Road to Matt Ryan: How the Carson Wentz experience helped Colts revive franchise identity
INDIANAPOLIS -- This offseason was a time of cold, hard reflection for the men in charge of the Colts.
Owner Jim Irsay, general manager Chris Ballard and coach Frank Reich built a roster that was becoming among the most feared in the NFL last season, having stomped on the Bills in Buffalo, toppled the Patriots in primetime and survived the Cardinals amid a rash of injuries. They were so proud of what they built, they broadcast it for the country to see weekly on the first in-season "Hard Knocks."
But nobody got to see their squad in the playoffs, thanks to one fateful day in Jacksonville and a slippage that started amid the winning. Instead, the playoffs featured Josh Allen dueling Patrick Mahomes, of Jimmy Garoppolo's leadership and Joe Burrow's rise and Matthew Stafford carving his own path to reach the mountain top.
MATT RYAN TRADE: Falcons give QB gift as frightful future awaits franchise
NFL MOCK DRAFT: Impact of Tyreek Hill trade could go beyond Chiefs and Dolphins in first round
Each of those moments was a painful reminder of what the Colts didn't have. They knew something was missing when they beat the Bills with 106 passing yards and the Patriots with five completions.
By the time Carson Wentz was falling apart along with the rest of the team in Jacksonville, the hope and belief in the position that has defined their franchise had already slipped away.
The three men processed it in their uniquely different spirits.
Irsay, the man who cried with Peyton Manning and gives speeches in the locker room after wins, started recording cryptic videos outside his private jet.
"We have allowed and I have allowed doubt, fear and a lack of faith slip into our DNA," the Colts owner said. "It will not stand. ... I promise you one thing: Anyone walking into the 56th Street complex this year will be walking in with all chips in, period.”
Reich, the former pastor, spoke with a quiver in his voice about the failures of the position he played in the NFL for 14 years.
"I stuck my neck out for him last year," he said of Wentz. "I was a big part of that decision to get him here, and so I believe he’s going to continue to have a lot of success at quarterback. That might be here, it might not be here."
Ballard, the lifelong scout, shot from the hip.
"Make the layups," he said. "Do I think you have to throw to win? Yes."
The 10 weeks of postmortem have finally ended. The Colts have emerged with a quarterback in Matt Ryan they believe has the track record, playing style, traits, scars and competitive fire to lead them back into the light.
Only time will tell how much a 36-year-old has left, but Ryan is a known commodity, grizzled by the flames of the spotlight, and they won't ask him to be someone he hasn't been.
The 2021 season and the 10 weeks after it have felt like a lifetime. The Colts had to rediscover who they were, what they lost and what they needed to get back.
A desperate place
That autopsy couldn't wait. The night the season ended, the three leaders of the Colts took a jet back to Indianapolis and met in the facility for hours.
Raw emotions spilled out after Wentz's rapid decline coincided with a team-wide collapse, first in a Week 17 home offensive dud against the Raiders and then in a 26-11 thrashing in Jacksonville. It felt like rock bottom.
The franchise has spun its tires at quarterback ever since Andrew Luck retired on the eve of the 2019 season. Ballard was hired to build a team around him, which he preferred to do in the trenches, through the draft and by re-signing talent. Reich had been chosen to protect his body, accentuate his arm and match him in the mind. Irsay was happy to let him grow into the throne Manning rode to a statue out front of his stadium. Luck's retirement blew a hole in those plans.
After two seasons of Band-Aid approaches with Jacoby Brissett and a 39-year-old Philip Rivers, Irsay, Ballard and Reich were tired of coming up with new answers. They had three options at a long-term fix:
>> They could try to trade a package of draft picks for Matthew Stafford, a prolific thrower on the Lions who was looking for a team to go all-in with him. Indianapolis was on his radar.
>> They could move up in the draft, as teams did for Mahomes and Deshaun Watson. The draft had one dual-threat option who checked their boxes of production, leadership and toughness in Ohio State's Justin Fields.
>> Or they could trade for Wentz, the player Reich had coached to prolific heights in Philadelphia before he plummeted to a dark place through injuries and poor performance.
The option that won out was the only one they were certain they could pull off: They traded first- and third-round picks for Wentz.
That spring, Stafford went from the Lions to the Rams. Fields surprisingly fell to the 10th pick in the draft, and the Bears moved up to take him.
The cost for both was one additional first-round pick from what the Colts paid for Wentz. Indianapolis spent that pick on Michigan edge rusher Kwity Paye.
Like Jonathan Taylor and Darius Leonard and Quenton Nelson and other strong draft picks before him, Paye was not able to stop the avalanche that swallowed the quarterback and eventually the team.
That slippage began before the collapse in Jacksonville. It teetered in those wins over the Bills and Patriots, when Reich, the former quarterback, began calling runs for Taylor out of a fear that his quarterback might lose the game.
Reich will never call a player out publicly, but starting in early December, he began to drop bread crumbs of what was missing.
"We just have to get a little bit more of that dynamic back into the pass game," he said.
"I think for us to go where we want to go, there are going to be games where Carson will be the quote-unquote star of the game."
Reich still believed in the physical abilities of the quarterback he'd drafted No. 2 overall out of North Dakota State in 2016. In 2017, Wentz threw 33 touchdowns, scored the best QBR of any quarterback and helped earn Reich the Colts job.
Thus, the connection was personal. And so, with another quarterback retiring in Philip Rivers, a reunion only felt natural in their hearts.
But after allowing for a slow start with the Colts due to Wentz's injuries and the adjustment to a new playbook, Reich and his staff were having a hard time getting that connection to manifest itself on the field. His offense lacked flow, with drives often ending with big Taylor runs, explosive Pittman Jr. catches or quick punts.
Reich kept reaching back to the 2016 and 2017 seasons, when he could inject confidence and direction into that 6-foot-5 frame and rocket arm.
To Reich, in his 30th year in the NFL, it didn't feel that long ago.
In Wentz's arch, it was a lifetime ago.
Reich never saw the fall of Wentz in Philadelphia. That came after their stunning Super Bowl run with Nick Foles, when Foles grew into a folk hero as Wentz rehabbed a torn ACL and MCL. When another vibrant personality, Jalen Hurts, arrived in his quarterback room and created instant bonds in 2020, Wentz spiraled into a lowlight reel of interceptions and sacks, each one tightening the noose on his job and $108 million guaranteed contract.
Wentz needed a fresh start, and Reich thought they could get back to what they'd done together. But that came when Wentz was 25, and now he was turning 29.
The version Reich knew shook off 14 interceptions as a rookie as the Eagles still believed in him, and he played with confidence. The three years Reich didn't see ripped those ingredients up in a highly public display.
In Indianapolis, Reich and the Colts chased the old ingredients. They gave him security with no other quarterbacks competing for his job. They showed him love, praising him even after he tripped up, as with the left-handed interception to lose the Titans game.
They ran run-pass-options and three-step drops and play-action married to a dominant run game, the blueprint of the Eagles' Super Bowl run. And for nine games, Wentz delivered a 100.1 quarterback rating across 33 attempts per game.
But adversity eventually strikes for every quarterback. The question was always whether Wentz would respond differently this time.
In Week 12, the Buccaneers decided to test it. Locked in a Week 12 shootout with Tom Brady, Tampa Bay sent run blitzes to nearly every hole. Reich put the game in Wentz's hands with 26 consecutive passing plays.
Wentz threw three touchdowns and topped 300 yards, but the Colts blew a double-digit lead and lost as Wentz was committed three turnovers.
One of them came on a jump ball to Pittman Jr. The play call had been the perfect distillation of Wentz's gunslinger personality, allowing this 6-foot-5 receiver to make posters of defensive backs on the Ravens, Rams and 49ers earlier in the season. But on this play, Pittman Jr. lost track of the ball and allowed a 5-9 safety to jump over him.
Wentz attempted one more jump ball to Pittman Jr. that game, on a Hail Mary on the final play.
He didn't attempt another in the final five games.
In that same loss to the Buccaneers, Wentz threw seven short passes to Zach Pascal, who dropped a pair and fumbled another. After that game, Pascal saw his target share cut in half in his final four games. That left Wentz playing even more sideline-centric, despite many of Reich's primary concepts coming in the middle of the field.
After the Buccaneers game, Wentz's attempts per game dropped from 33 to 23 as Reich leaned more on Taylor. The coach urged his pupil to make use of the plays he did get.
That included three straight pass plays to start the game against the Patriots. But after Wentz sailed a third-down fade route over Pittman Jr.'s head, Reich called nine straight runs on the next series. Wentz attempted nine more passes in the game, which Taylor sealed on a 67-yard run into a stacked box.
Reich appeared to be losing faith in what to call for Wentz, who already had some calling into question his leadership through his decision not to get vaccinated. Wentz wasn't the Colts' only top player who made that choice, but he was the one who was new, getting to know teammates while wearing a mask or helmet in most settings.
Late in the season, when he struggled on the field, starting defenders started to decline to answer questions about their quarterback after games.
