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.
Not going to lie my favorite part about Jones doing well with the Colts is how it created the nickname. Indiana Jones is so much better than previous nicknames. The Draw Play cannon shapes how I view football to an alarming degree. Much like when Jay Cutler became the “Don’t Care Bear” or not being able to mention rex Grossman without Sexy Rexy unleashing the dragon. Russel Wilson and Kyler Murray are always tiny players in my brain. These are the head cannon names\Likenesses I think of every weekend and confuse people on the outside when these players are brought up. I love it.
I know I am missing some others but what are your favorites?
Josh Allen as Football Moose
“If it was Shane Steichen and the Colts who fixed him, how bad is Anthony Richardson?”
Given Steichen’s body of work with other QBs, this really is the question that everyone needs to be asking right now. The Colts are currently putting up historic offensive numbers with Indiana Jones at the helm. Obviously that’s not going to hold, but the fact that they even reached that point should have everyone questioning how awful Anthony Richardson was to prevent this from happening when he was the starter.
Whatever else you might say about him, Danny Dimes has played QB at the pro level (or any level, really) before for an extended period, and actually takes coaching. Neither is true of AR5. The Colts thought they could bring in a guy who had no idea how to play the position and wasn’t particularly coachable and start him out of the box and it backfired spectacularly. Lesson learned for the entire NFL, hopefully.
Turns out, when you invest in a decent offensive line and let a coaching system develop over time, good things happen. Danny Dimes’ cold, dead eyes, not looking panicked, is a nice change for him.
The thing about Anthony Richardson is that he was a terrible QB in college. On a team that was SURROUNDING him with talent. I don’t know how anyone thought he could ever make it as an NFL QB, when he clearly didn’t have the skills to be a college QB.
How bad was Anthony Richardson? I’m mystified that anyone thought he could be any different.
This. I watched him in college. He was ok at best, usually because even when he made good plays, his inconsistency pretty much killed the team’s chance at making real progress. When he was drafted, I said it was way too high. I already knew how this was gonna play it out. Saw it for long enough while he was at Florida to NOT know. All the potential, but none of the ability to make proper use of that potential.
Remember when you said the dolphins entered the season with the worst vibes and then switched to the colts last-second? You should’ve trusted your instincts. Even with the jets being winless, the dolphins are still probably the worst on vibes.
Two things most of the recent QB comeback stories have in common is that they were drafted high originally and there were no expectations of them where they went. I’d say Jones fits both of these criteria.
I think there’s a more important throughline of the QB comeback stories: They all stank when they played in New York and that’s where their careers were originally written off.
Geno Smith: Bad in New York, good in Seattle (don’t ask about Las Vegas)
Sam Darnold: Bad in New York, good in Minnesota/Seattle
Indiana Jones: Bad in New York, good in Indiana
Aaron Rodgers: Bad in New York, good in Pittsburgh
My conclusion: New York is football hell.
The Colts are being driven by blood magic. I’m convinced that Irsay either sacrificed himself, or was sacrificed, in order to win another Super Bowl. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense. If Daniel Jones was going to improve after leaving the Giants, it was going to be in a system like Shanahan’s, not the f-ing disaster that has been the Colts.
Hell, I’m a Colts fan, and *I* was wrong about the Colts. I thought they had a ceiling of about 10-7 with Indiana Jones, and were going to be just good enough not to be able to pick a QB next year. Instead we’re talking about a potential deep playoff run. So I certainly can’t blame everyone else for being negative on the Colts coming into the season.
I’m just going to say that I don’t buy it. Almost all of the teams they beat so far this year have been bottom tier trash teams, with only the Chargers victory being really good. They have a ridiculously easy schedule and I think they’ll finish on top of the AFC, but I don’t see them going better than 1 and done in the playoffs.
The thing is, they haven’t just been beating those trash teams, they’ve been absolutely dumpstering them. A long time ago, Football Outsiders did a study where they concluded that the best sign of a really good team isn’t winning close games against good teams, it’s blowing out bad teams. The Colts are doing that.
I agree they haven’t really been tested, but they’re ticking all the boxes so far.
Same. I don’t buy it at all. If they win a game in the playoffs I’ll believe it.
Plus can it be a long term thing or will it be a one off?
I’m inclined to agree. This reeks of the Vikings’ season last year, and we all know how *that* ended.
Me, before the season: Yeah, the Colts will be lucky to barely get into the playoffs. They are going to be bad this season!
The Colts: No.
I think the likeliest situation is that Shane Steichen is a QB whisperer and was able to coach up Jones and not Richardson. Compare this situation with the Niners and how Shanahan went from Lance to Purdy. Or the Vikings when O’Connell went from the comeback tour of Darnold to now likely having a bust in McCarthy. I think Jones is a competent QB who, at minimum, can get the ball into the hands of playmakers provided he’s got good support. He’s similar to Goff in that way.
I’m now expecting the Colts to crumble into a pile of … whatever we expected them to be at the beginning of the year.
I think it might be as simple as personality. Daboll’s a real fiery guy who tries to shit-talk you into doing better. Jones seems like a more stoic person who probably responded to provocation by withdrawing & obsessing over his play instead of getting fired up in return. Shane Steichen on the other hand is intense but serious and meticulous. I bet he and Jones are Just Vibing and that’s all this otherwise good roster needed.
During that first season Goff was with the Lions, Dan Campbell eventually demoted OC Anthony Lynn and got on the headset himself. From what Campbell and Goff have said it sounds like Lynn was much more of a Daboll type – or a McVay type – on the mic while Campbell was almost eerily calm. Goff’s play immediately improved even though Dan had zero OC experience. We all ignore “soft” factors like personality because it’s so hard to quantify or even know about them from the outside. Then we see a turnaround like this with no obvious cause.
Give it another year and see where it goes. People said the same with Phil Hughes when he had his best season with the Twins and you know what happened after that.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I read the tea leaves and predicted this, at all (I figured he’d be a much better player somewhere else, but I certainly didn’t imagine THIS outside of sarcasm) BUT. Looking back, the signs were definitely there. There was a sizable period of time with the Giants when he was the most accurate deep ball passer in the league, and although brief, he and Saquon were both healthy AND on the field, Jones usually played pretty darn solid. See 2023.
If you ask me, the soul crushing outside noise from the day he was drafted that never ever went away got into his head, and the year sitting on the Minnesota sidelines seeing how a stable non-incompetent franchise is run was enough of a breather for him to reset and go.
The only REAL problems he had with the Giants was the turnovers and the injuries. Having a solid offense lets him relax and not feel the need to MAKE things happen every play, which cuts down on turnovers, and a good OL that keeps him from getting hit on EVERY PLAY helps reduce both. And not having fans booing him during the game, before the game, after the game… probably keeps his confidence in a good place.
Either way, I’m ecstatic for him, and I hope he wins a Super Bowl MVP so that Schoen can proudly proclaim he jettisoned not just ONE player who immediately brought a Super Bowl to a franchise, but TWO. In back to back fashion, no less!
I really like this recap of his career, the highs and the lows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZYPZiICw-Y