TALKING COLTS: Manning throws away Bengals for 6th-straight win

INDIANAPOLIS – Campus lore says you’re not supposed to learn anything new during dead week.

The Colts’ 35-3 win against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunday didn’t really teach us anything; it just reinforced a lot of stuff we already knew.

So to prepare for finals, let’s recap.

• Peyton Manning is good. Real good. The Indianapolis quarterback completed 26-of-32 passes for 277 yards and three touchdowns. His QB Rating (134.0) was his highest on the season.

And he spread the ball around.

He connected with seven different receivers, and each TD pass was caught by a different Colt (Marvin Harrison, Anthony Gonzalez and Dallas Clark, in that order). Against a bad, but not terrible, pass defense, he looked like a premier passer.

• The run game isn’t. Joseph Addai and Dominic Rhodes combined for 20 carries and 57 yards, or 2.9 yards per carry. The Bengals aren’t the worst team at stopping the run, but they’re not far from the cellar. Only once has either back rushed for more than 80 yards in a game. That puts a lot of pressure on Manning and his receivers to be successful through the air. An unbalanced offense is rarely a great offense.

• For all its faults, the defense can make big plays. Indianapolis had just a four-point lead with less than two minutes left in the first half when Kelvin Hayden intercepted a Ryan Fitzpatrick pass and returned it inside the Colts’ red zone. Hayden returned his second interception of the game 85 yards for a touchdown. But the first interception set up an Indianapolis touchdown to give the Colts a two-score halftime lead. After that, it was a rout. Had that not happened, who knows?

• At times, the Colts look awfully mediocre. They almost finished the first half with only a four-point lead against a 1-10-1 team.

• Robert Mathis and Dwight Freeney are man-beasts. The pass-rushing duo recorded 2.5 sacks and 1.5 sacks against Cincinnati, respectively. Between them, they accounted for 7 hurries. That’s a good way to force turnovers.

• This is a fragile team. Bob Sanders returned, but Addai left in the second half with a shoulder injury. Coach Tony Dungy said he could have returned, but this team has taken a beating.

• The Colts are still a playoff-caliber team. A six-game winning streak has taken them from 3-4 to 9-4. With just two more wins, they can remove the “caliber.”

• Expectations are still high. Manning burned two time-outs on the first drive of the second half. Fans greeted him with boos – they weren’t used to seeing such disorganization out of their experienced offense. Manning used his hands to quiet down the crowd.

“I didn’t like that, so I was telling them I didn’t like that,” Manning said with a laugh. “It’s their right to boo, but it’s my right to tell them I don’t like it. It works both ways. ... Booing for calling a time-out, guess the bar’s pretty high around here.”