On organizational philosophy, hubris, and expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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