No fans, for example, attack the Cold, Hard Football Facts with the same kind of fury and venom of Indy fans. Take this classic email zinger we got the other day from a guy named Brad Wells, who runs the nifty Colts fan site, StampedeBlue.com:

 

“You're like clowns trying to figure out how a vibrator works.”

 

That’s good stuff. And, we gotta admit, not entirely inaccurate.

 

Colts fans, it turns out, are more than a little sensitive about their team. Any word from us, for example, that fails to declare everything and everyone associated with the organization as the greatest ever in the history of mankind elicits an onslaught of angry emails. More than a handful of Colts chat boards have cranked up the page impressions over the years with fans ripping the Cold, Hard Football Facts for the tiniest perceived slight.

 

Skipping through the history books the other day, we finally figured it all out: Colts fans have been beaten black & blue for 45 years, following an organization that has suffered some of the most inexplicable and humiliating defeats in NFL history. No team in pro football has consistently produced dominating regular-season powerhouses that fell flat in the biggest games of the year -- dating all the way back to Johnny Unitas himself.

 

Hell, you’d be a little sensitive, too.

 

Now, we realize there’s about two people in Baltimore who still follow the Colts. And fans in Indy certainly had no reason to follow the Colts in Baltimore. So there’s really no crossover memory among the fandom.

 

But there is an institutional memory – the Indianapolis Colts, for example, are quick to claim the legacy of Johnny Unitas’s Baltimore Colts, as well they should. (The NFL also "officially" recognizes the teams as one.)

 

But as you’ll see below, that Colts legacy cuts two ways – and one of those ways hurts so bad that fans feel the need to lash out at us following every critical postseason interception. 

 

It’s a legacy that no other team possesses. Since the glory days of 1958 and 1959 the Colts, like no other team in football, have consistently fielded dominating teams that lost badly in the playoffs.

 

Bob Irsay apparently packed that legacy in the Mayflower trailers and shipped it out to central Indiana back on that snowy night in 1984.

 

You'll see that consistent legacy unfold right before your very eyes here, in our list of the 10 most humiliating defeats in Colts franchise history, with a clean five from Baltimore and five from Indianapolis.

 

Don Shula’s 1964 Colts were easily the most dominant team in the NFL, with Hall of Famers everywhere, a legendary quarterback at the top of his game (96.4 passer rating), a league-best 12-2 record, the top-ranked offense (428 points) and the top-ranked defense (225 points).

 

In a precursor of Colts postseason games to come, the HoF quarterback crumbled like a cookie and the team was humiliated in a 27-0 loss to Cleveland in the NFL championship game. Johnny Unitas completed just 12 of 20 passes for 95 yards, with 2 picks. Hall of Famer Lenny Moore gained just 40 yards on the ground, and Hall of Famer Raymond Berry caught just three passes for 38 yards.

 

Jim Brown rumbled for 114 yards against the league's top defense, while the Browns nearly doubled up the Colts offensively, 339 yards to 181 yards. It was perhaps the most humiliating title-game beating of the 1960s.

 

Well, who could forget this legendary doozie? Don Shula’s 13-1 Colts, one of the most dominant teams in history, even better than the 1964 Colts, were supposed to go out and reassert the NFL’s continued mastery over the AFL in Super Bowl III. They had plenty of momentum after whitewashing the Browns, 34-0, in the NFL title game.

 

Instead, the Colts fell flatter than a fancy French crepe, losing 16-7 to Weeb Ewbank’s Jets – the same coach who had led the Colts to their championships in 1958 and 1959. That’s tough.

 

Quarterback Earl Morrall picked up where Johnny U left off in 1964, putting as many balls in the hands of Jets defenders as he did in the hands of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey (three). He totaled just 71 yards through the air before being replaced by Unitas.

 

The loss is considered by many (though not by us) as the biggest upset in pro football history – a fitting legacy for the Colts organization.

 

The Colts finally vindicated themselves in 1970 by besting the Cowboys in Super Bowl V. They were seeking a shot at consecutive championships when they traveled to Miami for the AFC title game.

 

The Colts were armed and dangerous – a Hall of Fame quarterback in Unitas paired with defense that surrendered just 10.0 PPG, one of the stingiest units in modern history.

 

Naturally, the HOF quarterback, not to mention much of the rest of the team, failed to show up for the big game: the upstart Dolphins crushed the defending champs, 21-0.

 

The stingy Colts D was torched for a 75-yard TD reception by Paul Warfield, while Unitas threw three picks – including one returned 62 yards for a TD by Dick Anderson. Somewhere, an unborn Peyton Manning took copious notes.

 

The worst part? The coach who led the Dolphins to success that day was the same coach who led the Colts to failure in Super Bowl III: Don Shula.

 

Coaching karma, it seems, is not a friend of the Colts organization. 

 

The 1976 Colts led the league in every major offensive category, including yards and points. And, with an 11-3 record, they earned a home game against the 10-4 Steelers and one of the greatest Steel Curtain defenses.

 

The location proved irrelevant: the big-game Steelers rolled the Colts like a wealthy drunk passed out in a Skid Row gutter, 40-14.

 

The score doesn’t tell us the full ghastly nature of the beating. The big-game Steelers racked up 526 yards of offense. The Colts, with the league’s No. 1 offense, generated a meager 170 yards. Big-game Terry Bradshaw was brilliant, completing 14 of 18 for 264 yards, 3 TD and 0 INT. In true Colts tradition, quarterback Bert Jones was so anemic in the big game that they should have given him a blood transfusion at halftime. 

 

Jones was a Pro Bowler who led the league with 3,104 passing yards in 1976. But he completed just 11 of 25 for 144 yards, 1 TD and 2 INT in the Three Mile Island-style meltdown against Pittsburgh.

