Pre-Game Recon: Five Questions With LRMPLRMT&ROATFITLRMDTF

This week, Little Red Mitten of "Little Red Mitten Presents Little Red Mitten’s Thoughts & Ruminations On A Team From Indy That Little Red Mitten Deigns To Follow" was kind enough to answer five questions about the Colts for us.

After you do the Locomotion and jump up, jump back, 'cause I think you've got the knack (Whoa ohhhh), you can read LRM's answers.

1. Imagine that you've just been hired by the Texans. Gary Kubiak asks you to tell him the three (3) areas/players/things he should focus Houston's attack on in Sunday's game. Assume with me that you're not a double-agent and actually intend to do right by your new employer. How do you answer Kubes' question?

LRM: I would start by telling Kubiak that his team is full of cheaters. That’s right--cheaters!

Look, I don’t care what your "excuse" is or if you "accidentally took a banned substance," the fact is, once you have been caught using STEROIDS you are a classless cheater. And spare me the "it wasn’t steroids," because we all know that it was, and only an idiot who didn’t understand football would say otherwise. In fact, it’s pretty clear that the only reason Houston won the first game was because they cheated like a bunch of stupid moron cheaters who are a disgrace to the game and should be banned for life!

Second, I would tell Kubiak that he should run the ball right at Dwight Freeney because there’s a chance that Freeney has a broken leg. No, you probably haven’t heard about it, but that’s because you don’t have the inside sources that I do ever since we made our run to the Super Bowl. People in the know pass along all sorts of information that common folk like yourself are not privy to. Sure, some of it turns out to be completely false, but I am not a journalist, nor do I claim to be, so I see nothing wrong with floating rumors out there with no verification whatsoever. People who think I should verify these stories are complete idiots because IT'S NOT MY JOB TO VERIFY THESE THINGS, IDIOTS!

Finally, Kubiak should know that Bill Polian is absolutely horrendous at drafting in the third round, so your best bet is to attack Philip Wheeler (3rd round, 2008) and Jerraud Powers (3rd round, 2009). Teams that do that are almost guaranteed to beat the Colts, and it’s only because so many teams have zero understanding of football that the Colts do not lose every game that these two players suit up for. Polian’s track record with third rounders is awful --- I EVEN SAID AS MUCH TO DON BANKS OF SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, OR AT LEAST ALOUD AND IN HIS GENERAL DIRECTION WHILE HE WAS DOING SOMETHING ELSE, AND HE TOTALLY DID NOT DISAGREE WITH ME, WHICH MUST MEAN THAT I AM RIGHT.

I’m also pretty sure that Polian killed Brandon Burlsworth after he drafted him in 1999. No, I have no proof of that, but, again, it’s a rumor that I’ve heard in my capacity as a Colts blogger.

2. The Colts obviously have several injury issues to deal with, what with Dallas Clark out for the season, and Austin Collie and Joseph Addai both out for this game (at least). What changes can we expect to see from the offense to compensate for these losses?

LRM:

With the media bias against the Colts, I am very surprised that people have even heard about these injuries. I suppose that just proves that I am doing a good job of informing the public in a way that the East Coast Media does not. I mean, you barely even heard anyone mention the Colts last week. Did you notice that? Of course not, because only someone who really understands what to listen for on the NFL broadcasts would have caught that.

All that said, the offense begins and ends with Peyton Manning, of course. He is easily the greatest quarterback ever, though the media would tell you that Tom Brady or Tony Romo is because they kiss up to those teams. When Manning is on, it doesn’t really matter who he is throwing to because the ball is thrown so perfectly that anyone could catch it as long as the receiver wasn’t a third-round draft pick. I expect you will see lots of three WR sets with Reggie Wayne, who is much better than Andre Johnson, I should add, Pierre Garcon and Blair White. Look for Jacob Tamme to get some reps at TE and possibly H-back. Also Donald Brown and Mike Hart will split carries, though we are a little banged up in the running game, so your cheating linebacker, Brian Cushing, can probably slow down the running game. Not that it will matter.

Also, I would point out that we are using a new punter for this week because our regular punter was so distraught over the way I OWNED him on Twitter that he went out drinking and tried to swim in a ditch or something.

3. The last time these two teams met with both coming off a bye week, the infamous Rosenchopper took flight. I really don’t have a question here. So, while I go bang my face repeatedly against a wall to try to drive that memory back out of my brain, perhaps you could share your thoughts on community-building as it relates to sports blogs.

