ARTICLE: On football: Shame on the Colts for tossing away perfect record, By Bob Kravitz, USAToday, December 28, 2009

I agree totally with this analysis. I watched the game and was very excited to see the Colts leading deep into the 3rd, with the Jets doing nothing to suggest a comeback other than the luck of a KO return. I got very mad when the coach pulled Peyton. I think it was a deliberate attempt to throw the game and do it in an obvious, we-don't-care fashion. I thought it was disrespectful to the game, and patently dishonest to the players. Benching Peyton for one quarter, when he faced no hits, was totally meaningless in terms of playoff preparation. This was all about the coach believing the team was better off without the pressure of perfection, but now he's created, as one ESPN analyst (Trent Dilfer, who's good) put it, a big pause in the team's sense of history and inevitability and invincibility, and that can be crucial in a sport as emotional and momentum-driven as football. You just don't mess with mojo, and you don't take off two weeks and then skip a week of playing and suddenly place the first serious game in a month and not risk a collapse, which happens all the time to college teams in the big layoff before bowl games. So I thoroughly disagreed with the decision, and I sure as hell hope it doesn't come back to haunt them in the divisionals.