 

And then minutes after the game, in a coincidence so amazing we could not make it up, a plane fell from the sky and nose-dived into the stands at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, symbolizing yet another high-flying Colts team that crashed and burned in the playoffs.

 

Well, at least the Colts showed up this time for a playoff battle against the Raiders at the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. They just didn’t stay for the whole game. 

 

In one of the great postseason battles of the 1970s, the Colts held a 31-28 lead in the final seconds when Oakland tight end Dave Casper ran a deep post pattern and hauled in a 42-yard reception from Kenny Stabler that put the ball at the Baltimore 14. The amazing over-the-shoulder catch is remembered today as the “Ghost to the Post.” Errol Mann quickly kicked the game-tying field goal.

 

The game ended in the second overtime on Casper’s 10-yard TD catch – a second consecutive great season for the Colts gone to waste without a single playoff victory. Sound familiar, folks?

 

The Colts fled Baltimore in 1984, but the organization must have kept the manual that Johnny Unitas authored  during the 1964 championship game. You know, the one that Earl Morrall studied before Super Bowl III, and then handed to Bert Jones in the 1976 playoffs, and then finally delivered into the precious hands of Peyton Manning – the manual which tells otherwise great quarterbacks how to completely disappear in the biggest game of the year.

 

Yeah, that manual.

 

In the most humiliating defeat by any playoff team of the past decade, the 10-6 Colts of 2002 traveled to the Meadowlands to face Chad Pennington and the Jets – the 9-7 Jets, a team that barely scored more points than they had surrendered all season (359-336).

 

If the game was any uglier it would have hid in a Parisian bell tower.

 

The Jets stomped the Colts, 41-0, while outgaining them offensively, 396 yards to 176. Ouch.

 

Manning did what Colts quarterbacks typically do in big games: took the day off. He completed 14 of 31 passes for 137 yards, 2 INT and a 31.2 passer rating, probably the worst game of his career.

The Colts rebounded from the devastating defeat to the Jets with a 12-4 record in 2003. They even won a pair of playoff games to earn a spot in the AFC title contest against the Patriots.

 

These Colts were different!

 

Then the Hall of Fame Colts QB had a typical Hall of Fame Colts QB mulligan in the biggest game of the year, channeling the ghost of Johnny Unitas – who died a year earlier – in the 1964 title game and throwing not one, not two, not three, but four INTs.

 

We can hear the Count from Sesame Street rattling off the INTs right now ... "Four! Four wonderful postseason interceptions!"

 

The Colts lost, 24-14.

 

The 2004 Colts were labeled unstoppable by every "pundit" in the land. There were plenty of reasons to agree.

 

The Colts went 12-4 for the second consecutive year and entered the playoffs with one of the most prolific offenses in pro football history, scoring 522 points. They even hung 49 on the Broncos in the wildcard round of the playoffs – entering the divisional playoffs at New England with an average of 33.6 PPG in 17 contests.

 

 

Much like the high-flying 1976 Colts, the high-flying 2004 Colts were outmuscled by a team that typically came up bigger in big games.

 

Manning had thrown 53 TDs in the first 17 games of 2004 – and then failed to find the end zone even once against the Patriots. Somewhere from the great beyond, Johnny U beamed with shame as he remembered the similar offensive meltdown of his high-scoring Colts against the Browns in 1964.

 

New England won, 20-3, holding the Colts 30 points below their regular-season average.

 

Only the Colts could come up with this classic storyline just too precious for words:

 

The loud-mouthed drunk kicker with the great stats but no heart, who had blown regular-season games for the Colts in the past, and who even had the temerity to call out the actual football players on his team following the 41-0 loss to the Jets in 2002, lined up in the final seconds of a playoff game against the Steelers for the biggest kick in his life and ... !!!

 

Not even close.

 

In fact, Vanderjagt shanked the kick like it was prison drug mule who just ripped him off. The ball landed closer to the right corner of the end zone than it did the goal posts.

 

The Steelers held on for a 21-18 victory. It was a humiliating finish for the Colts. They had won 14 games in 2005 (best in the league and a franchise record) and had dominated the NFL (No. 2 in scoring offense and No. 2 in scoring defense). They even flirted with an undefeated season, racing out to a 13-0 start. Yet they failed to win a single playoff game.

 

By now, even the new generation of Colts fans from Indy were sickened by the unmatched organizational tradition of capitulation under pressure. It's like they learned football theory from the French.

 

This is a two-for-one from the Colts that looked eerily similar to each other and that ruined what appeared to be an institutional change of guts following Indy's 2006 Super Bowl championship.  

 

The 2007 Colts were a powerful 13-3 team that boasted a Hall of Fame quarterback, one of the league’s best offenses (third) AND the league’s top-ranked defense (16.4 PPG). Sounds a lot like the great Colts teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 

Plus, EVERYBODY was looking forward to the big AFC title game showdown against the high-scoring 16-0 Patriots in what would have been one of the great epic meetings in postseason history and that would have rivaled Super Bowls for ratings.

 

But naturally, the Colts didn’t have the stomach for the fight. They committed three costly turnovers and surrendered 21 second-half points in a 28-24 loss at home in their cozy stat-churning dome to the 11-5 Chargers.

 

The 12-4 Colts of 2008 did themselves one better. They traveled to San Diego with a Hall of Fame quarterback and one of the league’s best defenses (seventh, 18.6 PPG) to face the 8-8 Chargers. The Colts lost, 23-17. Along the way, they became just the third team in history to lose a postseason contest to an opponent that didn’t even have a winning record.

 

That's a tough one to swallow, even for Colts fans. No wonder they're so sensitive: epic meltdowns have coursed through the veins of the organization now for 45 years.