o
It wasn't that long ago that many Colts fan were branding Ballard a genius for finding a way to get another team to take Carson Wentz off of our hands in spite of the fact that he still had a year left on his Colts contract, and then went out and acquired an elite/borderline elite quarterback such as Matt Ryan.
When Chris Ballard first came to the Colts in 2017, he vowed to build a "complete team", as opposed to a team which was extremely reliant an an elite quarterback. We saw an extreme example of that in 2011, when the Colts went 2-14 without the injured Peyton Manning.
That 2011 season verified 2 things ...... that Peyton Manning, who repeatedly guided the Colts to a bare minimum of 10-12 wins each and every season regardless of what kind of team that he had around him, was one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of pro football, and that the Colts had been extremely dependent on his presence to continue that perennially winning pattern.
So, along comes Ballard in 2017. In 2019, when Andrew Luck abruptly retired, the Colts went 7-9 with Jacoby Brissett at quarterback. Not only that, but the Colts were very competitive in almost all of the 9 losses in which they sustained that season ...... with a break here and there, they easily could have gone 12-4 or 11-5.
https://www.jt-sw.com/football/pro/r...Teams/2019-ind
So Ballard went out and acquired a 38 year-old Philip Rivers for the 2020 season. The slightly-past-his-prime Rivers, who had the mobility of an inanimate object such as a chair, guided the Colts to an 11-6 record, a playoff berth, and a playoff game in which the Colts went right down to the wire against an excellent Buffalo Bills team on their home-field. That 2020 team was a pretty darned complete team with an immobile, slightly-past-his-prime Philip Rivers taking snaps from behind the center.
In 2020, the Colts started the season at 9-6. They easily could have been 10-5 if Rodrigo Blankenship had not been injured in an early-season game against the Ravens. Everything looked pretty darned good until Wentz shit the bed against the Raiders, and then the entire team shit the bed against the Jaguars.
So what did Ballard do in response to the late-season collapse over the final 2 games of the 2021 season ??? He somehow managed to get the Washington Redskins/Commanders to take Wentz off of our hands, even though he still had a year left on his 2-year contract with the Colts, and he acquired Matt Ryan ...... Colts fans everywhere rejoiced at Ballard's resourcefulness in the face of adversity.
So in the 2022 season opener against the Texans, Matt Ryan didn't start playing well until the 4th quarter and overtime period. The Colts managed to salvage a tie, and very nearly won the game in spite of the awful start in the first 3 quarters of the game.
Then in the 2nd game against the Jaguars, Ryan didn't play well at all, albeit behind an awful performance from the offensive line.
Add to the above the fact that Shaquille Leonard, the Colts' best defensive player (and arguably one of the best defensive players in all of football) missed both of those games, and Michael Pittman Jr., the Colts' best receiver, missed the Jaguars game ...... with hindsight, many people would probably come to the conclusion that the Colts' record of 0-1-1 should not be surprising at all, and more significantly, only the most George Steinbrenneresque, manically compulsive Colts fans would be calling for the head of Chris Ballard.
In conclusion, I don't think that the second coming of Edward DeBartolo Jr. and/or Carmen Policy is out there ...... and even if they were, I'm not so sure that they could have done much better than Chris Ballard has done with this Colts team since coming on board prior to the 2017 season. As for me, I'm firmly on board with Ballard as the Colts' GM in spite of the disastrous start to the 2022 season.
o