Stuck

 Light a candle this morning to Your Indianapolis Colts, who are exactly who we thought they would be before we were suckered into thinking they might be something else.

Remember? Remember when all the wise guys (including me) were talking about what a mess the roster was, and how this season was going to be a Learning Experience not only for prize rookie Anthony Richardson, but for the Colts in general?

Why, some people were saying they wouldn't win more than four games. 

Oh, yeah. That was me.

But then Richardson showed flashes and Zaire Franklin started tackling everything that moved, and Zach Moss turned out to be more than just a placeholder for the disgruntled Jonathan Taylor. And then Richardson went down but, hey, look, Gardner Minshew's throwing touchdown passes to Michael Pittman Jr., and Taylor's back, and ...

And stuff began to happen. The kind of stuff we thought would happen before we forgot we thought it.

Minshew started turning the ball over every time he blinked. The young secondary became the young-and-banged-up secondary, and even guys like Derek Carr started setting it on fire because the Colts' backup DBs turned out to be more Roddy McDowell than Ronnie Lott. 

Speaking of Carr, he picked on the Horsies yesterday for 310 yards, two touchdowns and a 133.3 quarterback rating, completing 70.4 percent of his throws. That was 45.7 points and 6.3 percentage points higher than his season averages so far.

So he got better in a hurry, and Alvin Kamara and Taysom Hill gashed the Colts for 122 yards and three scores on the ground, and the Saints won 38-27. It was the Horsies' third straight loss. And now they're 3-5 with the sadsack Panthers and Patriots next on the docket, and what do you do if you're them?

Some folks think it's time to pull the plug on the season, fire-sale the hell out of it at the trade deadline tomorrow, and look to next season. Because wasn't that how we all thought this should go back in early September?

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, they do have the Panthers and Patriots coming up. JT's doing JT things again. And there's a chance the front-line DBs will heal up, and that Minshew won't yak up the football the way he's been doing lately.

This is the very definition of stuck, if you're the Colts. So what do you do?

Hope you can win two winnable games and get to .500 through ten games, with an outside shot at squeaking into the playoffs? Or bail on the season and start looking to next year, when Richardson will be healed up and there might be a chance to do more than just squeak into the playoffs?

Even more crucial a question: Do you really at this point trust Chris Ballard to swing anything meaningful at the trade deadline? Or to engineer the 2024 draft any better than he's engineered his drafts so far?

Yeah, me neither.

And so we're back to our original starting point. Which is to say, the Colts really are exactly who we thought they would be.

Not very good.