The victory cigars that Indianapolis Colts center Jeff Saturday purchased at the start of the 2005 season were smoked after each of the first seven games. But on a late November night near the team bus at Gillette Stadium, the smell of the cigars was different. The taste of them was even better for Saturday and some of his teammates.
The Colts had finally conquered the mountain that Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and the defending back-to-back Super Bowl champion New England Patriots sat atop in a 40-21 beatdown in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
“I remember being there and thinking how sweet it was to be leaving New England knowing we beat a really good team, a team, quite honestly, who had our number prior to that,” Saturday said. “We beat a well-coached, disciplined football team. That gave us even more confidence than what we had before. I don’t think there’s anything that compares.”
ESPN is re-airing the most anticipated game up to that point in the 2005 season at 8 p.m. ET Monday as part of its five-week Monday Night Football Classics series.
The Colts were 7-0 and the Patriots were 4-3 going into that Week 9 game. The Colts had superior talent, and not just on offense. The Colts were stacked on defense, too.
But mental obstacles lingered. The Colts, despite believing they had a better team, had been knocked out of the playoffs by the Patriots in each of the previous two seasons, including the AFC Championship Game in 2003.
And as good as quarterback Peyton Manning was — throwing for 49 touchdown passes in 2004 — there was no getting around his 0-7 career record in games played at Foxborough to that point.
It wasn’t Harlem Globetrotters-against-Washington Generals domination, but it was still bad for Indianapolis.
“We were playing hot at that time going into the game,” former Colts coach Tony Dungy said. “We were 7-0 and had won all our games but two by double digits up to that point. But everybody was saying wait until they get to the Patriots and then they’ll see how good we really were. Everybody also always talked about [Coach] Belichick’s defense and how they had Peyton’s number. We never felt like that was true.”
The offense, led by Manning, was stacked. The biggest difference was on defense. Dungy, who was in his fourth season as coach, built a solid defense through the draft, highlighted by the likes of defensive ends Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis and safety Bob Sanders, to go with the prolific offense.
“We said that with the talent we had on that team, if we couldn’t beat these fools this time, it just wasn’t going to happen,” Mathis said. “Our minds were made up that those fools were going to get it that game. It wasn’t even an option.”
Dungy’s message was no different for this game than it was for any other one: “Don’t do anything special — just do what we’re supposed to do and we’re going to be fine because we have a better team.”
In the third quarter, the Colts ran off 21 straight points against the Patriots to turn what had been a 7-7 game into a 28-7 lead.
Manning threw for 321 yards and three touchdowns. Running back Edgerrin James rushed for 104 yards, and receivers Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne had 128 and 124 yards, respectively.
After years of watching Brady play chess while the Colts played checkers, according to linebacker Gary Brackett, the Colts finally slowed him down.
“Our defense was designed to protect the lead like game closers,” Mathis said. “Peyton is going to jump out and get us a two-score lead; our job was to protect it. That was the blueprint.”
The Colts held the Patriots to 288 yards of offense in the game. Belichick, seeing defeat was inevitable, even replaced Brady with Doug Flutie late in the fourth quarter.
The 40 points scored by the Colts were 37 more than they had scored in the playoff matchup against the Patriots in that same stadium the previous season.
“That gave us confidence that carried on for probably the next four years,” Dungy said. “I’d have to go back to Pittsburgh in 1978 to think about being around a team with that much weaponry and talent. That ’05 team, man for man, was better than the ’06 team that won the Super Bowl.”
Mathis added, “If anybody says anything different about that not being the best team they played on, they’re flat-out lying.”
The Colts ended that season with a 14-2 record and eight Pro Bowl players. They had nothing to show for it because they were upset by Pittsburgh in the divisional round of the playoffs. The Colts won the Super Bowl the following season, and they reached it again in 2009. The 2005 season was part of a nine-year streak of at least 10 victories.
“Every year when the question of who was going to win the Super Bowl, the Patriots were the ones everybody talked about,” Brackett said. “Until we beat them, we never actually got in that conversation.”
The Colts went through a stretch in which they beat the Patriots five out of six times, including in the AFC Championship Game in 2006. And it all started on that Monday at Gillette Stadium in early November 2005.
“It let us know that there was no team we couldn’t beat and it’s always that marquee game that gets you confidence as a team and it was that game,” Mathis said. “We knew we had a lot of talent, but it was that we still couldn’t beat those dudes. Once we got over that hump, mental hurdle, it was game on for the next few years.”