Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the Colts are caught up in controversy over an injured player that they seem to believe might not actually be all that injured.
Cornerback Vontae Davis has been bad this year. No one disputes that part. What is at issue is whether Davis’s struggles have been due to injury, and the extent of it. Davis suffered a groin injury in preseason and returned to action October first, and he’s been receiving treatment on it, but the Colts have steadfastly refused to list him on the injury report. They benched him last Sunday, and went out of their way to make sure everyone knew it was performance-related and not due to injury. That ticked Davis off:
“I’ve been here six years,” Davis said. “We’ve had similar situations where I played hurt. These things happen. And I never got confronted and (no one) said, ‘Your play has slipped.’ Nothing. I was playing at a level that was acceptable.
“But now, my play slips and this? They should have come to me way earlier and said, ‘Vontae, you’re not yourself. You’re not playing well.’ I told the trainers my groin was not responding.”
Compounding Davis’ disappointment, he says, is the fact that Pagano did not initially deliver the news to him. Instead, Davis says defensive coordinator Ted Monachino and defensive backs coach Greg Williams broke the news. Not Pagano, Davis’ coach the past six seasons.
“It should be more about the respect. I’m a professional,” Davis said. “I’ve been in (the league) long enough. When I look at the situation, I feel like there was no respect. Knowing Chuck, I figured it would come from him. It really bothered me.”
With Colts trainers and doctors apparently not signing off on Davis’s claim that his injury is affecting his play, he went to see his own doctors this week. And this morning, it was reported by the Indianapolis Star that those doctors have recommended season-ending surgery.
Davis reportedly has a groin muscle that’s peeling back from the bone, and playing through it could make it worse. So he’s going to get that operation, whether or not the Colts recommend it.
They don’t:
This is not the end of the beef between Davis and the Colts—if there’s money at stake, they’ll see each other before an arbitrator—but it is the end of Davis’s six-year tenure in Indianapolis. Which is doing totally fine, by the way, everything’s fine: