Patriots didn’t win a laugher, but Colts still ended up a laughingstock

Colts safety Colt Anderson is tackled by a wave of Patriots defenders.

By Chad Finn and Boston.com Columnist @GlobeChadFinn

October 19, 2015

4 minutes to read

Colts safety Colt Anderson is tackled by a wave of Patriots defenders.

COMMENTARY

After months of anticipating the delivery of a particularly vicious brand of football vengeance, it turns out it wasn’t necessary for the Patriots to once again embarrass the Colts.

The Colts Clown Show, led by ringmaster Chuck Pagano under the garish big top of Lucas Oil Stadium, proved perfectly capable of embarrassing itself, and in a manner so staggeringly inept that the memory of their blunder will have more staying power than any 60-point thumping Tom Brady and friends might have administered.

You know what I’m talking about. You saw it happen live, you rewound the DVR a half-dozen times immediately after the fact to make sure that play indeed happened. You’ve gleefully watched it countless other times today, with the whole ridiculous sequence in no danger of getting old anytime soon.

I’ll provide you a brief synopsis, if only so you can rehash it in your mind’s-eye and snicker at the multi-faceted absurdity of it all again. Late in the third quarter, the Colts trailed the Patriots 27-21. Indianapolis brought out its punt team for a fourth-and-three play from its own 37-yard-line. Rather than lining up in a conventional formation, the Colts sent everyone wide right — except, that is, for Griff Whalen and Colt Anderson, by trade a receiver and a safety, respectively. They set up as the center and the quarterback in this what-in-the-heck-is-this scenario.

The plan, Pagano later explained, was to perhaps catch the Patriots with 12 men on the field, or draw them offsides, or … something … anything different from the debacle that ensued. What actually happened was this: Whalen, for some reason that remains unclear, snapped the ball. Rather than bursting out in fits of laughter, Patriots special teamers Brandon Bolden and Jon Bostic instead kept their composure and buried Whalen at approximately the same time the snapped football hit his palms.

The play was a failure of everything: Common sense, coaching, execution, awareness of the moment … every element that separates the perennially savvy franchises from the self-destructive ones. It’s not just that the Patriots knew how to defend what was supposed to be an unexpected trick play better than the Colts knew how to execute it. It’s that the play wouldn’t even have counted had the Patriots failed to stop it. The formation, which the Colts had apparently practiced for months, was deemed illegal.

Indianapolis’s disaster prompted New England’s laughter. The Colts were hoping to punch the Patriots in the mouth. Instead, they ended up as a punch line.

Al Michaels, calling the game for NBC, summed up the whole scenario with appropriate befuddlement in real time: “What in the world … flag is down … you tell me.’’

If only the Sabols were still with us. They would have had a new edition of NFL Films’ Football Follies ready to go by this morning.

By the time the Patriots scored what would be the clinching touchdown a few plays later, the goofy (I’m running out of adjectives here) play call had become an all-time blunder, a miscalculation so blatant that you wondered whether Darrell Bevil had phoned in the suggestion to Pagano from The Idiotic Playcallers Headquarters, which are rumored to be located somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

Poor Griff Whalen and Colt Anderson, rocketed from obscurity to a place of infamy, their names and antics seeming straight out of a Dan Jenkins novel.

The play itself sent us searching for context, comparing it to the other follies that are already so familiar.

The early conclusion: This doesn’t quite fall into the same genre as the buttfumble, but it trumps the good-idea-bad-outcome fourth-and-2 play in ’09 as the most curious call in a Patriots-Colts matchup. Let’s call it even with the Yepremian-duck-throwing, Marshall-running-the-wrong-way, Mornhinweg-taking-the-wind, and Pisarcik-handing-off-to-Csonka’s-thigh play calls for now. Only time and our thorough consideration through the years can determine its precise rank. We promise to do our part.

The irony is that the trick play — as well as an onside kick that nearly worked — confirmed that it was the Colts, and not the vengeful Patriots, who entered the game determined to utilize every clever wrinkle in the playbook. The consensus perception entering the game was that it would be the Patriots who would use their full arsenal of plays and players to pile up as many points as possible. Perhaps, in speculating on massive margins of victory, we mixed up their perceived desire to destroy the Deflategate instigators with the likelihood of them actually doing so.

The Colts are a talented if flawed team — an AFC finalist a year ago, as you may have heard — so beating them at their place, with few fortuitous breaks and too many injuries, counts as a significant achievement. The Patriots were content to run the ball and run out the clock late, even as the Colts teased their fans by pulling within one score.

Should they run into each other in the playoffs, the Patriots will not be lacking for creative options in the playbook that will still be unfamiliar to the Colts. They kept it pretty simple on Sunday night, to the point of underutilizing tight end Rob Gronkowski and running back Dion Lewis.

If and when they meet again, maybe that will be the time for the Patriots to unleash everything and everyone, to mercilessly dominate when the stakes are much higher.

For now, though, Sunday’s outcome was more than enough. The Patriots didn’t beat the Colts in a laugher, but they did help them morph into a laughingstock. It’s not quite payback for putting us all through months of Deflategate nonsense, but it’s sure sweet enough for now.

Chad Finn can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeChadFinn.