Why Colts are confident they can mold offense for new QB Matt Ryan
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Frank Reich has gotten used to this.
He’s better at it than most.
The architect of the Colts offense finds himself in another offseason of change, tweaking and tinkering and overhauling his offense to fit Matt Ryan, the fifth starting quarterback he’s had in his five seasons as the Indianapolis head coach.
Reich has learned to love this process.
“I actually enjoy that a lot, not that I want to do it every year,” Reich said. “I’ve found those conversations have made me better, and made me a smarter, better football coach, because five years in a row now, I’m going to have to sit down with a new quarterback and hear what they think, what they believe, why they believe what they believe.”
Ryan has been through this plenty of times on the other side of the coin.
The Falcons legend played for three different head coaches and six offensive coordinators in Atlanta.
This time, he had a chance to pick the new system he’d be joining. When the Falcons decided to trade arguably the best player in franchise history, they gave Ryan a chance to pick his destination.
The more he watched the Colts offense, the more he saw a flexibility that invigorated him.
“When you look at Frank, too, what is so interesting to me is they morph,” Ryan said. “Depending on how he sees things, the players that he has and what they’re doing. I feel confident that I’ll be able to learn it pretty quickly.”
The Colts offseason program begins on April 18.
The process is only beginning.
Why Frank Reich's offense adapts so easily to new QBs
The transformation Ryan saw in the Colts offense is there by design.
Reich built his offense to be multiple.
The goal is to make it difficult for defenses to prepare for Indianapolis, place seeds of doubt in the defensive coordinator’s mind, then be able to find an answer for whatever the defense is trying to do.
A side effect of the offense’s multiplicity is that it makes it easier for Reich to adapt the offense to a new quarterback, a critical task in today’s NFL. The change the Colts have been through at the position has been extreme, but it’s also part of the reality for every offensive innovator rising through the ranks.
“Everybody has an offense that they like to do, but every year, every quarterback’s different,” 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said. "If you think that this is your offense and you’re going to find a quarterback for it, you’re in for a rude awakening.”
From the outside looking in, it might look like a complete overhaul.
But one of the keys to being multiple is that the foundation of the Colts' offense remains the same. How the quarterback gets to his spot might be different, or the formation, or the personnel grouping, but the plays and concepts that form the core of the offense remain intact.
“Somewhere between 80-90% of the offense is pretty similar,” Reich said, “and 10-20% is maybe a little bit nuanced, or just a different point of emphasis.”
Finding out how much of the offense needs to change to fit a new quarterback requires a posture of humility.
A coach has to be receptive to somebody else’s opinion on the offense he built.
“It starts with listening. Listen to the quarterback. Sit down, and listen to what he likes,” Reich said. “Get to know him. How he thinks. What he believes.”
The entire time the quarterback is talking, Reich’s brain is whirring, translating the quarterback’s words into the Colts playbook.
“I know what we believe, I know what we’ve done well,” Reich said. “As he’s talking, I’m just envisioning: ‘That fits. OK, that fits. Oh, I hadn’t thought about that, we can do that. That will fit here. That would be a little bit new, we’ll have to think that one through.”
'I've learned some new offenses in my time'
Ryan is no stranger to those conversations.
“I’ve learned some new offenses in my time,” Ryan said with a touch of wry humor at his introductory news conference. “And learned how it works best to do it.”
A quarterback bears as much responsibility as the coordinator for making a new relationship work.
The coach is trying to tailor his offense to the quarterback. But there’s a fine line to walk. The quarterback has to know what fits his skill set best and fight for it, but he also has to be able to recognize that the new system might be able to improve or highlight his game in ways he’d never realized before.
“Matt’s the ultimate pro,” Falcons head coach Arthur Smith said. “He’s gone through a bunch of transitions in his career. It’s probably rare that he’s thrown for as many yards as he has and been in as many systems, had as many play callers.”
But this process is a little different. For the first time in his career, Ryan is joining somebody else’s team in mid-flight, trying to seamlessly transition into a Colts offense that already has a bunch of core pieces who have been playing in Reich’s scheme for years.
The coaches who’ve worked with Ryan before believe he’s perfect for this process. Fourteen years into his NFL career, known for his meticulous preparation and intelligence, Ryan has an innate ability to see himself in somebody else’s offense.
“When you’re with a guy like that, the experience they have on stuff, you get to learn so much,” said Shanahan, who took over as the Falcons offensive coordinator eight years into Ryan’s career and helped the quarterback win the 2016 MVP. “You see a play one way, and you think you’re running the same play, but you get to hear it from his perspective, and you go, ‘I’ve never looked at it that way.’”
'Obsessed with getting better'
This time, Reich began tailoring the offense before the Colts even had Ryan on the roster.
It was part of the pitch.
Two nights before Indianapolis sent a third-round pick to Atlanta to land its new starting quarterback, the Colts met with Ryan on Zoom to sell him on the idea of coming to Indianapolis.
“It was fun talking to Matt,” Indianapolis general manager Chris Ballard said. “He’s just obsessed with getting better, even as he’s aging, just continuing to play at a high level.”
Reich prepared for the meeting by making a cut-up of a significant portion of the Colts playbook, taking Ryan through it, trying to get the Falcons legend to see himself operating in blue-and-white.
Ryan had never met Reich, but he’d studied the Colts running game last season after Jonathan Taylor began to emerge, and Falcons tight ends coach Justin Peelle, who’d played with Ryan at the beginning of his career, had worked with Reich in Philadelphia.
“Raved about him,” Ryan said. “One of the smartest, most level-headed guys he’ll ever be around.”
By the time the Zoom meeting was over and Ryan walked downstairs, his wife, Sarah, could see a difference in her husband.
“It was apparent very quickly there was an instant connection in every way,” Reich said. “Personally, but also football, the way we think about the game.”
Modeled after Peyton Manning
Because of Ryan’s age, accuracy and reputation, the Colts’ new starting quarterback has frequently been compared to Philip Rivers, who turned in a resurgent season with Reich in an Indianapolis uniform in 2020.
“He’s his own guy, first and foremost,” Reich said. “Matt himself said, ‘Hey, I try to model myself after Peyton Manning,’ and I felt a little bit of that. I felt a little bit of Philip Rivers, and kind of, maybe, a little bit between the two of those guys, but he’s Matt Ryan. You could just feel his presence.”
Ryan, a football history buff like both of those quarterbacks, has long modeled his game and approach after Manning, and he’ll likely revel in the fact that the base of the Colts offense is the Tom Moore passing game Reich learned as Manning’s quarterbacks coach.
There will also be elements of the Rivers' version of Reich’s offense that can be emphasized again with a quarterback at the helm who has always been good at finding the running back, attacking the middle of the field, and a quarterback the Colts believe is capable of getting the ball out of his hands quickly, elements that were minimized with Carson Wentz at the helm last season.
But to assume Reich will just open his iPad and click on the 2020 offensive file would be a mistake. Ryan has a different skill set than Rivers — more mobile, an arm more capable of pushing the ball down the field — and most importantly, has played in very different schemes in Atlanta.
“If there’s a 20% difference, if 10% is like it was with Philip, then I think there’s 10% of it that’s going to be unique to Matt,” Reich said.
The week before the trade, Reich’s brain was already in motion, figuring out how to introduce Ryan to some of the Colts quick-game concepts — the kind of stuff he didn’t run much in Atlanta — and incorporate some of the Falcons’ play-action Ryan has played to perfection into the Indianapolis offense.
From the sounds of it, both men are ready to get to work.