LRM:

Not too long ago, as I was firing all of the talented writers from my blog and was basically holding whiny open-casting calls for people who might like to write, eventually leading to my hiring of people who think that meat-metaphor-humor passes for quality, I took the opportunity to share my thoughts with everyone at SBN. After all, I know how great my wisdom is, but I felt that other less accomplished bloggers could benefit from my direction. So I wrote this:

For many of our new bloggers --- I use "our" to indicate that I feel like I am in a position of authority within SBN --- the offseason will show a dip in readership. Do not lose heart, young bloggers! I, too, was once a new blogger who lacked the influence and clout that comes with you're team winning a Super Bowl in which Rex Grossman probably should have been the MVP. With that clout came insider information like you wouldn’t believe. I ONCE HAD A BEER WITH PETER KING, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

Then, this past February, when the Colts were cheated out of another Super Bowl by officials who refused to make an incorrect call on the Saints’ two-point conversion try, our traffic SKYROCKETED! I mean, can you believe that people would want to come to a Colts blog while the Colts were playing in the Super Bowl?! Of course you can’t!  Such things are unheard of!  But, because my blog had developed such a reputation among NFL fans and writers, we were able to overcome SBN’s relative lack of exposure and bring a ton of traffic around that game.

Sure, most of those fans quickly left or were banned for disagreeing with me, but I chalk that up to there being idiots and morons and trolls. And yes, since that I time I have managed to alienate a huge percentage of my old readers to the point that they have taken up online refuge at Battle Red Blog, but that is because they were also jealous of my knowledge and insight, and they could not handle it when I easily refudiated their weak counter-arguments, which were invariably based on stupid stuff like fact and reason.

Why do I write this? To tell all of you new inexperienced bloggers that you can also live this dream that I call my life.  Just always strive to overreact to player’s Tweets, rumor monger with impunity (because you are NOT a journalist and are not bound by their stupid rules), write poorly constructed arguments, ignore many rules of punctuation and syntax, and above all else ban anyone who dares challenge your authority. Heck, you can even ban people who disagree with you over email after you have emailed them to say that you weren’t going to ban them this time. This doesn't make you a coward at all, nor does it suggest that you lacked the creativity to offer a good response.  IT ONLY MEANS THAT YOU ARE THE KING OF YOUR DOMAIN.

Sincerely,

Radley Bells (my real name --- before you ask, yes, my mom was a huge To Kill A Mockingbird fan)

4. Who is the one player on the Colts that most people do not know, but who you think will be a household name by next season?

LRM:

It has to be Reggie Wayne. If the media covered the Colts the way they cover the Texans and Cardinals, the conversation about who is the best WR in football would not even BE a conversation because everyone would recognize that Wayne is it. Instead, the media give love to Andre Johnson and Larry Fitzgerald simply because they play on higher-profile teams in bigger markets, and they ignore that Wayne is the total package.

I really hope he has a big game on Monday night so that more people might start to take notice, though you can bet that Gruden and Tirico won’t even mention him by name when he does something. Really, this disgusting bias against the Colts is more proof that bloggers serve a necessary function in sports. Without my blog, you might literally never have read anything about Peyton Manning, Reggie Wayne, Tony Dungy, etc.

If you want someone a little more obscure, I'd say Robert Mathis or Dwight Freeney.  Really, people outside of Indianapolis have no idea how good these two are.  I bet you didn't even realize that they played defensive end, did you?  Defensive end, in case you didn't know, is the position at either end of the defensive line.  (It's that kind of insight and in-depth football knowledge that has made my blog so popular.)

5. Put your name on it: At the end of the game Monday night, the score will be Texans __, Colts __. The Colts final record will be __-__, and they will appear in __ playoff games.

LRM:

This is a simple question to answer when you understand the game the way I do. The score will be Colts 47, Texans 16. The Colts’ final record will be 14-2, and they will appear in 3 playoff games, ending with a Super Bowl win!

Thanks to Little Red Mitten for playing along. He was too busy granting interviews to various media types to send along any questions of his own, so there are no corresponding answers from me.

[Disclaimer: Other than NFL personnel, the persons, events, and occurrences in this post are fictional. Any resemblance to any real persons (living or dead), events, or occurrences is purely coincidental.]

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