The Colts without Luck

Andrew Luck decided to retire. I've talked for years about how the Colts' failure to protect him for years would eventually have negative consequences. Luck missed a whole season two years ago because of injury, and despite one of the best O-Lines in the league, he didn't feel like he could continue. I don't blame him, and I'm glad he has his whole life ahead of him, hopefully pain free.
I also don't think that this was a total surprise to the Colts. After a season where he was hit very infrequently, Andrew Luck was still in pain. After coming back to training camp, he wasn't himself at the beginning of the season. This was a team that was set for success with or without Luck, though the levels of success may have varied. Well, they are going to do it without.
The Colts have already decided, even before the season started, that they would give Jacoby Brissett a vote of confidence, signing the pending free agent to a two year extension. People were talking about the Colts tanking this season, but that is obviously not the course Indianapolis will take.
As much as the Colts losing Luck will hurt, we need to remember that the Colts were among the favorites to win the Super Bowl. It's a hell of a lot easier to win the Super Bowl with a star quarterback, but you do need more to make it happen. The Colts have the same team, less the quarterback. It's still a good team.
Now, I never thought the team was going to be good enough to really contend for the title. They have a very difficult schedule after reaching the playoffs last year. The Jaguars should be better. The Texans should be healthier and the Titans are on the way up. While the Colts are a young, improving team, so is the rest of the division. It's going to be a battle to get to the playoffs, even with their quarterback of choice.
Oh, and that offense and improved defense? They were pasted by the Chiefs in the playoffs. The Chiefs are approximately the same as they were last year, and even they couldn't handle the Patriots.
Now, like I said, the Colts are a better team than one that should even consider tanking. They have assembled perhaps the best offensive line in the league, which will allow Brissett to succeed, or at least be more successful than he was when he started 15 games in 2017. Brissett was sacked more times than any other QB in the league during the games he started. The offense will be stable so long as the O-Line stays stable.
Then, there is the defense, long a liability of the Colts. Through two years of good drafting, the Colts have also developed one of the better defenses in the league. Most of the Colts' draft capital was spent on further filling holes on defense, and Justin Houston could ultimately be the most important signing the Colts made this offseason.
It might seem like I am arguing two different points. The schedule is tough, and the Colts won't do well. Their team is pretty good, the Colts will do well. I'm using those two ideas to make one conclusion. The loss of Andrew Luck doesn't hurt on the field as much as it seems, initially, because I don't think their ceiling was as high as some people believed, but also, their floor isn't that low without him. The Colts won't win the Super Bowl, but with a good break, they might make the playoffs. That's the same prediction I would have made before Luck's retirement.

The Xcel Energy Center is resurfacing their plaza

Anyone who has walked across the Xcel Plaza knows that the stonework that abuts West 7th Street is an uneven nightmare for anyone riding a scooter, wearing heels, or simply doesn't enjoy turned ankles. Well, good news. The brick work is getting redone in an effort to create a level walkway.
It's a welcome change not only for pedestrians but also for fans, who will likely appreciate not having the little pits in the walkway that fill with water and freeze into tiny ice rinks every winter as people wait to get into the arena. Usually, the athletes are better on the ice than their fans.
This is likely the most visible upgrade to the always active arena this offseason. There don't appear to be plans for any internal renovations to the XCel, but this was definitely low hanging fruit. Re-bricking the plaza improves safety and the visual aesthetic, without costing much money, relative to other potential repairs.
Anyways, the rest of the Wild organization is an absolute disaster this offseason, so I thought maybe I would provide some good news.

