Patriots at Colts conjures memories of Indys infamous trick play disaster

Chuck Pagano is retired and loving life as a grandfather of four in Boise, Idaho, but he cannot escape his worst football moment.

For him, the comically ill-conceived and ill-executed fake punt in the 2015 Colts-Patriots game — the last time the Patriots played in Indianapolis — remains an eternal source of mockery in much the same way Jim Mora’s “Playoffs!!” rant continues to dog the former Colts head coach.

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“Every time there’s a bad special-teams play in the NFL and someone does something really silly like I did, they play that play (the fake punt, or as Wikipedia calls it, the “Colts Catastrophe”), over and over and over again,” Pagano said. “Until they put me in my last suit and bury me, I’m going to have to, unfortunately, relive that play.”

Pagano, a long-time NFL assistant and head coach, can laugh now. Well, sort of laugh. It’s not a guffaw, necessarily, but it’s a resigned and humorous acknowledgment that he and his team screwed up in a way that set them up for eternal derision on a national stage. This is what happens when you try to out-smart the smartest man in the room; in this case, that’s Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. Never was that more evident than in October 2015, the Colts trailing the Patriots 21-20 with 1:14 left in the third quarter at Lucas Oil Stadium, facing a fourth-and-3 at the Indy 37-yard line.

In case you’ve forgotten — and believe me, they haven’t forgotten here in Indianapolis — click here to see how the play unfolded, as nine players shifted to the far right, leaving a makeshift center and quarterback alone in the middle of the field.

Pagano wasn’t sure if then-special teams coach Tom McMahon previously used the play or had seen someone else use it, but during that week’s practice, the Colts had run it flawlessly. Clayton Geathers, a safety at the time, would be over the ball. Colt Anderson, another safety, would stand behind center. No worries, no problems. Everything seemed fine, until …

Saturday, when Geathers was removed from the lineup with an illness.

That meant wide receiver Griff Whalen would replace Geathers in that spot over the ball. The problem — and here’s where things get a little cloudy — is either nobody told Whalen NOT to snap the ball or Whalen misunderstood his role on that play and snapped it to an unsuspecting Anderson, who was immediately swallowed up by three New England tacklers for a 2-yard loss. There were five New England defenders within 5 yards of the play. Then, to pour salt into the wound of indignity, the Colts were penalized for an illegal formation. The Patriots declined it, of course, took over on the Colts’ 35 and quickly scored a touchdown, altering the course of the game and leading to a 34-27 Patriots’ victory.

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The Colts dropped to 3-3 that day and finished the season 8-8.

“It’s designed to steal a possession,” Pagano said recently. “We run the offense off (the field), OK, so they stand on the sideline, like really close, and act like there’s still a chance they can come back on. So they’re standing there, the punt team comes out and then you shift to this formation where it looks like you’re going to run the punt team off and run the offense back on. The idea is you force them to use a timeout if they get screwed up and they don’t have the right personnel or too many men out there and they’re not lined up correctly. Or maybe you have an advantage somewhere based on the formation, you can run a fake off it.

“The long and short of it, obviously, is it went awry. All those things we were trying to do, none of them happened. Because only as Bill Belichick could do, they responded exactly the way they should have responded. They lined up correctly. Obviously, they’d faced the play or seen the play somewhere, but that’s what we were trying to do.”

The bottom line was, Whalen was not supposed to snap the football unless the Patriots got flummoxed and had too many men on the field. That didn’t happen. He snapped it anyway to an unsuspecting Anderson, who was stunned and slightly bobbled the snap.

Hilarity ensued.

“That’s where I screwed up,” Pagano said. “I mean, I never should have put any of those guys in that position. I take full responsibility for it. What happened there, it wasn’t Colt’s fault and it wasn’t Griff’s fault, shoot, it was my fault. When I saw the thing going awry, I should have called a timeout and saved everybody the heartache of what transpired.”

On the TV broadcast, announcers Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth were completely confused.

