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The main reason it's hard to picture the Colts going 16-0 is because it's fairly clear they really don't care about going 16-0.
"It’s really not that important," Colts Head Coach Jim Caldwell said this week. "You’ve seen a lot of great records during regular season. What really counts in this league is one ultimate goal. That is to win it all. Once you get to the playoffs, you have to do something with that opportunity. Going undefeated during the regular season has never been a high priority.”
And make no mistake:
That's a lot more than What You'd Expect Caldwell to say or What Coaches Are Supposed to say. That's reality around the Colts. Clinching division titles and homefield advantage is important to them, but undefeated seasons, not so much. There wasn't much emphasis on it in 2005 when they began 13-0, and while there was disappointment after a Game 14 loss to San Diego that season, it wasn't sky-is-falling stuff. Seeing New England attain the unbeaten regular season two years later then lose in the Super Bowl only reinforced the idea -- and likely made it an easier sell to any players who wanted to focus on it. Before New England '07, it was easy to say only winning the Super Bowl mattered and that 16-0 meant nothing, but in January of 2008, the Colts and the rest of the league saw how true it really was. This week, Colts President Bill Polian said this week he believes not a bit in the notion that somehow resting players in meaningless games in 2005, 2007 and 2008 somehow led to first-game postseason losses in those seasons.
"The idea that you somehow lose momentum or that you get rusty has no basis in fact, none whatsoever," Polian said. "It's just a theory and it is great to be spoken about and written about, but the facts say otherwise."
The guess here is if -- and it's still obviously an if -- the Colts reach a point this season where they have clinched homefield and are still unbeaten, you'll see the play it as they did in 2005 against San Diego, a game in which all healthy players played, but borderline healthy players did not.
That's one issue that will make an undefeated season difficult. Another is motivation -- not surface motivation, but deep-down, desperate motivation -- the kind it often takes to win close games in the NFL against contending teams. Although the Colts gave a big-time effort in that game -- a 26-17 loss -- they still seemed to lack at least an infinitesimal amount the urgency that'd gotten them to 13-0. That was a team that year that won 13 consecutive games by seven or more points -- no team in NFL history had accomplished that feat -- and it seemed more than coincidence that they clinched in Jacksonville the week before, then suddenly lost the following week. Once the urgency was gone, the adrenaline/edge needed to beat a team still in contention in a a game without playoff implications seemed to be gone, too.
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