Putting way too much pressure on the Vikings

I don't think I am being too dramatic here, but if the Vikings don't win the Super Bowl this year, they have completely missed their shot with this window. This season is a crucial one for the Vikes, and they can't screw it up. The problem is that I don't believe they have the ability not to.
It is difficult to maintain a core of talent for much longer than 2 or 3 years, and the Vikings are likely approaching the end of such a cycle. Players will either age out of their most effective ability, or they will reach free agency, and their contracts will no longer fit. It's not an issue of team management, it's just the way things work in the NFL. The exception is teams that have a broader period of contention.
One thing that most teams who reach a contending window, and are able to lengthen that window, is a stable, home grown quarterback. The Vikingsgave up on Teddy Bridgewater, just as they have had to do with all of their drafted quarterback talent, excepting only, perhaps, Daunte Culpepper and Brad Johnson, so they broke the bank on Kirk Cousins.
So this season is just as much a referendum on Cousins as it is on the Vikings' window. He still has two years left on his deal, including the coming season, but if Cousins can't lead the Vikings deep into the playoffs, or if he does and still looks shaky thereafter, the final year of his contract will likely consist of keeping the seat warm for the next man ready to fail as Vikings quarterback.
The problem is that Cousins is a deeply flawed player, who has never really proven himself of leading a team into the postseason. Washington was just as successful, if not moreso with Alex Smith at the helm last year, before he got hurt. Quarterback statistics are hard to assess. Often because a bad team is behind early, a quarterback's numbers are inflated as his team tries to catch up. The only way, in my opinion, to judge whether or not a quarterback is effective is if his team wins when he is on the field. Has Kirk Cousins proven that he wins? Not consistently.
That's the biggest albatross on the Vikings' neck this season. Next season, they will need to worry about retaining core pieces of their roster if they hope to sustain some modicum of success. Their last challenge is time. They'll find out, either this year or next, that they've run out of it.

The Colts are just going to keep building through the draft

There was a lot made of the Colts' 2018 season and their position as the off season approached. They were a team on the upswing, and they were in a place of great financial flexibility, so some massive moves were expected, with holes on defense and a wide receiving corps that was very shallow, as well as a widely stated need for a running back.
The free agency glut came and went, and the Colts came away with.... Devin Funchess. Later, the Colts went out and added Justin Houston and Spencer Ware, but that was long after the premium names were already off the board.
The Colts then went to the draft, and the general consensus was that they crushed it. They traded out of the first round, and had three picks in the 2nd round, which they used to fill three pressing needs: Rock Ya-Sin, a cornerback, Ben Benogu, a linebacker and Parris Campbell, a wide receiver. This is the second year in a row that the Colts have potentially done extremely well with the draft.
That's a great thing to have in their back pocket. As they continue to develop internally, with young players breaking out, they will be able to either retain players in the long term, or in the short term, add that final component to a potential championship team.
Which, uh... I guess is what the situation was this year. To me, that signifies that they could get more out of the prospects they are adding than the entirety of the free agent pool, which is incredibly arrogant. Of course, Chris Ballard, the GM, is yet to be proven wrong in his Indianapolis tenure. We can call it confidence, since Ballard has already started to turn the team around using similar methods in previous off seasons.
The Colts could have added a bunch of free agents to round out the roster. They didn't. They could probably do it again next year. They probably won't. That doesn't seem to be how this organization wants to operate.