Collinsworth: Uh-oh.

Michaels: Yeah, now we’ve got a fourth down-and-3, you’ve got Griff Whalen ready to take the snap. He’ll snap it, actually Colt Anderson is behind him (Whalen).

Collinsworth: (as the play unfolds): What … the … heck.

Michaels: And … what in the world? Flag is down. You tell me.

Collinsworth: I thought maybe they were trying to get them to jump offsides? That was insane. I’ve never seen anything more bizarre than that. What was the plan?

Michaels: I don’t know. It’s completely nuts.

On the sidelines that day, Pagano wanted to hide.

“Shellshocked,” he said. “I’m thinking, ‘That didn’t just happen.’ You’re like, ‘Please Lord, tell me that didn’t just happen.’ You start praying. Talk about a head-scratcher. I’m like, ‘What in the hell?’ There’s no do-overs, no mulligans. You can’t just turn back the clock and time and say, ‘Jesus Christ, why did I do that? Why did I put those guys in that position?’ But you’ve got to live with it and maybe this will be the last time it’s brought up.”

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He paused and laughed.

“I hope.”

To this day, Pagano deeply regrets that he went forward with the play and put Anderson and Whalen — especially Whalen, a late addition to Pagano’s folly — in that position.

“I had talked to Colt and said, ‘Hey, look, if all else fails and nothing is there, you can hard count this thing and maybe get those three (defenders) to jump offsides,'” he said. “Obviously, that wasn’t very smart on my part. Just a bad, bad deal. I hate that those guys had to be out there in that situation.

“I never should have put them in that position to where there would even be a remote chance something bad would happen. When you’re running it all week, and you’re running it with Clayton and then game day comes and you don’t have Clayton, I should have said, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do it.’ Just dumb. Really dumb.”

Pagano was peppered with questions after the game about one of the goofiest plays most of us have ever seen, and he kept accepting the blame and responsibility, continually saying it was a “miscommunication.”

Whalen, who could not be reached for this story, toed the party line after the game, saying it was — that’s right — a miscommunication.

Anderson, now an assistant coach with the Bengals, declined comment through a team representative. The day after the game, he told the Indy media, “It’s unfortunate that the miscommunication went on, but we’re going to learn from this mistake and move forward.”

McMahon, now the Broncos special-teams coordinator, did not comment for this story, either.

That said, can you blame any of them?

Belichick seemed to grasp what the Colts were attempting to do — well, more or less.

“I think the play was a version of the swinging gate play,” Belichick said later in the week. “I don’t know exactly how it was supposed to work; that’s something you’d have to ask them about.

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“They brought the gunner in to snap the ball so he would’ve been an eligible receiver, so we had to cover him. I think basically you want to try to, on punt formations … it’s just a numbers game. You want to have enough guys to match to the smaller numbers, and as many guys as you can to match to the larger number where they were over-shifted … So it’s just kind of everybody making sure that they take care of their responsibility on the shift and make sure that we can defend the formation and know who is eligible. I think it’s something that every special-teams coach goes over.”

It’s all a little bit unfair, one botched play defining the totality of a man’s career. Pagano was a top-notch defensive assistant and had just one losing season during his Colts tenure, but you bring up his name, and this play is what you see in your mind’s eye.

At least he can laugh about it. I mean, what’s the alternative, right? Give him credit for being willing to relive it.

“I’m blessed to be retired and living a good life, so we can laugh about it now, but really, do me a favor, do it justice, OK?” he said. “It was totally on me. Colt wasn’t the goat. Griff wasn’t the goat. It was my fault, period.

“Shit happens. Yes, it does. If you coach this game long enough, obviously you try to avoid something like that, but it won’t be the last bonehead play we’ll ever see. But it’s something I have to live with. Every time somebody tries something really ridiculous, they show that play.

“Just when you think it’s gone and it’s dead and buried, there it is.”

(Top photo: Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

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