ColtsSpeak: Rick Bustos
PhilB: How are you feeling about your Colts today?
Rick: I like us better than going into last year. I think we’re a lot more prepared. I think we’ve filled a lot of holes, we have a lot of good depth, which I think should help. I’m like a lot of other Colts fans, a little apprehensive about which (quarterback) Philip Rivers we’re going to get, he doesn’t even have to be the 2018 version, if he can be about 80 percent of that I think we’ll see a lot better team that has a lot more success this year than we did last year. I feel bad for (quarterback) Jacoby (Brissett), I think he catches a lot of the weight of the team and how we did last year, especially with that 5-2 start and then turn around and he really played horrible after his injury. I think we kind of overachieved a little bit at the beginning of the year and set ourselves up for disappointment. It wasn’t all just on him. I’m excited, man. I hope to see us get back, but it’s still tough to get over the Andrew Luck (retirement before 2019). It’s something you don’t expect as a football fan to happen. I feel like a lot of the fans are still just kind of waiting on that to go away, or waiting on us to fix that. It’s really hard to replace a franchise quarterback like that.
PhilB: My wife is still upset about that. I don’t think she’s ever going to forgive (former GM) Ryan Grigson and (former head coach) Chuck Pagano for that.
Rick: Yeah, and that’s a lot of it, man. That poor man took such a beating for the first five years. And shame on the owner (Jim Irsay) for that, and Chuck, too, but Grigson had no business being a GM, right? He never should have been in the position he was in.
PhilB: I criticized Irsay, too. When Luck retired, I criticized all three of them. I’m not against Mr. Irsay. I’ve had a good relationship with him, but I’m sorry, they missed on that. They made a mistake there.
Rick: Yeah, they did. We’re not just talking on one year or a one-season mistake. That was something that just kept showing itself, from the different poor relationships he had with some of the players, Grigson specifically, and then the way he handled a lot of the internal stuff, from the draft picks he continually missed on, just year in and year out. Hindsight is 20-20, right? It’s really easy to see how bad Grigson was when you have Chris Ballard now and you’re able to see what a very much above-average GM is like, such a great drafter, such a good developer. The culture he’s building there is something that will make us competitive for a lot of years to come. We’re not just going to be a one-hit wonder. I do like that part. It’s easy to be very impatient when it comes to expecting us to be back in contention for AFC South titles and Super Bowls because, really, we were starting to enter Luck’s prime and. if he was still there, we’d be a perennial favorite right now. We’re just trying to climb that hill again. I think he’s doing it the right way, I do like that part. I’ll admit I’m one of the fans that kind of gets a little bit agitated when I don’t see us do much in the offseason, especially the previous offseasons to now, when we had all that money, we had all the cap room, and all the holes to fill. Now that you start to see some of these players he’s invested time and draft picks into start to develop, you kind of see where the plan and vision is headed. It makes it a lot easier to criticize Grigson and that group when you have such an opposite-end-of-the-spectrum group now that does such a great job.
PhilB: You sound like a pretty level-headed guy. Your comments and opinions are well-thought out and they’re measured. I say that only because I get nervous when there are a lot of expectations. Everybody is pretty optimistic about the team. How have you tempered your enthusiasm about what this team could do with the reality of what it might do?
Rick: Media is media, right? Whether it’s in sports, whether it’s in the COVID stuff we’re dealing with now, whether it’s in politics, whatever, most of those talking heads say stuff to garner likes, to garner clicks. It’s really easy as a fan, when you’re so optimistic about your team, you feel like we’ve done a lot to get better, a lot of these younger guys should take steps forward, with the way the offensive line is playing right now, Quenton Nelson might be the best football player in the league in the next couple of years. To be a guard and in that conversation, that just shows you. And he’s such a great guy, too. You’ve got to love how he handles things. It’s really easy to see all those things. My youngest brother (Bryan) will call me all the time and he’ll say, ‘I just watched First Take and they didn’t even put us in the top 10 in the NFL.’ So it’s real easy to get very agitated when you don’t hear where you think they should be, but at the same time, I think we’re going to sneak up on some people this year. It’s the NFL, everything is on tape, right? It’s not like you’re going to surprise anybody from week to week. People know what to expect. They know who is on your team. They scouted these players before they were ever drafted. GMs and scouting departments have tape and video and books on these guys before ever they get to the NFL, so they kind of know what to expect and be ready for. I think our defense is really what’s going to take us where we want to go this year. When you ask Jacoby Brissett to score 24 to 30 points a game, which is what we almost would have had to do last year to make the playoffs, you’re asking a guy who has never shown the ability to do that with an offense that was completely depleted. I think this year, as long as Rivers can stay healthy, you’re not putting him in bad positions like he was with the Chargers. You’re not asking him to go win the game in the fourth quarter and throw three touchdowns. He’s not trying to throw the ball in those tight windows and force things, he’ll be a lot less turnover-prone Philip Rivers, leaning on the running game.
PhilB: Yeah, I’ve reiterated he can be more of a game manager.