It's all bad news

We are at the beginning of the summer dog days for sports media coverage. There is only one of the big Four sports that is currently active, and it is the longest, steadiest season of them all. The crush of free agency is through for the three primary winter sports, and all the drafts are complete as well. It allows MLS to sneak up a little bit, but really, there are no big headlines to be made right now.
Unless it's bad news.
There is usually a buffet of stories about the offseason misbehavior of athletes - usually NFL athletes (there are just more of them), ill worded statements from executives and entirely too much attention paid to minor roster machinations in all leagues. Everyone tunes into every story more closely, developing strong opinions about everything they read.
And then the worst happens. Perhaps it is because we have so few distractions, except for those miscreant headlines, but it seems like the passing of Tyler Skaggs has a real chance to settle into our collective psyche and really, really hurt. With other bad news, and lord knows there is plenty in the course of the year, we can soldier on, but Skaggs sudden passing will likely have a chance to sit with us.
I think there is more to it than the headline desert of summer, or even the relative youth of Skaggs. There are other deaths that come in the summer in other sports. Jared Lorenzen, former NFL quarterback with the Giants and at the University of Kentucky just passed today, for example, at the tender age of 38. I think it's because baseball is a local sport, and fans of the game really have a chance to come to embrace members of the organization.
Baseball is part of the cadence of summer. Whereas football, and to a lesser degree basketball and hockey are events, baseball comes around every day, and we hear the announcers say the players' names so often they become interwoven in the humid summer air. The rhythm and the persistence of baseball make the players seem more akin to family.
And we watch them grow up with our organization, anticipate their success for longer. Players in other leagues are certainly younger, but they arrive ready to play, either out of high school or overseas. Maybe we saw them in college, but surely not the one in our back yard, or the one our local news, or the blog we read is most dedicated to.
Baseball players are part of the fabric of summer, in a way players in other sports are not enmeshed, and regardless of age, we become invested and engrossed in their development, and have a built in patience, almost like the players are our children in a way. We may never meet a professional baseball player through their career, but losing them so young has a special sting.
RIP, Tyler Skaggs. You will be missed.

I don't like country music

I want to first preface this by saying there isn't anything wrong with you if you do like country music. It's a personal taste and I do not share it. Too many people conflate an opinion on music, especially, as some sort of moral test. One is more legitimate if one prefers one kind of music over another, and they talk about the virtues of one kind of music and the fans of said music have. A genre of music is not and cannot be more virtuous than any other, and if you believe it can, then you are pompous. Country simply doesn't sound right to my ear, and that is OK, just as if hip hop or grunge or whatever doesn't sound right to yours.
Because I titled the post this way, I figure you expect an explanation. Sure, I'll give it to you. Die hard country fans espouse the lyrics and the instrumentation, the originality of the music. I don't want to put words in your mouth if you are a fan, so I'm just going off of common refrains that I have heard. I am going off of my taste, and arguing with anonymous voices that may or may not reflect your opinion. I'm trying to be very diplomatic here, over something that really makes people salty.
I find the lyrics of country songs to be too saccharine for my taste. More broadly, most that point to lyrics as something they appreciate in a song do so because they find the words to be relatable. I don't relate to country music. I grew up in suburbs, went to school in the city and am rather cynical. Country lyrics ring a bit treacly to me. I roll my eyes instead of enjoying the sentiment.
Some country songs border on pop or rock, depending on whether or not the instruments accompanying the lead guitars are fiddles or not. I don't like the way fiddles sound. If you remove the fiddle and replace it with a powerful bass line, it will definitely sound better to me, but at that point, is it really country anymore? I'm honestly asking, because I'm not sure where the line is.
The originality thing isn't really an issue for me. Country is no more or less original than any other brand of music. Thematically, most songs are the same, which is true in any genre, though those themes are the same. Country is just as prone to covering previously performed songs as rock or pop, and in my view, covering someone else's song isn't that different from sampling, which is often performed in hip hop. What I'm saying is that Country doesn't distinguish itself in my view on originality. This wouldn't matter much, but the themes and tone it sticks to generally don't appeal to me, and I don't identify with them.
Now all of that said, and this is the important part of this post: I have come to have so much respect for the talent of country singers. When they want to, they definitely can make a foray into another genre of music. Look at pop stars Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood and now Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris on the female side, and Dan and Shay and Florida Georgia Line among the men.
I bring all of this up to say that this spring's hot song, Old Town Road was terrible when Lil Nas X performed solo. It took Billy Ray Cyrus to make it the hit it became. When country artists take their talents to other genres of music, It almost always adds positively to the song in question. Tim McGraw and Chris Stapleton have perhaps done this the most effectively in recent years, and now Billy Ray Cyrus, somehow, has done it again.
I have all the respect in the world for country artists, and I appreciate their talent when they have cross over hits. I just don't like country music.

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