metrics, Anthony Gonzalez has elite skills, Collie and Garcon were basically "just guys" in 2009.  Now, they could conceivably keep improving, and in the case of Garcon I consider that likely or at least possible.  However, there was nothing about the performance of either player that screams out "this is an elite wide reciever!".

So for all the Patriots fans who ever screamed about Manning only being great because of his 'weapons', now you know what 18 would do if he had to throw to 'other guys'.

He won 14 straight games, an MVP award, and took his team to the Super Bowl.

This week I spoke to David James, aka the Predictor.  James makes a living out of analyzing sports and using his own unique brand of statisical and scouting analysis and intuition to make bold calls.  James recently came out with NFL rankings for the coming year.  James likes the Colts to return to the AFC Championship game where he asserts they'll take on the Buffalo Bills.

James is known for his accurate claims and unique insights, though he freely admits that he obviously can't predict injuries.  The following is a summary of our conversation as it related to the Colts.

• James is very high on Anthony Gonzalez and sees him having a huge year.
• James does not think much of Don Brown.  He expects him to seriously disappoint fans, calling him "a solid college player".  He wanted Indy to take Beanie Wells.  He felt that the excuse that Brown 'fit the Colts' system' didn't out weigh how explosive Wells is.
• He projects this to be a huge year for Peyton Manning, but there's one problem.  He sees this as being Peyton's last really big year.  In his eyes, the sum total of all Manning's nicks and dings over the years will catch up to him sooner rather than later.
• He things Jim Caldwell is a good coach, but he's very high on Ron Turner. He says that Ron didn't have the weapons to work with in Chicago.  Because of this, he sees a big year for all Indy's wideouts.  He also sees a future in head coaching for Turner, possibly with the Colts after Caldwell, but definitely with some other team.
• He noted that Norv Turner is an exemplary coordinator, but a mediocre head coach.  I'm sure we all can agree with that.
• He projects a massive slide for the Saints down to 20th.
• He feels the Colts' offensive line is underrated and doesn't get the attention it deserves.
• He stressed how important it was for the Colts to get a deal done with Mathis because the defensive line isn't the same without him.
• Finally, he called Joe Addai "that stud from LSU".  Again, no argument here.

James is enthusiastic and confident in his predictions.  While many of his projections are controversial, he did show an impressive depth of knowledge about the team.  He was coy about exactly how he achieved his predictions saying that he wasn't about to give up the "keys to the kingdom" that many teams would pay dearly for.  He did make it clear that he based his predictions on a mixture of complex statistical analysis and gut feel.

We'll track James's predictions through to the end of the season and see if he's earned his moniker.

Blue Blood is hitting the road! Join me next Thursday (the 29th) night for the Estel Walker Show on FM 100.1 in Fort Wayne.

We'll be at Buckets Sports Pub on 6282 West Jefferson in Fort Wayne from 6-7 PM.  We'll sign some books, sell some books, and talk some Colts football!

So all you Fort Wayne, Warsaw, Columbia City and Northeast Indiana readers, come out and say hi!