Panic time is here

OK, feel free to panic.
That message is for Colts fans, and it’s one I wouldn’t have offered a week ago.
I believed most people were overreacting to the opening-week loss to the Houston Texans.
After all, the Colts also started the 2010 season with a loss against Houston, although admittedly by a much slimmer margin, and still went on to win make the playoffs by winning another division title.
Surely Indianapolis would rebound in its first home game and beat the Cleveland Browns, who had just come off a loss in their home opener to a Cincinnati Bengals squad with a rookie quarterback making his first start. Oh how wrong I was.
Instead, the lasting impression of Sunday’s game at Lucas Oil Stadium is that of the moment in the CBS broadcast that showed a young fan hunched over with his head in his hands and his father patting him on the back. Any hope that was left had been sucked out of the stadium.
Now, I never believed the Colts would be a playoff team without Peyton Manning.
I did, however, expect they’d have a chance to win six or seven games and be respectable. After their week-two performance, they look like a team headed for a top-five pick in the NFL draft.
But while the 0-2 start and the likelihood of a terrible season are difficult to swallow, especially for a team that has had the kind of success Indianapolis has enjoyed over the last decade, those things are not what should scare fans most about this situation.
The most worrisome thing is that one player means the difference between being a Super Bowl contender and a league laughing-stock.
Such an idea isn’t so shocking in basketball, where there are only five players on the court at a time and a rotation of eight to 10 per game. But in football there are 53-man rosters, and just about every one of those players spends at least some time on the field each game.
Other teams have lost star quarterbacks and put together productive seasons with back-up QBs.
The New England Patriots lost Tom Brady to injury a few years back and went 10-6 under Matt Cassel, who at the time didn’t have half the playing experience Curtis Painter does now. Ten years earlier the same team lost Drew Bledsoe, and Brady, then an unknown sixth-round pick from Michigan, took it to the Super Bowl.
Even the now-surging Detroit Lions were able to stay competitive last season when Matthew Stafford went down and Shaun Hill took over. We’ve seen unknown youngsters and veteran back-ups alike step in and allow teams to at least be respectable in their stars’ absence.
If Indianapolis didn’t believe Curtis Painter could be a viable option, which it apparently didn’t given that it coaxed 38-year-old Kerry Collins out of retirement rather than give the Purdue graduate a chance, then he shouldn’t have been on the roster. And knowing Manning was having surgery, even though they expected him to be back, the Colts should have had a better contingency plan.
So one of the team’s jobs in the off-season will be to find a legitimate back-up quarterback, whether he be a top prospect, late-round draft pick or NFL veteran.
Even more importantly, the Colts need to be asking themselves how much of their recent success has been about Manning, and how much actual talent they have beyond No. 18. Because if they hope to contend for another Super Bowl when Manning presumably returns next season, he’s going to need a lot more help than the roster is currently showing it can provide.[[In-content Ad]]