Colts didn’t learn from last season’s collapse
· Yahoo Sports
The Colts watched last NFL season fall apart after such a promising start. Then they built this season around the same design that sank them. They need Daniel Jones to be healthy again. Desperately. That is the part that feels hard to defend. Indianapolis can point to Jones’ progress, his rehab, his familiarity with Shane Steichen’s offense, and the way the team looked when he was playing well. All of that is fair. The Colts were a different offense before the injury. Jones gave them structure, mobility, and enough efficiency to make the early-season success feel real.
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But last season also showed the danger of building everything around a fragile quarterback plan. When Jones went down, the offense did not adjust smoothly. The season lost shape. Defenses could load up differently, the passing game became less reliable, and the Colts stopped looking like the team they had teased earlier in the year. That should have forced a more careful offseason response. It did not.
Indianapolis is back in a similar position
Indianapolis Colts quarterback Daniel Jones (17) yells at the line of scrimmage Sunday, Nov. 30, 2025, during a game against the Houston Texans at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.Jones is expected to be ready for camp, but Achilles recoveries are never simple. Even if he is cleared, that does not automatically mean he will move the same way, drive the ball the same way, or handle pressure the same way. For a quarterback whose game has depended partly on movement, those are not minor details.
The backup situation does not exactly erase the concern. Anthony Richardson has his own uncertainty, and Riley Leonard is still a developmental option. That leaves the Colts hoping Jones returns close to full strength and stays there.
Maybe that happens. But hope is not depth. The Colts did not collapse last season because they lacked talent everywhere. They collapsed because the one position they could not afford to lose became the position that broke the offense.
Now they are asking the same spot to hold everything together again. That is not learning from the collapse. That is trusting (and praying) for history not to repeat itself.
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