Frank Reich is Only the Latest Victim of Belichick's Eternal Blood Vengeance Against the Colts

Jerry Thornton11/07/2022 7:20 PM

Billie Weiss. Getty Images.

The result of yesterday's utter destruction of the Colts' offense by two generations of Belichicks speaks for itself:

As do the Colts numbers:

Total yards: 121
Yards per play: 2.0
Passing yards: 43
Yards per pass: 1.1
Sacks: 9
Sack yards lost: 60
3rd down efficiency: 0 for 14
4th down efficiency: 0 for 2
Red zone efficiency: 0 for 2

Choose your favorite out of that bag of Halloween candy. But my personal full-sized Reese's Peanut Butter Cup is that 2.0 yards per play. Meaning that if your center is 6-foot-1, and you just had him snap the ball and have the quarterback hand it right back to him so he could fall forward, he'd have gained an inch more on every play than Frank Reich's entire offense managed.

And given the fact he'd just benched his starting QB and fired the coordinator-in-name-only, he found himself fresh out of bucks to pass and goats to scape. The axe had to fall on him. The debacle was so complete, there was no one else.

To be clear, I have no animosity towards Reich. In fact, I have no opinion of him at all. By all the tributes for him on line since he got fired, he's a well-respected man about town and this is a shame.

What I do have animosity towards - gobs and gobs of animosity - is his former employer. For a couple of decades now, the Indianapolis Colts have representative of everything that is wrong with football. In fact, with everything that is wrong with America in the 21st century. The Colts as an organization has been smug, self-satisfied, self-entitled, pampered, mewling and self-important. They've been a collection of whining little twerps, constantly pointing fingers any time they're beaten by a superior program that is none of those things, decrying the unfairness of it all and demanding somebody else do something to make things right for them.

So let me just say that when it comes to this franchise it's personal. Which is why it's so gratifying to see that Belichick has added Reich's head to his trophy wall.

Where do we even begin? How about 2003, when they lost a crucial home game when the Patriots kept them out of the end zone on four cracks from inside the 5-yard line. That one cost them homefield in the playoffs. But rather than make an assessment of what they could've done better, all you heard afterwards was that Willie McGinest faked an injury to stop the clock. Like that's what caused their garbage playcalling and trash execution. Then when Peyton Manning threw four picks in the playoff game at Gillette, they pissed and moaned about the Patriots secondary being too physical. And went to the Rules Committee and got them to change the way defense is allowed to be played to suit their own needs.

Which did them very little good the following year in the playoffs, again at Gillette. There again, Indy got an abject lesson in what physical football was all about when the Pats held them to three points:

That game was played in a 16-degree wind chill. So the talk was about how unfair the Patriots homefield advantage was, since the Colts play in a hermetically sealed dome. Which explains my use of the word "pampered" above. Then there was the worst of them all, the AFC championship game held in Foxboro in January of 2015. That's the game that is famous, not for LeGarrette Blount's 148 yards and three touchdowns. Or the fact the home team scored the last 31 points of the game. No, that's remembered as the game when they once again accused the Patriots of cheating, touching off a Category 5 shitstorm that raged for two years and was one level of the judicial system away from going to the Supreme Court.

Why bring all this up now? Just as a reminder that deeply troubled Pats fans like me are not the only ones who have taken stock of this history. Deep down in places he loves to talk about at cocktail parties, Belichick loves annihilating the Colts like he did yesterday. As much, if not more, than any other organization.

Case in point, in the last 10 meetings between the two teams, his have won nine. By an average score of 33.8 to 17.9. In eight of them, his team scored 30 points or more. In four, they've scored more than 40. And once had 59. Yesterday's offensive numbers were not impressive. But make no mistake, this was taking care of family business once again. A shotgun blast in the elevator. A machine gun spraying the bedroom. A bullet through Moe Green's glasses on the massage table.

How ironic that Reich is the latest in a series of Colts head coaches Belichick has outlasted, since the Patriots basically put him him behind the desk in Indy to begin with. It was less than five years ago that Josh McDaniels was signed, sealed and delivered to their head coaching job before backing out to win another ring in New England. So they pivoted to Reich instead. Metaphorically speaking, Belichick brought him into this world, and now he's taken him out of it.

Couldn't happen to a nicer franchise. Never forget.