FanPulse Week 1: Which NFL team goes worst to first in their division?; Fans losing confidence in Colts

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across the NFL powered by SurveyMonkey. As the season kicks off in just a few weeks, each week, we’ll send 32 polls to 100+ plugged in fans from each team. Colts fans, sign up HERE to join FanPulse.

The wait is over. The 2019 NFL preseason is in the books and the Indianapolis Colts are prepping for their Week 1 matchup with the Los Angeles Chargers.

This preseason wrap up/Week 1 FanPulse is also here for the first time of the regular season and we’ll continue these surveys each week as the 2019 season progresses.

In this week’s set of survey questions, we as are asked a couple of questions, and things have certainly changed nationally in regards to one of the questions in particular.

This week’s questions were:

• Which team will go from worst to first in their respected divisions?
• How confident are you in the direction of the Colts franchise?

Obviously, the former is a question we’re going to be asked each week throughout the season, but the national question’s results were quite interesting to say the least.

You might have to wipe your eyes in response to the graphic above had you been living under a rock for the past couple weeks. However, given the recent retirement news of the Colts’ franchise quarterback, these numbers have been inflated a bit with recency bias for my money.

Nobody knows, at this moment, what Jacoby Brissett will actually bring to the Colts’ offense this season as he gets the keys to the franchise so to speak. But, it’s pretty plain to see what the opinion of the national audience is about the team’s chances with Brissett under center.

The Jacksonville Jaguars received 52 percent of the national vote, with the next highest number being shared by the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders at 9 percent. Regardless of their individual reasons, I get why the results are what they are to some extent. On the other hand, it seems that the national audience is a lot higher on Nick Foles than they should be. Given the year-to-year parity of the AFC South, though, it’s ultimately a pretty easy option when you really consider divisional opponents of the other teams in question above.

Next, we look to see what the confidence level of the fanbase is surrounding the Colts with the franchise quarterback hanging up his cleats.

As you might guess the overall confidence level (73 percent) is down significantly amongst Colts’ fans as well. It does feel a bit of an overeaction though being as the Colts have an experienced quarterback taking the reins with an offensive mind such as Frank Reich molding the product we’ll see on the field.

It seems a little contridictive that people feel, on a national level, that Nick Foles can lead the Jaguars to the AFC South title — a quarterback who’s done virtually nothing in his career outside of the past two seasons — and simultaneously force the local fanbase to lose more than 20 percentage points worth of confidence in the past two weeks.

Reich molded Foles, a lifelong average passer, and now Brissett has been the primary guy with Luck out during the preseason, yet Colts’ fans can’t get behind him.

I don’t know that the national question would change all that much throughout the season simply due to the mitigating situations within each respected division, but it will be very interesting to see what the results following Week 1 will do for the Colts’ fanbase should they have a good showing and/or Brissett looks like an NFL starting caliber quarterback.