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The perfect storm (Part II)
Cold, Hard Football Facts for March 14, 2006
The Colts are donkeys because…
… they decided to pay No. 1 money for a No. 2 receiver rather than re-sign the most productive running back in the history of football and the most important and under-appreciated cog in Indy’s offensive machine.
Indy general manager Bill Polian (pictured here) made it clear at the end of the 2005 season that he was more committed to wideout Reggie Wayne than he was  to James.
Polian was so committed to Wayne that he doled out No. 1 money for this No. 2 receiver when he signed him three weeks ago. Wayne will make $2.6 million in 2006 and reportedly received a $13.5 million signing bonus with his six-year deal. It is possible that Wayne will be the most highly paid No. 2 receiver in football this year.
This move is nothing less than brutal salary-cap mismanagement and symbolic of a GM that fails to understand the concept of value. (This is the same GM who drafted Wayne in the first round of the 2001 draft and tight end Dallas Clark in the first round of the 2003 draft when the Colts clearly had more pressing needs on defense.)
Wayne is certainly a fine player, but the Colts paid him like he’s irreplaceable. The truth is that there are plenty of guys around the league who can put up Wayne numbers (an average of 61 catches, 833 yards and 5.6 TDs per season), and they can do it for less money.
The Colts will soon find that James is much harder to replace. After all, as has been widely reported here and only here, James is the most productive offensive player in the history of the NFL.
He averages 125.7 yards from scrimmage per game, No. 1 all time. The No. 2 player on the list is a pretty fair ballcarrier named Jim Brown.
The most productive offensive player in NFL history simply does not walk through the training camp door each summer. In fact, as far as we can tell, he comes along once every 86 years.
The Colts let him walk out like he was just another journeyman player.
James’s importance was underscored to anyone who bothered to pay attention back in the 2001 season, when he missed 10 of 16 games because of injury. Not so coincidentally, quarterback Peyton Manning went through the worst stretch of his career in those 10 games.
- 2001 was Manning’s worst statistical season, other than his rookie year of 1998.
- Manning posted a 92.2 rating in the six games that James played that year.
- Manning posted a 79.5 rating in the 10 games that James missed that year.
- Manning recorded the single-worst statistical game of his regular-season career (19 of 32, 173 yards, 0 TDs, 3 INTs, 35.0 rating) against Miami in 2001 with James on the sidelines.
A failure to use James effectively has been one of the great contributors to Indy’s disastrous postseason failures. In his seven seasons with the Colts, James:
- touched the ball (rushes and receptions) 26.5 times per game in the regular season
- touched the ball 20.5 times per game in the postseason
- ran the ball 22.8 times per game in the regular season
- ran the ball 17.4 times per game in the postseason
- caught the ball 3.7 times per game in the regular season
- caught the ball 3.1 times per game in the postseason
You could argue that James was not given the ball as much in the postseason because he failed to produce when handed the opportunity. That’s not true.
- James has averaged 4.7 yards per touch in the regular season
- James has averaged 4.5 yards per touch in the postseason
You could argue that the Colts simply would not have matched the money Arizona was willing to put up for an elite NFL ballcarrier. We’d agree. But it should not have reached this point. The Colts should have wrapped up James last year (or even earlier), when they opted to make him a franchise player.
By dumping Wayne and replacing him with any of a number of receivers who could have given them equal production for much less money, the Colts would have had more money available to sign James.
Instead, the Colts wildly overpaid for a No. 2 receiver and let the most productive offensive player in the history of the game walk out the door.
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