Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian: Other teams will play the Colts as Miami did

Indianapolis Colts TE Dallas Clark (AP Photo)

Indy Football Report Editor John Oehser takes a look at the comments Tuesday night of Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian on his weekly radio show following a Week 2 victory over Miami . . .

Indianapolis Colts President Bill Polian said there's a reality about the Colts these days, and that reality is there are teams that are going to play offense against Indianapolis in a strikingly conservative fashion.

One of those teams, as it turned out, was the Miami Dolphins.

Which was one of the the reasons Polian -- in his 12th season as the Colts' president -- wasn't panicking after a 27-23 victory over the Dolphins Monday, a game in which the Colts allowed 239 rushing yards and held possession just 14:53, the lowest in the NFL for a winning team since 1977.

"That's the way it goes when you play teams like that," Polian said Monday on his local weekly radio show on 97.1 Hank FM in Indianapolis. "We've seen this all before. It's of little consequence. It's not cosmic. The world isn't ending because they possessed the ball for 80 plays. That's the way people want to play us and in the end, we won the game."

Polian, speaking with Voice of the Colts Bob Lamey, covered other topics, including:

* The overall play of the defense: "We have a standard of performance for each unit. For the offense, it was quite high. They met their standard of performance. No question about that. For the defense, they came nowhere near reaching their standard of performance. . . . Nowhere near close. We were playing too high on the defensive line. We had far too many missed tackles. We had far too many poor entries in terms of gap control and things of that nature. We have lots and lots of work to do to get better on defense and get better specifically against the Wildcat and the kinds of things that people are going to do us. As far as the game plan and how the game was played, they played to their strengths.

* The left tackle position, where Charlie Johnson is starting ahead of Tony Ugoh: "Charlie has played well (at left tackle). Tony is getting better. His knee gets balky from time to time, which limits to some degree his practice, but he was OK for the ballgame Sunday night. Barring injury, I think we'll stay with the rotation we have now. As you know, this is a long season and you can have injuries. You do have injuries every week so everyone on the team has to be ready to go and step in and be able to do the job."

*The Colts' 14:53 possession time against Miami: "The most overrated and meaningless statistic in football is time of possession. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with winning the game. There is no statistical correlation between time of possession and winning the game. Absolutely none. It's just something that people can talk about. Does it effect physical conditioning in a ballgame such as Sunday night? You can make two arguments. One is that it might if you are in a passing game, because the defensive backs are running a long way and the rush men have to rush the passer, which is very fatiguing and very debilitating. You can make the argument that in a run game it's less important, although you do take some lumps over the course of a ballgame. But from a statistical, valuative standpoint, it has no meaning whatsoever."

* The status of middle linebacker Gary Brackett and cornerback Kelvin Hayden: "Gary is probably the least diagnosable at this point. Kelvin has some sore muscles. It's not a hamstring, but he has some muscle soreness in his leg that would indicate probably a strain. In Gary's case, we're not quite sure at this point. We'll know later in the week."

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