Can the Colts Survive Their Late-Season Gauntlet?

Sunday’s trip to Arrowhead will be the most important Indianapolis Colts game since they faced the Chiefs in the 2018 playoffs.

The Colts went 10-6 in 2018, with Andrew Luck under center. They beat the Texans in the Wild Card round. They entered Arrowhead as four-point underdogs, facing a team with an upstart second-year quarterback named Patrick Mahomes.

The game was never close. The Chiefs jumped out to a 17-0 lead and never looked back, eventually winning 31-13.

The injury-plagued, iconoclastic Luck abruptly retired the following summer. The Colts found themselves without a franchise quarterback or a plan for acquiring one. Philip Rivers, pushing 40, got them back to the playoffs in 2020, but the tread was peeling off Rivers’ tires by December. Rivers retired after a playoff loss to the Bills. The Colts tumbled to the back of the Wild Card chase and stayed there.

Things started getting really weird. Carson Wentz weird. Jeff Saturday weird. The Colts thought they were drafting Tarzan when they selected mint-condition action figure Anthony Richardson fourth overall in 2023. In fact, they had drafted George of the Jungle. And there was trouble behind the scenes, as boisterous, eccentric owner Jim Irsay gradually succumbed to illness and substance issues.

The Colts are suddenly, unexpectedly 8-2 after their bye. They rank third in DVOA, first on offense. New owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon (let’s call her I. Carlie for now: half a Nickelodeon reference, half a Masterpiece Theater reference) appears to be the diametric opposite of her troubled father and deeply-troubled grandfather.

Daniel Jones is playing the best football of his life. The trade deadline brought Sauce Garner, who could turn the secondary from a weakness into a strength. The Colts are fundamentally sound, fun to watch and consistent (give or take a turnover spree against the Steelers) in a season where the traditional AFC powerhouses keep tripping over themselves.

And so it’s back to Arrowhead to face a Chiefs team that may be nearing the end of the era that started in 2018. The Colts could be dragon slayers. Or this could be 2018 or 2020 all over again: another season that ends with the Colts getting put back into place, followed by yet another offseason quarterback search.

Welcome to Down the Stretch, Too Deep Zone’s least-popular recurring feature, which takes a deep dive on a team headed for the playoffs. This installment covers the exciting, enigmatic Colts, their old and new personalities, their brutal late-season schedule, and their prospects for accomplishing more than a one-and-done playoff appearance.

The Indianapolis Colts Story So Far

As recently as late August, the Colts organization appeared to be careening toward a regime-change reboot.

Iconoclastic longtime owner Jim Irsay pulled down the curtain and joined the jam-band invisible in May. His eldest daughter I. Carlie spent her 2024 internship touring the facility and roaming the sidelines wearing a headset, looking for all the world like the sort of failchild who considers themselves an “innovator” and plans to replace the regional scouts with A.I.

Chris Ballard, Papa Irsay’s trusted football majordomo, spent nearly a decade building a roster in his own image: not terrible, but blander than soggy low-sodium saltines. Shane Steichen spent two futile years trying to transform Anthony Richardson from some affable adolescent Hill Giant into a reasonable facsimile of Josh Allen. Ballard and Steichen shoveled Daniel Jones off the scrap heap and onto the roster as a mentor/ultimatum for Richardson. They spent the entire offseason trying to figure out which wire to snip. Jones won the starting job by default in August, which looked like a damning indictment of Ballard and Steichen.

The Colts began the season by crushing the Dolphins and have since mixed beatings of the the many bottom-feeders on their early schedule (Titans twice, Raiders) with narrower wins over tougher foes, including an officiating-assisted 29-28 victory over the Broncos.

A loss to the Steelers, followed by a narrow overtime win in Berlin against the scuffling Falcons, suggested that the Colts were fading back toward the pack as they entered their Week 11 bye. But the arrival of Sauce Gardner, coupled with the likely return of injured Charvarius Ward, could provide a major boost to the Colts defense just as their offense is starting to fade.

Leadership Structure

Perhaps I. Carlie is a mega-meddler turning the Colts into a surveillance state. Perhaps, as Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk suggested, she should become a role model for other owners. (Florio would quit in three seconds, then sue for invasion of privacy, if the president of NBC Sports were listening in on every conversation. But whatever.) Perhaps she plans to ditch the headset once she’s more versed in football operations and all the Grateful Dead paraphernalia has been cleared out of the owner’s box.

The new Colts owner explained her Big Sister is Watching approach bluntly: “I need to at least be able to learn, be able to identify, stupid. Not to be crass, but is this person even good?” Whether you find that remark funny, refreshing or alarming depends on whether it is coming from someone else’s boss or your own. Some of our reactions may also be gender-dependent, but I think a male boss (especially one that is new to the industry) throwing around words like “stupid” would set off even louder sirens.