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Colts RB Zack Moss guts out 30 carries to chase a dream

BALTIMORE -- Zack Moss was facedown at M&T Bank Stadium, staring into wet grass covered in darkness.

The Colts running back had a pair of Ravens tacklers crushing the two halves of his back on his 16th carry of the game. It was a moment of fate that comes to NFL running backs, when the toll of a workload meets the physics of the world.

But Moss did what he's been wired to do since August: He picked himself back off the grass and hobbled away.

Then he found a way to come back.


With a bruised leg, Moss limped through the wet grass of a low-scoring slugfest because his team needed every last one of his 30 carries, every blade of grass in his 122 yards, including a 24-yarder for the longest Colts run of the season and a first-down carry in overtime to set up Matt Gay's 53-yard game-winning field goal in a 22-19 victory over the Ravens.


"He just runs so hard," left guard Quenton Nelson said. "He finds the crease. Sometimes there isn't something and he makes something out of it."


This is a man who wanted it, who feared not long ago that a golden opportunity had been taken away.

In early August, Moss took a handoff in training camp, met a linebacker and felt his forearm snap. He didn't even get over to the sideline before he grabbed his Colts helmet with two hands and spiked it into the grass.


This was the opportunity he prayed for after a trade from Buffalo in the middle of last season, when the Bills moved on from the third-round pick in exchange for Nyheim Hines. It was one he felt he'd earned by averaging 4.8 yards per carry in the final eight games last year, one that ratcheted up when Jonathan Taylor went on the Physically Unable to Perform List and requested a trade and the Colts needed someone to step up as the bell-cow for a Shane Steichen offense breaking in a rookie quarterback.

He wasn't the only one.

"It was no surprise to me," said strong safety Julian Blackmon, who played with Moss at Utah. "He's bruising, man. ... He's patient. He's one of those guys who will wear you down over time."

Said Michael Pittman Jr., who faced him four times in college: "He is just a ground-and-pound, tough guy. He's gong to get those tough yards."

This season was also an opportunity Moss owed to his wife, Jesse; and the baby boy named Zavien they welcomed into the world in June. And here was a man in a contract year with an arm that didn't work, playing a position that's fighting to survive in this league.

But Moss said that month of forced inactivity brought him closer to his faith, which is constantly instilling the virtues of patience, of what is learned from the things temporarily lost.

"Everything happens for a reason," he said. "... God is allowing me to do things I couldn't have imagined."

He watched on as Colts running backs ran 16 times for 25 yards with two lost fumbles in a 31-21 Week 1 loss to the Jaguars. He tried to go that week, but the forearm just hadn't quite healed yet. And so he was testing that patience some more.


Then Week 2 at Houston rolled around, and the Colts were begging for his services. He played every single running back snap available in the game and took 18 carries for 88 yards and a touchdown in a win he finished after Anthony Richardson left in the second quarter with a brain injury.

This week, the Colts needed him even more. They were without Richardson, playing instead with a drop-back quarterback in Gardner Minshew, meaning the totality of the run game would fall on Moss. They were on the road in a raucous stadium against a Ravens defense that loves to blitz. It was windy and drizzly following a visit from Tropical Storm Ophelia. And they had to find some way to keep the ball out of Lamar Jackson's hands.

Moss' career high in carries entering Sunday was 24, in Minnesota last fall. He hit 30 carries one time in college.

But he became Indianapolis' bell-cow on Sunday, for 30 carries and their lone touchdown of the day. From the 17-yard line in the second quarter, Moss ran a wheel route up the right sideline against Patrick Queen and flipped his head back to find a rainbow from Minshew that he reeled in for a score.


Outside of that catch and the 24-yard run, Moss wasn't ripping off chunk plays because that isn't quite his style, and today wasn't a day to feel 100%. Built thickly at 5-foot-9 and 205 pounds, he likes to make a single cut before barreling downhill, spinning behind his blockers and would-be tacklers to add any additional blades of grass he can possibly find.

His 30 carries averaged 4.1 yards a piece, which was more than the Colts passing game could find on a drizzly day without Richardson, as it averaged 3.8 yards per pass play. They needed every yard he could find to get into Gay's range, and Moss' former college teammate nailed field goals of 54, 53, 53 and 53 yards.

The only points the Colts scored that weren't on Gay's leg came on Moss' 17-yard catch.

Baltimore Ravens linebacker Patrick Queen (6) chases down Indianapolis Colts running back Zack Moss (21) on the first play of the game, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023, at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore.
He's still an NFL running back, so he knows he can't take anything for granted. A bone can break, or a lineman can roll up on him, or Taylor could come storming back, or any number of other factors could eat into the bell-cow role he's found for the first time in his four-year pro career.

But he'll always have that helmet slam in August, and the wife and son he did it for, and the story he'll tell Zavien Moss some day when he's older about the patience it took to come back. On Sunday, his father bottled that patience into 30 runs, including one where he got rolled up on and found a way to keep on going.

"It's meant a lot," Moss said, "but the job's not done."