It doesn’t make any more sense with time. The Colts’ momentary collective hysteria in the form of a fake punt was dumbfounding the moment it happened, and neither memes nor Chuck Pagano’s mea culpa can force it to make sense.
Oh sure, the ball wasn’t supposed to be snapped — God help them if it was. But then how does one explain the entire offense, minus the two sacrificial lambs on the ball (seriously, the “offensive lineman” weighed less than 200 pounds), simultaneously forgetting where the line of scrimmage is? I’ll tell you how to explain it: This was merely a leakage into this dimension from the dimension of Tecmo Super Bowl, as imagined by The Cauldron.
This version recasts Chuck Pagano as Player One, who makes an indefensible decision that the incredulous AI tries to deter. But damn the torpedoes and all that. Maybe it would comfort Colts fans to imagine all eleven players on the field were merely simulacra, drones of an obsolete and fallible decision maker, doomed to perform the commanded motions without any hope of success. Maybe that would explain why Griff Whalen snapped the ball. It would at least feel better than him shrugging and muttering “miscommunication.”