By the time the Colts fell down double digits to the Jaguars with their playoff lives on the line, their passing game was broken beyond repair. Their opponents seemed to know it, too.
"He was battling the whole time, and we felt it," Jaguars defensive tackle Dawuane Smoot said of Wentz, who threw for 185 yards on 29 attempts with two turnovers. "He threw a couple picks, so he was going to start holding it. We started just teeing off."
Wentz finished the season with 27 touchdowns and 7 interceptions, numbers that made it puzzling to outsiders that the Colts were ready to move on. Numbers didn't tell the story of what happened when the ball went to Wentz with the game on the line, as it did against the Jaguars.
As Wentz walked off the field as a Colts player for the final time, Taylor joined him step for step. Taylor had just won the rushing title with 1,811 yards, but his team would watch the playoffs from home.
"Golly," Wentz said to his running back. "Tough to swallow."
The meeting Irsay called that night with Reich and Ballard was the first step in moving on. Irsay wanted his franchise's identity back, the one Manning built and Luck carried forward right as the NFL became entrenched as a passing league.
"Doubt, fear and a lack of faith." By the end of the season, Irsay's words explained the feelings many had when his team dropped back to pass.
A return to feeling right
The path forward was also a path back.
In the autopsy, it became clear the Colts didn't run the 2021 offseason as they had others. Whereas Ballard normally hunts for value in moves and avoids overreaction, he skipped the draft and sent a first-rounder for a flawed quarterback the Eagles were shopping around.
Fear and doubt summed up that move, too. The Colts placed their faith in Reich to return Wentz to his early success, only to realize that success meant he couldn't have known the depths Wentz hit when adversity struck.
The Colts veered from the pillars they had long defined quarterback play by in Indianapolis.
“Ultimately, it’s the most scrutinized position in sports," Ballard said. "You’re playing a position where you’re trying to make accurate throws with people trying to actually hurt you. Then, the scrutiny that comes into play week to week.
"So, handling the ups and downs of it and staying the steady course, there’s so much that goes into it."
They wanted someone who had faced the avalanche and come out as the same guy on the other side.
To find a player with that track record but who wasn't at an age too close to retirement, the Colts had to stick to one of Ballard's oldest principles: patience.
"In the NFL, you take nothing for granted," said a former executive who worked with Ballard at a previous stop. "Expect the unexpected."
Indeed, this year's quarterback carousel had turns the Colts could never have expected. One came about when Deshaun Watson was seeking a trade, reached out to the Falcons and they began to court his services.
Until then, Atlanta had told teams that Ryan was only available through a blow-away offer, which the value-centric Ballard was determined to avoid. The inquiry on Watson meant Ryan could need somewhere to go.
Watson turned down the Falcons, opting instead for the Browns. But in the process of building a recruiting pitch, the Colts saw that their purgatory of being a quarterback away from a contender meant they were an attractive destination for a quarterback in search of one.
And Ryan suddenly was.
Three days after their pitch, the 14-year veteran arrived to the Colts in exchange for a third-round pick.
He took the news conference stage and took one minute to pay tribute to the quarterbacks they missed, from Manning to Luck to Rivers. He did not mention Wentz.
He did his best to promise the traits they felt they lost last year.
"You have to get to know your teammates really well and how they tick and how they need to be motivated and what are the things that you can help them with to bring out the best in themselves," Ryan said.
The Colts believe in him because of 14 years of data dating back to when he was a top-five pick in 2008, asked to lead the Falcons from the aftermath of Michael Vick's dogfighting scandal. Ryan lasted through three head coaches and the full careers of teammates and still found a peak, like the MVP he won in 2016. He missed all of three starts in 14 seasons and has taken at least 40 sacks in four straight years.
"He's a fighter," said former Steelers cornerback Bryant McFadden, who is now an analyst with CBS. "I love that in a quarterback."
Ryan soldiered for the past four years of a rebuild, but he felt motivated to move to the right team, the same way that Manning, Brady and Matthew Stafford had en route to winning what he hasn't yet: a Super Bowl.
"In the back of my mind, that’s what I’m thinking about right now, is this opportunity that I have for the rest of my career to try and catch that spark and go," Ryan said.
Ryan is 36, past the age of carrying a team, and he needs weapons to throw to beyond Pittman Jr. They have work to do.
But for the Colts, trading for Ryan was about more than a transaction. It was about what his move told them about themselves.
Their obsession with the most important position in sports drove them to the brink of insanity, to abandoning processes, to erasing and starting over. But that urgency kept them as a place that a four-time Pro Bowler and league MVP could seek out for his first move ever to another team.
For a moment, the Colts are back to equilibrium.
Contact Colts insider Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.