The Indianapolis Colts traded two Pro Bowl linemen in the same week, handed Jonathan Taylor a $44 million extension back in August, and three months later put his name out to five other front offices shopping for a running back. A team still trying to win a football game doesn’t do that. A team clearing its best remaining asset off the books before the price drops does, and it sends its head coach out to a podium to insist otherwise.
Chris Ballard didn’t live to see any of it. The general manager was fired after a 2-4 start, and assistant GM Ed Dodds inherited the personnel department while Shane Steichen and his staff started reporting straight to owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon. Everything that happened after firing Chris Ballard, the dismantling of the roster, the calls on Taylor, came from that new chain of command. On purpose.
Quenton Nelson went first. The eight-time Pro Bowl guard who’d anchored that interior line since 2018 was dealt to the Seattle Seahawks for a 2027 third-round pick and a 2028 fifth. Days later DeForest Buckner, the two-time Pro Bowl tackle Indianapolis had built its defensive front around for years, went back to the San Francisco 49ers, the team that originally drafted him in 2016, for a fourth-rounder. Two Pro Bowlers gone in a week, for a stack of Day 3 picks that won’t resolve into anything useful until Taylor is probably wearing a different jersey too.
A day after the Nelson trade, Josh Downs requested a trade of his own. “I’m open to whatever,” the receiver told reporters, which is the sentence a locker room says out loud once it’s figured out what the building is actually doing.
Then came the cleanup. Asked directly at his October 28 press conference whether Taylor had requested a trade, Steichen said no, called the whole premise hypothetical, and added:
“JT’s on our football team.”
It’s a tidy, lawyerly answer, and I think it’s horseshit measured against what Taylor himself has actually been saying. Two days earlier, asked about the trade speculation, Taylor didn’t deny it existed. He just said he couldn’t do anything about it:
“I can’t control that, obviously. Like you guys know, I’m proud to wear the horseshoe, proud to be here.”
Nothing in that answer actually denies anything. It reads like a guy picking his way through broken glass in real time, choosing each word like it might cost him his roster spot. Two days after Steichen’s non-answer, pushing back on the idea that Indianapolis was punting the season entirely, Taylor said the quiet part a lot louder than his coach would’ve liked: “You think we’re rebuilding? We’re going out there trying to win. No one goes out there to wave the white flag and surrender.”
He wasn’t wrong to be annoyed, and it turns out he was right to be suspicious. On October 31, Adam Schefter reported the organization had reversed itself completely.
https://twitter.com/AdamSchefter/status/2116489136496365588
Four days before that, Schefter had reported Irsay-Gordon didn’t want to move Taylor at all. Now five teams, the Denver Broncos, Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, New York Giants and Seattle Seahawks, have called, with the Giants and Vikings out in front, and ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler floating a return in the range of a second-round pick and more. Five teams picking up the phone with three weeks left on the deadline clock means one thing: the price on Taylor just started climbing, in public, while the Colts kept telling him he wasn’t for sale.
The number worth sitting with is the one Indianapolis is reportedly using as its floor: the 2022 Christian McCaffrey trade, four Day 2 and Day 3 picks and zero first-rounders, for a star running back in the prime of his career, shipped to San Francisco. If that’s the comp the Colts are working from, a $44 million extension didn’t buy Taylor a floor. It bought the front office three extra months to shop him before November 10 without looking like it planned this from the start.
Believing in a player and taking calls from five teams on him three weeks before a deadline are not things that happen at the same time. Indianapolis is doing both, and leaving Steichen at the podium to handle the difference. Taylor can keep telling reporters he’s proud to wear the horseshoe. The horseshoe, as of this week, has somebody else on the other line.