Rick: It’s so easy to get really excited, I think it happens to all of us every year. You’re so optimistic. That’s probably the greatest thing about football, what makes me believe football is the greatest sport out there, literally every year it’s a reset the clock. Everybody has hope. The Browns have hope every year. That may go away in a couple of weeks, but it’s a sport that I don’t think anybody is counted out from the get-go. I think I’m like everybody else, I’m super excited at the beginning of the season, I’m starved for sports right now, where there’s been none for the last few months, which is huge, too. For me, I just try to keep it reasonable. I don’t want to get too high and be disappointed. I don’t want to get too low. It’s something that, over the years, I’ve gotten better at. When I was younger, I expected us to win constantly. I was very much overly fan driven. As I’ve gotten older and learned more about football and watched football more, I’m the type of guy who can watch football, I don’t care who’s playing. I’ll watch college on Wednesday nights because it’s football, right? I think as I’ve gotten older and just learned a little bit more about the game and how it works, I think that’s helped a lot. It tempers the expectations. I still think we’re going to be a playoff team. I still think we’re going to win the AFC South. But, again, defense is going to be the bread and butter this year. It will take us where we want to go or could be the reason we underperform again.
PhilB: Which brother calls you?
Rick: Bryan, he’s younger so he still gets real emotional about stuff. It’s funny, when Luck retired, we were actually at one of our fantasy football drafts, our main one we’ve done for about the last 10 years. We have a live draft every year. He had literally just chosen Andrew Luck, not five seconds before the announcement was made. We all thought it was a joke. He’s been a little emotional about it for the last year or so.
PhilB: What did you think of the DeForest Buckner trade?
Rick: I really like it. It was out of character for Chris Ballard. It was definitely out of character for what we’ve seen him do. He’s a very calculated person. He thinks about things. You’ve got some GMs and personnel people who get tunnel vision for one or the other, either we’re building for the future or we’re in win-now mode. He’s done a really good job of being able to balance the two. That was a lot of money to give somebody ($84 million for four years), but with the way our defense is and the scheme they run, man, that three-technique drives, that’s the engine. To be able to go out and get one of the top-three players at that position, and think about what it does for (linebacker) Darius Leonard. Think about how free that’s going to make him, to clean up tackles and hit that hole. As scary good as he is already, the Buckner trade will make him, they’ll talk about Leonard being a top-two or top-three linebacker in the league by the end of this year. That’s really where you’ll see the impact. I’d love to see us bring Jabaal Sheard back as well. I think that would really fill out our defensive line. I know we’ve got a couple of young guys they really like. Kemoko Turay had a really great season before he got hurt. Al-Quadin Muhammad has shown the ability to rush the quarterback. Sheard would just really solidify as someone opposite of Justin Houston. With those three up front, that would be a scary defensive line to go up against. And with Buckner, and the guys he’s played alongside these first three years, man, I think that kind of dulls his stats down a little bit. You’re playing around so many great players, it’s hard to shine as much as he could. I really think he’s an Aaron Donald-esque player. He’s not Aaron Donald yet, but he has the ability to be that type of a disruptive player for us over the next few years.
PhilB: I agree with you, 100 percent. We know Ballard doesn’t like to part with draft picks, so for him to move a first-rounder, it shows how much they valued Buckner. Then they gave him an $84-million extension.
Rick: Which is huge.
PhilB: That’s stamping him as a defensive cornerstone. I agree with all of it. Without him, you’ve got a defensive line that’s just OK at times. The defense didn’t protect leads in many of those close games last year. Yeah, they didn’t have enough offense, but were 5-6 in one-score games. They could have won two or three of those easy.
Rick: And been in the playoffs.
PhilB: They could have won two or three of those if they made kicks.
Rick: Yeah, Adam Vinatieri killed us. It’s hard when you’re a Colts fan, or you’re a fan of any team, when you have had players that have been with your team so long, and I’ve met Vinatieri a couple of times, I got his autograph, and saw him at a couple of rifle association meetings in Indianapolis, he was out at the last one back before COVID got going, I talked to him for 10 to 15 minutes. He’s a super nice guy, super friendly, the kind of player you really fall in love with. It’s hard when you have that emotional, personal connection with him. But, it’s a business. I really think we should have probably replaced him early on. If it was a matter of injury, then put him on injured reserve. And I appreciate the loyalty. That’s what it was last year. You were being loyal to somebody who has meant a lot to the franchise when he wasn’t one of the best 53 players on the team. It’s one thing when you don’t hit the kicks and cost us points, but when you absolutely cost us games, he was to blame for that. Those close games, it could have made such a huge difference.
PhilB: Anything else you want to say about the Colts?
Rick: I could talk all day about the Colts. My brothers (Bryan and Nathan) and I, we’ve been going to two or three games a year. We’ve been to some cool ones over the years. We were at the Chiefs playoff game when we came back from 21 points down. We checked out the Pittsburgh game on Thanksgiving. I hope we do good this year. I’m a huge fan, no matter what.
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