The Indianapolis Colts are on the road to take on the Houston Texans in their Week 8 game on Sunday at 1:00 p.m. EST.

The Colts enter Week 8 having won four of their last five. A lot of Colts fans (and writers/bloggers/podcasters/YouTubers) are riding so high and I feel like I'm living on an island, all alone, with the strong belief that this Colts team isn't as good as it has been is . Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad this team is over .500 at the end of October. The Is fantastic. But if the Colts hadn't played a rookie in his third game (Caleb Williams), a retread who has since replaced the remnants of Russell Wilson (Justin Fields), Will Levis and the All-Star combination of Tyler Huntley and Tim Boyle on the Bank was set? last week against the Dolphins, well I'm not sure that team would have won any of those games. But the fact is, you can only play against those who are on your schedule, and the Colts won those games.

So I don't want to take anything away from the team.

This week I've seen people point out that the Texans only won by two points in Week 1 and that CJ Stroud had a career-low 86-yard throw last week. They are missing a great wide receiver in Nico Collins and their defense is also missing several star players. And that's all true, but this Colts defense is bad. Very, very bad. Zaire Franklin is playing the worst football of his career. He can't get off the blocks and I don't care how many tackles he had last week, how many of them came before the defense was 4-6 yards beyond the line of scrimmage? You don't really have to look, there weren't many. Even the defense's best plays from a week ago relied on fumbles caused after a Miami defender had already racked up a large number of yards.

If the Colts had played better quarterbacks, I honestly don't know that they would have won a single game this year. And yes, I just finished lambasting run defense and you may be wondering how I make this connection. That's fair. But if the Colts are able to prevent the opposing running back from getting a first down on the first or second down, the opposing team often chooses to throw on third down. Bad quarterbacks don't often convert on third down. Unfortunately, despite his performance last week and Collins' absence, CJ Stroud is a very good quarterback.

After watching Anthony Richardson last week, I also feel completely alone in the online Colts world. First let me say, Richardson was bad. There. Got that out of the way.

But it is like that wild For me it's the way people talk Why he was bad.

I feel like I'm the only one who remembers week two against the Green Bay Packers. When he sailed passes to wide-open receivers and was then asked about it, he more or less said he was working through things too quickly, getting excited and trying to rush the throw, which resulted in the ball coming out wild.

So was it the same last week? NO! Most of his throws hit the target. He had one or two throws that were off target, but every quarterback has one or two that they would like back. So what happened last week? Everything he threw came out late. He slowed down, much too slow. He worked on his reads, found the open man, got back to his feet and threw the ball. The problem wasn't his accuracy, but the fact that from the time he found his receiver to the time he When he actually made the throw, too much time passed for the defensive backs to make a jump and break up the passes.

This is fantastic news!

Not because the result was bad. Not because the balls were deflected. Not because we had to listen to another week of narrative “analysis,” but because he took a problem he had the last time he played a full game and fixed it in the next game. He's working on a problem that he (and probably his coaches) has identified, and he's fixing things week after week. This is what progress looks like. It's not always the case that things just get better. Sometimes you have to do something differently before you figure out what works, and the process is happening right before our eyes and it sure feels like everyone is missing it.

Little-Known Online Facts About Me (I find) I trained in gymnastics for almost a decade. I mainly trained on parallel bars and floor (I'm a big guy who could spot the kids well, I was most useful in those two events), but occasionally I also worked with kids on vault or beam. I still don't know much about beam after almost a decade of coaching, I won't go into detail here, but I just know that I don't know. The only thing I know is that if a child is learning a new skill and keeps falling off the beam on the same side, you can convince them to fall off the beam on the other side. Every time I told a child to fail, but only in a different way, I got confused looks, and every time they successfully fell off the beam on the “other” side, I told them to split the difference and as Landing on the beam next time they did the skill. And guess what? Usually that worked.

Sometimes you have to fail in multiple ways to understand how to succeed before you actually succeed.

I don't know if Anthony Richardson will be a good quarterback. I hope he will be. But I'm sure he's making progress and it feels like no one in the football world is noticing.

Either way, I expect the Colts to lose this game, mostly because of their defense. Unless Richardson puts it all together this week (which is unlikely) and the offense is dominant, I expect this to be a difficult situation for Colts fans. I hope I'm wrong.

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This is your open thread for week eight, so stick around, chat, celebrate, commiserate, and argue in the comments! Go wild (within reason)!

Come on, Colts!