Indianapolis Colts – 49ers at LOS not quite same challenge at Seahawks in Seattle, so that’s good!

Indianapolis Colts – 49ers at LOS not quite same challenge at Seahawks in Seattle, so that’s good!

It’s a Saturday, but it feels like a Friday at least at the Indianapolis Colts headquarters where they had practiced today. Shane Stiken spoke to the media. What we learned, DeForest Buckner is going to be up on Monday night. Wait, not a surprise, but it was about 50/50 whether he’s going to be able to play or not. You’ve got Anthony Gould. He’s going to be down. Sus Gardner is going to be down. Nobody else has been ruled out. So, we got that going for us. The Colts do. What do you have to do to beat the San Francisco 49ers? You got to go be able to attack an imperfect defense. You got to be able to do it on the ground and in the air. Are they going to come out with the same game plan they had against Seattle? It seems like maybe you don’t have to run it quite as much in order to control the clock against the 49ers. Looking at both of these defenses, we’ll see. Here’s Shane Stiken talking about the challenge ahead on Monday night against 49ers. >> Um, it’s a credit to those guys. I mean, the coaches, um, their players, um, they’re battling through. Obviously, they’ve had some tight wins, you know, that they pulled out, um, you know, which this is what that league is, and they’ve done a good job of of finding ways to win. So, I think it’s a credit to everybody there. >> I don’t think you mentioned I know, uh, Quinton Nelson’s had a wrist injury practice for Monday. >> Yeah, he should be a good guy. >> Uh, with Sauce, do you think does he play again this year, do you think? >> Yes. Okay. >> Yeah. What do you when you you’ve got three of your last losses have been by like two, three, and four points. Yeah. So, it’s just that close. What What’s the difference? How can you prepare different to try to have a different result? >> Yeah, I think it’s in this league it is. It comes down to those close games especially, it’s two or three plays. Um it’s just finding those extra two or three plays a game more than the your opponent uh and finishing at the end. And obviously that stuff’s talked about. You work, you know, situations where it’s got to happen situations in practice uh to put those guys in position so when those things come up, they’ve repped it on the practice field and go from there. >> Any uh early Monday night football memories when you’re growing up? >> Yeah, I do actually. I think my first one was uh Qualcomm San Diego. It’s pretty awesome. They had the fireworks coming off and then they actually played the Monday night theme song on the jumbo trunk. Um and I was up in the box and I was like pretty freaking cool be a part of this thing. So, we’re excited. Monday Night Football doesn’t get any better than that. So, uh, excited to be back in front of the fans. I know the crowd will be rocking, so it’ll be fun. >> All right, there’s Shane Stiken. And you you kind of get the idea that he’s feeling pretty optimistic about this game, but he always he’s an optimist at heart. And I think you have to be you have to have some sane pessimism, and you have to have some bold optimism. If you’re a head coach in the NFL, you have to be pessimistic at the beginning of the week and figure out how to beat the opponent that’s in front of you. And then you got to put the game plan into place and then at the end of that say, “Yep, this gives us our best chance to win.” And you feel like Shane Stiken feels that way about this game against the San Francisco 49ers. Colts need this win. If they if they get this win, then it puts it in a position where they don’t have to win three in a row anymore. They just got to win two in a row. and winning two in a row gets them likely to an AFC South championship if everything else falls into place and and almost certainly gets them into the playoffs no matter what happens. But the Jaguars, they have to lose one, the Texans, they have to lose one in addition to the games that they play against the Indianapolis Colts. Colts are in a weird weird position and and we’ll see what happens with the defense minus uh S Gardner. We’ll see what happens with the return game minus Anthony Gould. And we’ll see if Bernard Ryman’s able to play at left tackle. Bernard Ryman doesn’t miss a lot of starts, doesn’t miss a lot of games. Is he going to be able to go on Monday night? And if he’s not, what are the Colts going to do about that at left tackle? Because right tackle Braden Smith’s already does that mean that they would do what they did in Seattle with Tonuda at left tackle, Travis at right tackle, or do they kind of mix and match and do some other things? We’ll see what happens. But that that unit’s got to function well. Even with Philip Rivers getting rid of the ball quick, right? You’ve still got to function well. You got to protect him. You got to run block. And then you’ve got to expose kind of a flawed secondary with the San Francisco 49ers. And what you’ve got with the 49ers as we’ve heard from Rick Venturi this week, you know what, you’ve got sort of a Gus Bradley sort of three deep and and we’ll see if we can’t take advantage of that because that plays into Philip Rivers hands, right? Philip Rivers, you like throwing in front kind of like the way the way that every quarterback did against the Colts the last three years and even beyond that when you had I flu running his his kind of form of the same defense, right? Let them dink and dunk. Make them take 15 plays to get in the end zone. And if they do get in the end zone and it took 15 plays, hey, you know what? That’s life in the big city. That was kind of the Eberfloose manifesto on NFL defense, which drove people here completely nuts. We’ll see what happens. I I think it’s going to be an intriguing game. Intriguing means uh-oh, this might be trouble or it might be really fun. What we do know that happened against the Seattle Seahawks, everything went exactly the way this team wanted it to go. And what that means is that could happen again. not exactly as it did in Seattle, but what the game plan was against Seattle was exactly what happened and they were able to execute it. We’ll see if the game plan that is put into place right now against the SH the San Francisco 49ers can do exactly the same thing. Find out on Monday. That’s why we watch, right? That’s why we love this game and that’s why the NFL is the hottest thing on TV. And and really it’s the it is the American sport. It’s not America’s pastime. It’s America’s sport because we don’t know what’s going to happen on Monday. It’s impossible to project. We’ll see.

Shane Steichen talks 49ers and Monday Night Football