'On cusp of something really special': How surprising Colts feel about AFC South near-miss

INDIANAPOLIS — The feeling in the Colts locker room on the last day of the season was complex.

These Colts surprised just about everybody.

Ticketed for a rebuilding year focused on the development of rookie quarterback Anthony Richardson, Indianapolis ended up playing itself to within a couple yards of the playoffs despite the loss of Richardson and intermittent injuries to a handful of critical players.

But the Colts were also just a handful of yards from a playoff spot and couldn’t come through, their last chance slipping away when Gardner Minshew’s pass bounced off the hands of Tyler Goodson on fourth down Saturday night.

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“You always want to have a solid year, obviously, you want to get in the playoffs,” Indianapolis head coach Shane Steichen said. “That’s the goal. The goal is to win the division and get in the playoffs, and we were right there. To come up short, it was very disappointing.”

The wound was opened on Saturday night.

The rest of the league pressed on the wound Sunday. When Jacksonville lost to Tennessee, the Texans became AFC South champions, earning a crown that used to reside annually in Indianapolis but that the Colts haven’t taken since 2014.

A win over Houston would have given the Colts a playoff game at Lucas Oil Stadium.

“It’s a little salt in the wound,” defensive tackle DeForest Buckner said.

The pain of that game is going to linger for a while.

Minshew spent his Sunday trying to decide whether he wanted to watch the tape, then finally turned it on Sunday night. Left tackle Bernhard Raimann ended the season thinking about his rough moments, rather than the fact that he’d established himself as a bona fide starter at a critical position this season. Middle linebacker Zaire Franklin felt the same way about his season.

Steichen thought plenty about his fourth-down play call.

“When it doesn’t work, you’re always going to think about it, you know what I mean,” Steichen said. “Have I stopped thinking about that play? No, I haven’t. It was a huge play in the game. We got the look we wanted, and it didn’t work out. That’s football sometimes. It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing, but again, faith and trust in anyone we put on that field to go make a play.”

But at the same time, looking at the season in full, the Colts are in a very different place than they were at the end of the last two seasons. In 2021, an unthinkable collapse foreshadowed drastic changes ahead; in 2022, the drastic changes had been happening for months, and it felt like the Colts were at rock bottom.

Indianapolis is no longer dealing with that kind of despair.

The Colts have laid a foundation in Steichen’s first season, and even though it’s only a foundation at this point, at least they’re building, rather than in demolition mode.

“You can’t take for granted the progress and the steps that we did make this year,” Franklin said. “In hindsight, and how I’m right now … it all just feels like a band-aid on a bullet wound. … The reality of the situation is we fought hard, a lot of ups and downs and adversity this year. I’m proud of what we did, I’m proud of what we went through.”

The Colts lost Richardson five games into the season. The team’s biggest star, Jonathan Taylor, missed seven games. The team’s biggest defensive star, Shaquille Leonard, never regained his old, difference-making form and got released.

Right tackle Braden Smith, a critical piece for the offensive line, missed seven games and played through pain most of the season. Tight end Jelani Woods never made it to the field. Nose tackle Grover Stewart was out six games due to a suspension for violating the NFL’s policy on performance-enhancing drugs. The two cornerbacks projected to start for the Colts, JuJu Brents and Dallis Flowers, ended up playing just 42.4% and 26%, respectively, of the defensive snaps.

A team that most analysts predicted would jostle for a top-five 2024 NFL Draft pick — the Colts themselves pitched in the preseason that a lot of long-term evaluation was ahead — instead won nine games and jostled for a division title.

“A lot of adversity this year, different people in and out of the lineup, but I think we always faced the challenge ahead,” Minshew said. “It didn’t go our way at the end, but I’m proud of the work that we put in this year, the things that we accomplished. We’ll really look back on this, especially as time goes on, with more and more favor and gratitude for everything we did.”

In a season full of injuries to starting quarterbacks around the NFL, a handful of teams folded.

The Colts were in the other camp, among the teams that found a way to compete despite being far from the plan they’d designed going into the season.

Indianapolis believes there is value in that performance.

“We’ve got a really scrappy team,” Taylor said. “I know that no matter what the situation is going into next year, the team is going to fight, claw and scratch.”

The expectations will be different in 2024.

The Colts will likely not be a surprise again.

Finishing 9-8 on Plan C or D will lead to excitement about the Colts taking the next step, provided Richardson is fully healthy.

Their head coach does not sound like he will shy away from it.

“I think we’re right there, and you can see it by the way our guys fought,” Steichen said. “But every year is a new year, so we’ve got to rebuild it again next year and have that laser focus every single day, the details, the preparation we put into it. We’ve got to be all over it, but I do, I think we’re right on the cusp of something really special here.”