Popular or not, Indianapolis Colts earned the right to choose their late-season approach

Indianapolis Colts QB Peyton Manning (David Duprey/AP Photo)

They have taken their message to the fans, the Indianapolis Colts have.

First QB Peyton Manning on Sunday, and the next day President Bill Polian, expressed to Colts fans that past is past – or, as Polian put it, “the past is prologue" – and that if the Colts are to achieve what they have worked throughout the season to put themselves in premium position to achieve, fan support is critical.

It was a necessary message, the right message, and because fans are by nature loyal sorts, they will support the Colts when they play host to an AFC Divisional Playoff game a week from Saturday.

One thing the Colts didn't do in the past few days was issue an apology, and there was a simple reason. They didn't owe them one.

Fans cheer. Coaches coach. Administrators administrate, and woe to the administrator who lets the fickle winds of fan opinion dictate football decisions. The Colts didn't not listen to fans in recent weeks. They just opted to not do what the fans wanted.

Like it or not, that's not only the right of the people who run the Colts. It's their obligation.

Just what a team owes fans – and indeed, what teams owe media, players and other teams in the league, for that matter – has been much-discussed in the wake of the Colts' decision 10 days ago to remove starters from a winnable late-season game against the New York Jets.

The Colts, leading by five points late in the third quarter, removed Manning and other front-line players, subsequently losing for the first time in 23 regular-season games. Gone was the chance at an unbeaten regular season. Fierce was the outcry, from immediate booing of the home team at Lucas Oil Stadium, to angry callers to Polian's radio show the next night, to harsh, critical commentary from the national media throughout the week.

So fierce was the backlash that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke a week later of finding ways to legisltate or encourage teams to play starters in meaningless, late-season games.

That's the reason for the timing of this entry, written a week after I'd sort of wanted to stop addressing this issue.

Because that's where the issue went from tiresome to silly.

While it was fine for Goodell to listen to fans, not only is there no way to legislate this issue, it would be wrong – and unfair – to try.

The conundrum here is that people -- the commissioner included -- have come to believe that somehow the NFL needs to motivate teams to play front-line players at the end of the regular season, as if somehow by not doing so teams are affronting the integrity of the game. I get the argument, but it is a narrow argument where a broader point is the more accurate point, and that's this:

The teams are not harming the integrity of the game, because in the big picture, they're not “tanking” anything. They're simply making decisions toward the stated, ultimate obvious goal of any team, which is to win the Super Bowl.

What has glummed up the works, to state the obvious, is this whole regular-season-record thing. I get that the idea of 19-0 is enticing, but except when there's a zero at the end of it, regular-season record in the NFL is pointless. Except in this rare case of 16-0, does anyone really remember a team's record? Do you remember that the 1989 San Francisco 49ers went 10-6 in the regular season, or do you remember Joe Montana's career-defining drive to beat the Bengals in the Super Bowl?

Do you remember the Green Bay Packers went 9-4-1 in 1967, or do you remember that they won the Ice Bowl in the postseason, and capped the greatest dynasty in NFL history with a fifth World Title in seven years in the second Super Bowl that postseason?

There's a not-so-subtle irony here, and that's this:

The Colts, a team criticized for a decade for failing to win in numerous postseasons after numerous successful regular seasons, is now being criticized for caring about the postseason.

Fans and media deal in quick hits, easy-to-digest soundbites, and when the Colts opted not to beat their chest and pursue a perfect season, the easy-to-digest criticisms were that they didn't want to make history, that they were hypocritical in their thinking, or – perhaps silliest of all – that they betrayed their fans because they didn't adhere to the wishes of a mob mentality that wanted 19-0 for message-board bragging rights and history. The reality is that the Colts wanted to make history -- playoff history, the only history that to them matters.

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