Colts stunned after blowing 33-0 lead in ‘heartbreaking loss’

MINNEAPOLIS — Zaire Franklin stood in the midst of a stunned locker room and tried to make sense of an unprecedented situation.

Despite his best efforts, the Colts linebacker failed.

“You give it literally everything you have, you’ve been through a whole lot of adversity,” he said. “We’ve been hearing everybody talk about us like we’re a punch line and we took that very personal. … For the game to go the way it did at the end, it’s definitely a tough, tough pill to swallow.”

That was Franklin trying to put the biggest blown lead in NFL history into perspective as the Colts suffered yet another historic loss Saturday in what’s becoming a pattern for the struggling team.

Indianapolis blew a 33-0 halftime lead before losing 39-36 in overtime in one the most inexplicable defeats the NFL has seen. The loss was the Colts’ seventh in eight games, dropping a team that started the season 3-2-1 to 4-9-1.

This felt like rock bottom for a team that has been struggling for most of the season.

“A heartbreaking loss,” interim coach Jeff Saturday called it.

The Vikings finished on a 36-3 run with the Colts failing to mount an offensive threat throughout the second half. The Colts crossed midfield just once in nine possessions spanning the 40 minutes between the third and fourth quarters and overtime.

“I’ve played in this league a long time to know that a lot of different things can happen,” said Colts quarterback Matt Ryan, who also was on the wrong end of a 28-3 comeback by the Patriots over the Falcons in Super Bowl LI. “Anything can happen. You just have to keep your head down and keep going and find ways to make plays when they present themselves. It’s not much. It’s a handful of plays in a game. It’s three or four plays from an offensive perspective that we’ve got to find ways to execute, and it’s a win. We just didn’t make them.”

All-Pro guard Quenton Nelson kept it simple, lamenting the Colts’ inability to generate any sustainable offense…