Colts' Off-Field Woes, Roster Holes a Product of Past Mistakes

The Colts have been in the news a lot lately for the wrong reasons. Linebacker Robert Mathis and, as reported by ProFootballTalk's Michael David Smith, safety LaRon Landry were suspended for performance-enhancing drug use.

Receivers LaVon Brazill and Da'Rick Rogers were released for off-field transgressions.  Owner Jim Irsay was pulled over for a DUI of his own, where cops found a literal brick of cash in the car along with several pill bottles. 

If you ever go to the NFL Draft Combine and are fortunate enough to have the pleasure of enduring rapid-fire GM speak, you'll learn quickly that every one of them has a process. A system. A structure. Whatever they want to call it. 

This current Colts roster is the result of a failed process by former general manager Bill Polian. The string of Colts' off-field failures are, statistically speaking, poor rolls of the dice by the players in question. But they're also the result of the problems that current general manager Ryan Grigson inherited with that initial roster.

Michael Conroy/Associated Press

To understand the current state of the Indianapolis Colts, you need to understand that, outside of having a terrific starting quarterback, the NFL is a game of attrition. Injuries can crack even the best units in the NFL. See the Philadelphia Eagles offensive line this season for proof of this theory in action.

Thus, quantity has a quality all its own. The Colts are still dealing—rather ineffectively, obviously—with the issue general manager Ryan Grigson was handed when he got former GM Bill Polian's keys in the first place: a talent shortage.

The Colts had done an excellent job of creating a functional roster around Peyton Manning for most of the early 2000s.

The formula was very simple, and it's one every team tries to mimic. Hit on your first-round picks (Manning, Reggie Wayne, Dwight Freeney, Dallas Clark), find one or two good players late (Mathis, David Thornton, Ryan Diem) and create a steady supply of undrafted free-agent finds (Dominic Rhodes, Gary Brackett, Nick Harper) to keep the rest of the roster strong.

Year	Player	AV Via PFR	Current Role
2007	Anthony Gonzlez	16	Retired
2009	Donald Brown	21	Backup Chargers RB
2010	Jerry Hughes	9	Bills pass-rusher
2011	Anthony Castonzo	19	Colts left tackle

Why the Polian magic stopped working is something we'd need to be privy to inside information to know for sure, but once the clock struck 2007, the Colts began to fail in all three phases of talent acquisition.

The string of late first-round picks who had been stars began to turn up Anthony Gonzalez and Donald Brown. The good late-round players started to show up tri-annually rather than annually. Injuries devastated could-have-beens like Austin Collie. And finally, the Colts' UDFA talent pool dried up as other teams began to realize the value of speedy linebackers and system corners. 

This all culminated in the crippled husk of a roster that Grigson inherited from Polian following the 2011 season. As I wrote in Football Outsiders Almanac 2014, only seven current Colts were on that team.

Two of them are special teamers Adam Vinatieri and Pat McAfee, two of them are lost for the season (Mathis, Fili Moala), one is utility lineman Joe Reitz and the other two are Wayne and first-round tackle Anthony Castonzo. 

This current Colts team has very little in the way of an established young foundation outside of Andrew Luck, wide receiver T.Y. Hilton and tight end Dwayne Allen. It relies on what it can from the legacy Colts on the roster, but the rest of the Indianapolis roster is built with sketchy materials.

Year	Player	Position	Cumulative PFF Rating
Year	Player	Position	Cumulative PFF Rating
2012	Donnie Avery	WR	-12.4
2012	Tom Zbikowski	S	-1.5
2012	Cory Redding	DE	+5.3
2012	Darius Butler	CB	+5.4
2012	Samson Satele	C	-17.7
2012	Mike McGlynn	G	-45.3
2013	Jerrell Freeman	LB	+6.3
2013	Darrius Heyward-Bey	WR	-13.1
2013	Ahmad Bradshaw	RB	+7.7
2013	LaRon Landry	S	-3.2
2013	Greg Toler	CB	-7.8
2013	Erik Walden	OLB	-9.1
2013	Donald Thomas	G	+1.1
2013	Ricky Jean-Francois	DL	+3.9
2013	Gosder Cherilus	T	+4.7
Total			-75.7

I've been hard on Ryan Grigson, and I will continue to be so because I think his methods of building a team are unsound. But that 2011 roster left all Grigson moves to be made under a veil of desperation.

Grigson inherited a roster where even the stopgappiest of stopgaps were improvements on the players in place, especially since the team was changing to a 3-4 scheme that marginalized the talents of those who were already there.

In other words, the Colts know that Landry isn't the greatest safety in the NFL. They knew he was a man who cared about his muscle mass more than his tackling and who accumulated missed games in large quantities. They signed him because he was still better than the alternative they already had.

It's hard to question the Colts for keeping Mathis after his 2013 season, but keep in mind that when Mathis hit free agency, he was hardly a sure transition to outside linebacker. The Colts ponied up to keep Mathis not only because of the past, but because there was no real plan for the future. There still isn't, given how poorly Bjoern Werner has played this year.

With Brazill and Rogers, the Colts took chances on players who might not have been on another team's radar due to off-the-field issues. The succession plan that a team ideally would have at wide receiver wasn't in place, so the Colts took the chance. They rolled craps. It happens. 

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

The off-field problems the Colts face, outside of their cuckoo bananas owner who has enough money and power to avoid any scrutiny above the level of an opinion sports column, are all a matter of what comes from the process up top. 

The lack of talent on the field has led the Colts to give chances to players who may waste them. That's a feature of the current process, not a bug. 

And, as long as Grigson continues to build his team's floor instead of its foundation, it's a feature we can look forward to seeing more of in the future.

Rivers McCown is the AFC South lead writer for Bleacher Report. His work has also appeared on Football Outsiders and ESPN.com. Follow him on Twitter at @riversmccown.