Colts Pick Their Poison

Mike Vanderjagt, the Indianapolis kicker who always seems to wind up with his foot wedged in his mouth, remarked last week that New England would be “ripe for the picking” Sunday in an AFC divisional playoff showdown.

Turns out, he was right. Everyone should have picked the Patriots.

Especially in a swirling snowstorm. Especially at a place where Peyton Manning has never won. Especially after defensive visionary Bill Belichick has two weeks to plot, scheme and finally lie in wait, energized by the challenge of confounding the league’s most valuable player and hottest quarterback. Again. For the fifth time in six games.

“From a defensive standpoint, to hold those guys to three points? That was tremendous,” safety Rodney Harrison said after a 20-3 victory that secured New England a spot in the AFC championship game for the third time in four years. They will play Sunday at Pittsburgh. “No one gave us a chance. We played our best 30 minutes of football in the second half.”

The Colts’ only scoring came in the second quarter when Vanderjagt -- deemed “Vanderjerk” by Harrison and other Patriots -- made a 23-yard field goal in the second quarter. Other than that, nothing. It was the first time since the 2003 opener against Cleveland that Indianapolis failed to score a touchdown.

It was the 20th consecutive home victory for the Patriots and their seventh consecutive playoff victory in Foxboro. Their first and only postseason loss at home came in 1978 against the Houston Oilers. Near the end of Sunday’s game, as frustrations mounted for Manning, the crowd began to chant “Cut that meat!” in reference to his credit-card commercial.

No matter how he sliced it, Manning couldn’t dissect the Patriots’ defensive game plan. They came at him with all sorts of exotic packages, showing him looks he never saw on film, jolting him out of his comfort zone. The player who finished the regular season with an NFL-record passer rating of 121.1 had that almost halved by the Patriots, who limited him to a 69.3 rating on 27-for-42 passing.

The temperature at kickoff was 25 degrees, but it seemed to drop as evening approached. It must have been particularly cold for Colt offensive players who had to stand on the sideline and watch their New England counterparts hog the clock, 37 minutes 43 seconds to 22:17.

Playing in the first postseason game of his eight-year career, New England’s Corey Dillon ran as if he had snow tires, gaining 144 yards in 23 carries. He was a key component in Patriot scoring drives of 78, 87 and 94 yards that accounted for 45 plays and roughly 25 minutes.

“We didn’t want to give them the ball for any extended period of time,” Patriot tight end Christian Fauria said. “The best thing, we thought, was to have them sit there and get cold and stiff. ... They were frustrated. They couldn’t stop us, even though they were doing everything humanly possible.

“If you’re on the sideline and you’re not playing, if you’re an offensive guy, the worse it gets. My toes were getting numb. My feet were getting wet. Just the fact they weren’t on the field, offensively we did what we were supposed to do.”

When the Colts did get the ball, they didn’t take many shots down the field the way they did during the regular season, especially when playing in the climate-controlled comfort of the RCA Dome. Manning’s longest completion was for 18 yards.

“Just didn’t really have some plays called at the right time,” he said. “It’s something that we’ve had for the most part all season, we have had some right plays called at the right time, and we just didn’t really have that tonight.”

Colt owner Jim Irsay stood in a chilly corridor under Gillette Stadium and tried to decipher what had gone wrong. He shook off the suggestion that the Colt offense isn’t built for bad weather and lumpy fields, just the kind of things Indianapolis has come to expect from Foxboro in January.

“No, I don’t think so,” Irsay said. “I think that we’ve proved that we can go out and play in difficult situations. In Denver, we scored more than 30 points there, and I don’t see that as being a factor. This was a game where we didn’t play well and they played great. ... I feel we can win here. We didn’t get it done today.”

So Manning will wade through another off-season wondering what might have been. Another Super Bowl dream wafted away like steam in the night air. His coach, for one, said it shouldn’t haunt him.

“Steve Young was in our building the other day and the same thing was said about him for a long while,” Coach Tony Dungy said. “And now he’s going to go in the Hall of Fame. I can remember when [John] Elway couldn’t quite win a Super Bowl and we were all hoping that he’d win one. Looking back on it now, he had a great career and he didn’t win his until way far down the road.”

Then again, the quarterback Manning was compared to most often this season was Dan Marino, mostly because Manning threw 49 touchdown passes to break his single-season NFL record. Marino, of course, retired without a ring.

The Patriots, meanwhile, continue their quest for another championship bauble. They’ll now prepare to play the Steelers, who defeated them, 34-20, on Halloween, ending the Patriots’ NFL-record 21-game win streak. Conspicuously absent from that game was Dillon, who was nursing a thigh injury.

“Your natural instincts say revenge,” Harrison said, when asked why the Patriots seem especially interested in getting another crack at the Steelers. “They’re standing in the way of what we ultimately want, and we’re standing in the way of what they ultimately want. It’s going to be the hardest-hitting, the most physical game of the year, us and Pittsburgh. We welcome the opportunity.”

After all, a Super Bowl berth is ripe for the picking.