Colts won't let anyone catch them looking ahead

INDIANAPOLIS -- Peyton Manning walked into the postgame interview room Sunday, a Hall of Fame quarterback in his prime, and he was looking sharp. Slacks and a white oxford. Sports jacket. No tie. I'm telling you, he looked good.

And almost nobody was looking.

Manning had just thrown for 270 yards as the Colts had beaten Tennessee 27-17 to move to 12-0, but there's another undefeated team in the league -- New Orleans. And the Saints were scrambling to force overtime against the Redskins. So as Manning stepped triumphantly behind the podium, he sized up the situation immediately: The focus of the room was elsewhere.

"Right," he said.

Funny moment. Telling, too. Because while everyone else and their mother are focusing on the pursuit of perfection by two different NFL teams, Manning and the Colts are locked into the moment. For three hours Sunday the moment was a game against surging Tennessee, and the Colts locked in.

They drove 75 yards in five plays for a 7-0 lead less than two minutes into the game. Soon it was 21-3. Then 27-10. If there is a perfect game to play against Tennessee, which has the best running attack in the NFL but doesn't throw the ball consistently well, this was it: Get the early lead. Force the Titans to try to catch up. Watch them fail.

And then go back to the locker room and put the blinders on. Another game next week. That's all that matters.

"We're just fulfilling the boring old cliché -- taking it one game at a time," Manning said.

The Colts get their pragmatic ways from their rookie coach, Jim Caldwell, who might be even more pragmatic and focused than the pragmatic, focused guy he replaced after last season, Tony Dungy. There's no way to gauge pragmatism and focus, but I wonder if Dungy can top this: When Caldwell was the coach at Wake Forest a decade ago, he told me how he planned his family shopping excursions to the mall -- right down to the mall entrance they would use, and the direction they would walk. His goal? Not to backtrack as they walk through the mall. Not even once.

"You want to be as efficient as possible," Caldwell told me.

That's pragmatism. It's also boring, but that's the Colts. They're boring. They throw short passes and call simple running plays, and they figure their mastery of the fundamentals will beat yours. It beat the Titans, whose sloppiness and inattention to detail cost them a shot at beating Caldwell's ruthlessly efficient team. Tennessee trailed by 18 and lost by 10 but, honestly, the Titans gave this game away. And they know it.

"We had good opportunities to nab this game," said Titans coach Jeff Fisher, "and we did not."

Nope. They didn't. They reached the 2-yard line on their first drive and got just three points out of it -- and that was better than completely scoreless drives that reached the Colts' 1 (in the third quarter) and the Colts' 14 (in the fourth quarter). Receiver Nate Washington dropped what would have been a 65-yard touchdown pass in the first quarter. Defensive tackle Tony Brown lost his cool late in the first half, drawing a personal foul to give the Colts a field goal they wouldn't have had otherwise. Add it up, and instead of losing this game by 10, the Titans could have won it by 10. Easily.

Joseph Addai's two rushing touchdowns help the Colts take control. (Getty Images)

But they're playing the Colts, and playing the Colts isn't easy. That will be true for the next team on the Colts' schedule, Denver, which visits Indianapolis next week. It won't be easy. The Colts will be locked onto Denver, and not onto their pursuit of perfection or the Saints' similar pursuit of perfection in the NFC. Because the Saints-Redskins game went to overtime, it was still happening after the Colts had finished off Tennessee. Not that you would know by walking into the Colts' locker room. They weren't watching the Saints. Didn't care. Maybe didn't even know what was going on.

When I asked Manning if he had any idea what was going on in the Saints-Redskins game -- the choking Redskins had just missed the clinching field goal from 23 yards! -- he smiled and shook his head and made a joke about the darned football game he had just played getting in the way of his ability to keep up with the Saints' score. After the giggling stopped, Manning turned serious.

"Do I care [about the Saints]? I care about the Colts," he said. "Certainly the Saints are having a great year. It's great for the city. It's great for football."

But other than that, Manning doesn't care. The Colts don't care. They're so locked onto the minute details of their own week, they were still obsessing about one missed goal Sunday even after winning: They'd wanted to hold Titans running back Chris Johnson -- who had tied the NFL record with six straight games with more than 125 rushing yards -- to less than 100.

They didn't -- although he never gained more than 11 yards in one pop, Johnson still finished with 113 yards on 27 carries -- and that came as a surprise to their leading tackler Sunday, linebacker Clint Session. He was smiling as he listened to a question wanting to know how the Colts had managed to bottle up Johnson, given that he didn't record his seventh straight 125-yard game or break off any of his signature touchdown jaunts, even if he did run for more than 100 yards, and ...

"What?" Session said, his smile suddenly gone. "He got 100 yards?"

Session scowled and pointed to another reporter.

Next question.

Everyone laughed. Another funny moment. Telling, too.

Unlike the Saints -- who were lucky Sunday not to suffer the biggest upset of the season -- the Colts aren't screwing around.