The moment might not mean anything six months from now, when the Colts are in the teeth of the NFL season’s grind. Or maybe it’ll be a harbinger that this group, that’s spent its last four seasons on the fringe of the league’s elite, was ready to break through.
Either way, for those involved, it was pretty funny.
The story starts with Matt Ryan acclimating to the Colts’ offense, and coach Frank Reich and coordinator Marcus Brady working through installing core plays with him over the course of the last two months. One such concept—“a play we’ve had a lot of success with,” Reich said—was going in, and it was a type of play that Ryan had a pretty good comfort level with from his 14 years in Atlanta.
“I really love this concept, and at the very beginning, I was like, ” Ryan said. “It was, , whatever. And so we go through the whole offseason, and I keep looking at it on the practice field going, .”
“And this is the great thing about Matt,” Reich added. “He told us what he wanted, but he wasn’t demanding, like, . And we said, alright, let us process this. The play came up several times in practice and we kept running it the old way.”
But Ryan kept looking and looking for reasons why, maybe, Reich and the Colts had that particular part of the play—a route run by a receiver who’d be fourth in the quarterback’s progression—right, and the idea of the adjustment just lingered in Ryan’s mind.
Finally, the last week of May, Ryan brought it up. And during a quarterback meeting in the first week of June, the second-to-last of the Colts’ offseason program, Reich said, “O.K., we’re going to look at it today.” Brady put it in the practice script. And as fortune would have it, the call went in when Ryan and the first offense was out, and Nick Foles was in with the twos.
“So Foles runs the play, the first progression’s not there, the second progression’s not there, and the third progression’s not there,” Reich said, his voice rising. “And sure enough, he goes back to the adjustment that Matt had talked about and it just clicked perfectly. And Foles hits and his reps were up, and he walks over and Matt looks at me, and I just start laughing. So Matt goes back in, now Matt’s in the huddle, Foles is in the background.”
Rookie tight end Andrew Ogletree came back with the ball, oblivious to what those who’d been in the quarterback room were laughing about, and as he did, Reich cracked to Foles,
“It’s just something funny,” Ryan said, “where you’re like, .”
Funny now, yes, with the hope being there’ll be deeper meaning to it in time as the Colts try to, finally, get over the hump with their fifth starting quarterback in as many years.
