Insider: Colts quarterback Jacoby Brissett proves he can replace Andrew Luck

INDIANAPOLIS — The last time they were in this building, the Indianapolis Colts became Jacoby Brissett’s team.

Right then, right there in the locker room. Andrew Luck told his teammates what the world had already learned, then walked into the news conference next door and told the world he was retiring and that he believed deeply in the man who’d be taking over for him.

Frank Reich echoed Luck’s belief in Brissett. So did general manager Chris Ballard, and the rest of the Colts locker room, and the people Brissett played with in New England, and the people who’ve mentored him since he was a schoolboy star in Florida.

But the rest of world still had questions.

Brissett has spent the first three weeks of the season answering just about all of them, a lesson he hammered home with a brilliant performance in a 27-24 win Sunday over an Atlanta team with plenty of talent and legitimate playoff hopes.

“I can tell you right now,” Colts coach Frank Reich said. “Jacoby’s getting the game ball.”

The night that Luck retired, and the days after, there were questions about Brissett’s accuracy.

The last time he was the starter, Brissett completed just 58.8 percent of his passes, and one of the knocks on him in training camp were the bouts of inaccuracy that seemed to show up every couple of days.

Brissett completed his first 16 throws against the Falcons, firing strike after strike, hitting short, intermediate and deep. He’d been efficient in the opener against Los Angeles, unremarkable against Tennessee, but after completing 28 of 37 passes against Atlanta, he’s now completing 69.1 percent of his throws this season.

“I was feeling like everybody was open,” Brissett said.

There were questions about Brissett’s ability to carry a team. He hadn’t flinched against the Chargers and Titans, had helped bring the Colts offense back from 15 points down in Los Angeles and tossed the game-winning touchdown pass in Tennessee, but the running game was doing most of the heavy lifting.

Then the Falcons forced him to carry the load Sunday, stacked the box and bottled up Marlon Mack at times and begged Brissett to throw. The first two weeks, Reich had kept hammering away on the ground even when the Colts were stalled, stuck with it until it broke things open late.

This time, he put the ball in Brissett’s hands from start to finish.

“They did sell out to stop the run,” Reich said. “Part of it was Jacoby was just on fire. Just kind of like when we’re running it and we’re gaining yards every time we call a run, when the quarterback gets hot like that, we’ve got to have the flexibility as an offense to ride the hot hand.”

There were questions about Brissett’s ability to push the ball down the field.

Brissett had been solid through the first two games, to be sure, but he hadn’t yet thrown for more than 200 yards, and as good as he’d been in the red zone, the Colts hadn’t produced many chunk plays in the passing game.

He hit T.Y. Hilton for 26 yards Sunday, found Eric Ebron for 30, fired a pair of strikes to a wide-open Zach Pascal for two of the game’s biggest catches.  

Brissett had said this would happen, had predicted the Colts would start pushing the ball down the field as soon as it was there.

“I think they just come when they come,” Brissett said earlier in the week.

There have been questions about a tendency to hold the ball, to take too many sacks, and Brissett has taken six sacks so far, ahead of last season’s pace. But he’s also escaped a dozen or so more, his strength and ability to escape the pocket so frustrating that Titans safety Kenny Vaccaro sought him out last week to pay him respect. He did it again on Sunday, scrambling for 6 yards on a key third-and-5 on the game’s most important drive.

“You can’t play quarterback much better than he played today,” Reich said.

There have been questions about Brissett's ability to manage the game the way Luck did, to change the protections and call the audibles and make the right decisions.

But Reich has been asking Brissett to make those kinds of decisions in key situations all season, and with the game on the line Sunday, on third down, Brissett walked to the line with the option to check into a run if he didn’t like the look.

The Colts got man coverage, Brissett hit Jack Doyle for 11 yards and they walked away with the win.

“Everyone’s running them now, right, the RPOs,” Doyle said. “Just putting the ball into Jacoby’s hand to make the right read, and he did, and we got the first down.”

The throw gave Brissett 310 yards on the day, four short of his career high, but the story beyond the numbers is the way he had to play. Atlanta put the game in Brissett’s hands, dared him to beat them, and he beat the Falcons in a way Carson Wentz could not last week.

Truth be told, this was already Brissett’s team, at least in part.

Brissett’s leadership skills, the natural magnetism that draws teammates to him like moths to a flame, has never been in question, but there’s more to it than that. Brissett’s place on this team was birthed in darkness, in the bleak days of 2017, when he took a beating all season long and kept fighting, kept coming back week after week.

For the Colts who are still around from that season, a bond was formed.

“I’m just happy for him,” Doyle said. “Here’s his moment.”

And Brissett is showing the rest of the world what the people close to him already knew.