Week 5: Indianapolis at Houston

There’s a difference between a collapse and a decline, and while the Indianapolis Colts do seem to be in the middle of one or the other this season, it’s impossible just yet to tell which. Declines are inevitable in the NFL, considering the ridiculous attrition brought on by the game’s workaday violence; that the Colts defense is struggling without Bob Sanders, one of the vanguard practitioners of said violence, is probably an irony Colts fans probably aren’t very amused by at present. But players get old, leave town or lose interest in continuing to have gigantic mean guys run over them every day for a living. The Colts currently are looking at a little bit of all those across the board – well, maybe not the last one, although they did have a 2007 second-round pick retire in the preseason because he didn’t dig the gigantic-mean-guy thing – but what remains still resembles a pretty good football team.

This type of decline, though, could pretty plausibly and pretty quickly collapse into a, uh, collapse. The previously middling run defense has devolved into a terrible one, leaving other teams to control the tempo and time of possession. This, in turn, puts pressure on Indy’s tentatively in-recovery offensive line, which currently can’t generate enough push for a decent running game and is breaking down under the strains of pass protection. Another few injuries and the Colts unctuous ownership family could find itself presiding over a collapse, surrounded by marauding Visigoths. Which, actually, would be kind of fun to watch, if it happened non-metaphorically. The Visigoth part, we mean.

Whatever the case, the Colts may have some help in staving off a collapse in the short-term from the Texans. Houston has built a fairly solid team that didn’t manage to play anything like solid football until Week 4, but the team’s weaknesses fit in fairly well with the Colts’ strengths, and vice versa. The Colts have struggled against better running teams; the Texans are definitively not one of those. Indianapolis is the NFL’s worst rushing team and has a patchwork offensive line; the Texans give up 160 rushing yards per game and their pass rush has underperformed badly. Even if the Colts are in the midst of a collapse, the Texans defense might somehow allow them to gain four yards on the play.

And yet…despite their impressive Week 2 comeback against the Vikings, the Colts somehow don’t seem like a team likely to win this week. Too many important players on their team are either injured or just-this-side-of-injured, and their defense has been pretty appalling. The Texans played great in a close loss to Jacksonville last week, and seem more or less to have figured out what they’re good at on offense – passing, turns out – and should inevitably at least get their pass rush figured out.

And, of course, they’re playing in Houston for the first time this season after Hurricane Ike wiped out their Week 2 game – it’d be a nicer story if it didn’t involve the city of Houston, but there’s clearly some advantage to be had, there. A Colts loss this week won’t signal an imminent collapse, or do much more to confirm their decline than some of their team stats do. It’s too early, yet, to know what it means. But we do hope it involves the Irsays being menaced by barbarians at some point.

TEXANS BY 3