We Were All Wrong About The Colts
I’ve been holding off on making this comic because I wanted to give the season enough time to percolate. Early returns mean very little in the NFL. The Packers entered the season with sky high hopes and vibes, looked like that team for 2 weeks, and have since become very questionable, despite their record. They aren’t the world beaters we expected. The Chiefs lost several early games and people started asking questions, meanwhile they have kept improving back to annoying levels. The Eagles are struggling, etc etc etc.
The point is, I wanted to make sure the Colts felt truly good before making this one. If they choke after this, you can blame me. But I think I’m safe.
Nothing could have pointed us to this result. The recipe for a good football team rarely involves a coach and GM on a severely hot seat, choosing between a cast-off bust QB who was never very good and a drafted project QB who is even worse. No major acquisitions in the offseason besides that cast-off QB. Even the owner died. I thought the Colts would be bad. You thought the Colts would be bad. Professionals thought the Colts would be bad. Even most Colts fans outside of delusional optimists thought the Colts would be bad. Nothing in pre-season indicated the Colts wouldn’t be bad. The Colts were supposed to be bad. Like, BAD bad.
The Colts are good!
Jones is the big story. When the Colts picked him up I gave a warning for the fans to not trust him. Danny could play good football. He had good games for the Giants. He had games when it looked like he could be the answer. But he was never consistent and after one good game he’d follow it up with 2+ stinkers. That’s the biggest difference between Giants Danny and Colts Danny so far. Jones isn’t faltering. He’s not regressing. He only has the occasional bad drive or mistake, instead of the other way around. He looks like his best self, all the time. He is driving the Colts offense in a way I’ve never seen him do. The confidence in him is back.
I don’t know why that’s happening. The joke answer is that he was always good and the Giants hurt him or held him back. That’s probably only partially true. The Giants absolutely failed Danny but I watched 6 years of Jones and he just as often failed the Giants. He’d be indecisive and take sacks or lock onto WRs and be easily defended. He was mobile, but a bad scrambler, usually only good when the play was designed. But he seems…fixed now. He goes through his progressions. He runs the offense effectively. He makes good decisions. Is it Shane Steichen? Is it his brief time in Minnesota? What fixed him? If it was Shane Steichen and the Colts who fixed him, how bad is Anthony Richardson?
The Colts don’t have the easiest schedule remaining but it also isn’t the hardest, and they’ve played well enough that even the toughest games left still look winnable (Chiefs and Steelers). The playoffs feel like a shoe-in, barring the team falling apart for a number of potential reasons. Most of all, this completely threw off everyone’s expectations and nobody knows how to react. Provided everything stays as things currently are, Steichen went from hot seat to tenure, and Chris Ballard stays employed. Richardson is probably cast off either this year or next to exist as some lowly backup somewhere and never see the field again.
I can’t be mad about Jones. Sometimes a guy just needs a new start and Danny was a good teammate and a consummate professional. Seeing him happy, slinging the ball, driving the Colts to victories, it makes me happy for him. I don’t wish him to fail. I wanted him to be our guy. He took so much abuse on the field and from shitheads off of the field from the first day he was drafted, and he did it all professionally and respectfully. I’m happy to see him happy. Be free, Indiana Jones.
Honestly, the resurgence of the Colts is one of the most (positively) surprising things I’ve seen in years in this league. Not only was nobody predicting them to be good, but the vibes were rancid. Anthony Richardson was one of the biggest busts of the last decade, the team was completely wasting its talent, Steichen was on the hot seat and Ballard was on a hotter seat, and everyone was SURE this was the last year of Steichen, Ballard, Jones/Richardson, or multiple as a legitimate QB or as a member of the Colts Front Office, with most people betting multiple.
Instead this feels like one of the biggest turnarounds a team has undergone in a while, and it feels even larger than the technical record gap (last 2 seasons were a pair of basically .500 seasons that felt significantly worse, probably because the AFC 7 spot was truly weak last season and the Colts blatantly choked it away with losses to the Broncos and Giants). It honestly feels kind of insane, right now their only loss is to a Rams team that has been the better team in arguably every game it’s played EXCEPT for the Colts game, they’ve faced multiple teams that were supposed to be better than them already and beaten them, it honestly feels like they’re going to waltz to the AFC South title despite being probably 3rd in betting odds coming into the year. I can’t remember the last turnaround on this level.