Colts begin playoffs with win or go home mentality

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (WLFI) - The Colts were back on the practice filed on Wednesday sticking to the process with a ‘win or go home’ mentality entering the picture on Sunday afternoon.

“Keep the routine the same and try not to deviate just because you can get caught up in the playoff hype and all that other stuff,” head coach Chuck Pagano said. “At the end of the day, they’re going to kick that ball off and it’s still football.”

“Field doesn’t change, it’s a different team, you just pull the decals off and slap a different decal on there and you’ve got another 60-minute game to play. We’re just going to stick to the process.”

For over half the Colts roster, the playoff experience on Sunday will be a first but it didn’t take long on Wednesday to hear some of those players talk about what playing in the postseason means.

“If you lose, you go home,” running back Vick Ballard said. “We are definitely not ready to go home so you prepare that much harder and prepare more to attention to detail.”

Cornerback Vontae Davis is in his fourth NFL season and this will be his first time tasting the postseason.

“It’s a special moment,” Davis, the AFC’s Defensive Player of the Week, said of his first playoff experience. “I’ve never been to the playoffs being in Miami. My brother, Vernon Davis of San Francisco, went to his first playoffs last year. He said it’s a great feeling, a great experience.”

“I feel like what Coach (Pagano) always says, ‘a kid in a candy shop.’”

The players admitted that the feeling around the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center was a little amped up on Wednesday with the playoffs on the horizon.

Those feelings will be here all week but for the players that are playing in the postseason for the first time this weekend, they will concentrate on a pair of things in advance of the Ravens game.

“I think one, you lean on guys who have been there before—Reggie (Wayne), Dwight (Freeney), Robert Mathis. And two, it’s a football game still,” quarterback Andrew Luck said.

“We’ve done a lot to get to this point so I don’t think you need to wholesale change things. Obviously, intensity is going to ratchet up, things are going to kick up a notch but trust in the same preparation, in the same process and hopefully that’ll pay dividends.”

The Colts head into the playoffs on a high note, winning nine of their last 11 games and capturing their season finale, 28-16 over the Houston Texans.

In the team meeting the night prior to Sunday’s game with the Texans, Pagano defined the word ‘mojo’ to his players and it’s something he wants his entire team to embrace.

“We wanted to play our best football at the end of the year, to win five out of the last six games, to go into that last football game and play a complete game in all three phases and have contributions from everybody,” Pagano said.

“You want to go in with that mojo, with that momentum rolling. So I think we, obviously playing the way that we played last Sunday and weeks prior to that, we get to go into this ballgame feeling pretty good about ourselves.”

There’s no denying the feeling is a bit different this week around the Colts complex.

The calendar has turned to 2013 but there are the Colts, sticking to the process in preparing for postseason football.

“The excitement is there,” Pagano said. “You can feel it in the building obviously, its playoff time.”