Pagano and Grigson Have Driven Andrew Luck and the Colts into the Ground

Like any accident that slows traffic, it’s impossible not to look at what the Colts could have been and wonder where it all went wrong.

If you look hard, though, the answers are clear.  

Chuck Pagano and Ryan Grigson were the spoiled teenagers who were handed the keys to a custom hot rod on their birthdays five years ago.

They took the hot rod for granted. They drove fast and didn’t worry about tomorrow. There were fender benders. They went to the shop for air filters and a tune-up and came away with fuzzy dice and a subwoofer. Oil changes? Insurance premiums? Closing the sunroof before a thunderstorm? Dude, don’t be lame. That hot rod was going to last forever and take them everywhere they wanted to go.

Grigson and Pagano drafted Andrew Luck first overall in 2012. As acts of football acumen go, it was like your brother-in-law showing up at the fantasy draft with the magazine he bought from a gas station and selecting Antonio Brown. A no-brainer. Luck was everything a team could want in a young quarterback. If Grigson and Pagano had held up their end of the bargain, even a little, he’d be the NFL’s biggest star, and the Colts would be contenders.

But Pagano and Grigson have done nothing to protect the precious, valuable, rare gift they were given when they took over the Colts in January 2012. Luck’s paint is chipping, and his engine is knocking. The Colts’ gears are grinding.

It’s time for someone to take the keys away.

There are folks who try to assign blame for the Colts’ woes to Grigson and not Pagano, or vice versa. Even those who want the Colts to perform a clean sweep like to puzzle over who is more to blame for the team’s methodical collapse from playoff contention to expensive mediocrity.

The only way to fairly assign blame for the Colts’ shortcomings between Grigson and Pagano is to start at the edges and work your way toward the middle.

When Antonio Cromartie signed a $3 million contract in the offseason, that was on Grigson. Cromartie got burnt like the skillet in a Cajun restaurant all last year for the Jets, a team that has never met a big-name defender it couldn’t overpay. When the Jets decide they would rather eat dead money than keep a veteran, anyone who throws millions at that veteran needs an intervention.

When Cromartie got isolated against Allen Robinson on Sunday, giving up a touchdown and a string of clutch-for-dear-life penalties, that’s on Pagano—though the Colts are so thin at cornerback that it’s hard for them to match up against the receiver-rich Jaguars, so that’s a little on Grigson, too.

When the Colts lined up in shotgun on 4th-and-1 with 1:42 to play, with Frank Gore on the bench, then executed a play in which four receivers ran routes within five yards of the line of scrimmage and bunched themselves within a phalanx of Jaguars defenders, that’s on Pagano.

When Gore’s replacement for that play was undrafted rookie Josh Ferguson, who dropped two passes earlier in the game, that’s on Grigson for failing to stock the bench. So is the fact that the entire right side of …

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