Indy’s line ready for next challenge

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January 16, 2007

The Colts’ offensive line has allowed just two sacks during postseason

Tom James The Tribune Star Tue Jan 16, 2007, 08:35 PM EST

INDIANAPOLIS — It’s a safe bet that the Indianapolis Colts offensive line will be severely tested when the New England Patriots come to town for Sunday’s AFC championship game.

New England will bring a veteran defense that has given the Colts problems in the past. But Indianapolis’ offense has been under the gun before, such as in last week’s AFC divisional game at Baltimore and the Ravens’ top-ranked defense, and responded quite nicely.

The Colts have allowed just 17 sacks this year, 15 during the regular season and one each in playoff wins against Kansas City and Baltimore. But, despite their success at protecting quarterback Peyton Manning, it was a loss in last year’s playoff that may have been the driving force for what has been accomplished thus far.

After last year’s AFC divisional playoff game with Pittsburgh, a game in which the Steelers sacked Manning five times en route to a 21-18 win, Indianapolis offensive line coach Howard Mudd called the performance one of their worst since he had been with the team. Center Jeff Saturday, a two-time Pro Bowl selection, agreed.

“We were terrible,” Saturday recalled recently. “We didn’t play well at all. And I really don’t know the reason for that. We’ve played well as a group ever since I’ve been here. But in that one game, we just didn’t play very well. And you couldn’t really pin it on any one guy in particular. Collectively, we didn’t do our jobs that day and everybody saw what happened.”

That brings us to this season and how the group has responded in the playoffs. In perhaps it’s stiffest test of the year to date, facing off against Baltimore’s defensive unit last week, Saturday and his teammates were up to the test.

“It’s not the 3-4, it’s not the scheme, it’s not the people. It’s doing your job on every play, and we did. I thought our look squad in practice (prior to the Ravens game) gave our guys an outstanding look of different guys coming from different places,” Colts coach Tony Dungy said earlier this week.

“I think we were prepared for what they did, but you still have to block them. You still have to block and we did a good job of that for the most part. We didn’t see guys coming free. That was a credit to our offensive coaching staff, Peyton for calling the right protections and guys being able to decipher where they’re coming from, which was hard because they (Ravens) had a lot going on.”

A similar type of performance will be crucial this week as New England is expected to try to come up with new ways to get to Manning and to cross up Indianapolis’ blocking schemes. The Colts showed a toughness on offense in the latter stages of the Baltimore game, something that the group had been accused of lacking in the past.

“That’s been the criticism, if you will, of us all year. So to be able to go on the road and win in a hostile environment, to really outperform a team that’s built for that. When we had to run it against the No. 1 defense, we were able to do that. Just whatever it takes,” Dungy said.

“And I was proud of the way we won the game. Not necessarily that we won, but how we went in there and you had to win a dogfight. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t the type of game that we normally play. But we were able to get it done even pretty much playing their game.”

• Rhodes carries the load — While rookie running back Joseph Addai has taken over as the Colts’ starter, veteran Dominic Rhodes has performed well in the team’s two playoff victories.

Rhodes had 68 yards in 13 carries in Indianapolis’ AFC wild-card win against Kansas City and added 56 yards in 14 carries against the Ravens last week. In fact, if it were not for Rhodes’ hard-nosed runs in the fourth quarter of the Baltimore game, the Colts may not have been able to keep control of the football as well as they did.

“Dom was outstanding (against the Ravens) and made some good power runs, ran in our short-yardage offense and did a great job,” Dungy said, adding that Rhodes has handled the switch in responsibilities better than anyone could hope for.

“Really like a professional. The big thing, I thought (running backs coach) Gene Huey did a great job of explaining to him what we were doing. It wasn’t a demotion, and he understood that. We were just going to start the game with Joseph, and Dom has ended up finishing the last two games and making some big fourth-quarter runs. But he knew he was going to still be involved. He knew he was going to get a lot of carries and be in in critical times. So it really hasn’t been that much different. They both still split the carries relatively evenly.”

• Keeping the faith — Despite calls from the media and fans to make drastic changes to a defensive unit that struggled for most of the regular season, Dungy continued to maintain that the defense wasn’t in as bad a shape as it may have appeared.

Now, coming off a pair of postseason victories in which the Colts have allowed 14 total points and has limited two of the league’s better running backs — Kansas City’s Larry Johnson and Baltimore’s Jamal Lewis — to 85 total yards, perhaps he was right.

“We’re a little bit healthier, the young guys that have played know our defense a little bit better and to be honest, we’ve just played a little bit better. We’ve played a little bit faster, we’ve played more instinctively and we’ve also known these two offenses pretty well,” Dungy said. “The big thing that we’ve done in this post-season is play well on third down. When you have those third-down stops and you don’t give the other team extra plays, that really helps you.

“We didn’t lose faith or confidence. What was a little strange to me, people asked me (after the Ravens game), did we feel like we were under the radar or did we feel like it was less pressure? For 10 weeks we were still the No. 1 seed. It wasn’t until week 15 that we dropped to No. 3. Even though we weren’t playing the way we thought we could play, we still knew we were a good team and didn’t feel any sense that we weren’t going to be here.”

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