INDIANAPOLIS — The son has been waiting, working for a long time to land this job.
The job he watched his dad do for so long.
When Tony Sparano Jr. was in high school and college, his father was Bill Parcells’ offensive line coach in Dallas, building enough of a name for himself that the Miami Dolphins hired Tony Sparano to be the team’s head coach; but it was the work he did with the big guys up front that captured his son’s imagination.
“I’ve always wanted to be a line coach,” Sparano Jr. said. “The bond created by those five up front when they truly play and function together as one unit is really special.”
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Sparano Jr. spent a dozen years working toward his goal, bouncing from team to team and mentor to mentor for six years as an assistant offensive line coach before landing the full-blown role with Shane Steichen in Indianapolis this offseason.
The Colts are betting almost all of their chips this offseason that their new offensive line coach can fix a unit that imploded in the first half of the 2022 season, setting off a chain reaction that set the franchise on fire. By the time the offensive line settled down, the fire was out of control.
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Sparano Jr.’s first job as a full-time offensive line coach is to take roughly the same group of personnel and produce entirely different results. Indianapolis just used the No. 4 pick to take a rookie quarterback, Anthony Richardson.
The Colts know the offensive line is critical to Richardson’s development, the franchise’s No. 1 objective for the foreseeable future.
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“We’re hoping to create the perfect storm with him, with Jonathan Taylor and that offensive line,” Indianapolis owner Jim Irsay said. “I don’t think the offense is finished. One of the things Shane really emphasizes is how great that offensive line is in Philadelphia, and we want to try to match that excellence that they have. … We haven’t gotten there.”
But the draft is now over, and the Colts still haven’t added any new pieces to the offensive line who provide experienced depth, let alone any players who look like they can challenge for a starting spot.
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Indianapolis drafted two offensive tackles — BYU’s Blake Freeland in the fourth round and Northern Michigan’s Jake Witt in the seventh — who project as depth pieces. The Colts also haven’t signed any experienced interior offensive line depth, outside of a January waiver claim on former Cowboys lineman Dakoda Shepley, who has played in 13 games over the past three seasons.
“Getting Freeland at tackle, we thought, was important,” general manager Chris Ballard said. “We think he’s got really good upside.”
Ballard has hinted the team believes there are still some pieces available in free agency who can help, but in reality, most of the players still available would likely be depth pieces, rather than real competition for a starting spot.
That puts a lot of pressure on Sparano Jr. to get better seasons out of a front five that currently looks like it will be roughly the same one that ended last season — Bernhard Raimann at left tackle, Quenton Nelson at left guard, Ryan Kelly at center, Will Fries at right guard and Braden Smith at right tackle. Fourth-year veteran Danny Pinter is also available, but he’s struggled outside of the center position.
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Frustrated and flustered by their awful start last season, the Indianapolis offensive line gave up 60 sacks, the second-worst mark in the league, and struggled to open holes on the ground, finishing 23rd in the NFL in yards per carry.
The Indianapolis offensive line played better down the stretch.
Sparano Jr.’s initial approach has been emphasizing what the Colts’ brass has been saying all offseason, that the talent in place is better than anybody outside the building realizes.
That’s not the only change in approach. Sparano, Jr., plans to make changes in technique, scheme and coaching style, but first and foremost, he wants to instill confidence back into an Indianapolis offensive line that admits it lost its sense of identity last season. .
“You look back at a lot of the good things we did, some things that were just missing here and there, and I think a lot of the negative kind of clouded our memory of how the year went,” Kelly said. “The eye-opening thing, watching the film, was we did a lot of great stuff, too.”
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Rebuilding the offensive line’s confidence requires a clean slate.
Especially with the Colts potentially fielding the same line.
“We go about it by building the dynamic of the group from scratch,” Sparano Jr. said
Sparano Jr., along with assistant offensive line coach Chris Watt, has to rebuild the Indianapolis offensive line in two separate ways. First, they have to get players like Kelly, Nelson and Smith playing up to their reputation and compensation — Indianapolis still has the NFL’s seventh-highest-paid offensive line; and second, they have to develop their young starters.
Echoing Colts’ brass, Sparano Jr. believes Raimann and Fries are better than they showed last season. Raimann, a third-round pick who’d played just two seasons at tackle when the Colts drafted him last April, gave up nine sacks, tied for seventh-most in the NFL, but Indianapolis believes he got better as the season progressed.
“Bernhard, our left tackle, he did a lot of good things,” Sparano Jr. said. “Was really encouraged by a lot of what I saw on his tape, both in pass protection and what he can do for you in the run game.”
The Colts feel the same way about Fries, a 2021 seventh-round pick who is headed into his third season in Indianapolis.
“When we played them in New York, just watching him go toe-to-toe with the two d-tackles that we had, with Dexter (Lawrence) and (Leonard Williams), and not backing down, I’ve got a ton of respect for how he approached that,” Sparano Jr. said.
What remains surprising is that the Colts haven’t added any experienced depth on the offensive line this offseason.
Two years ago, Indianapolis brought in veteran guard Chris Reed on a low-cost deal, a move that turned out to be prescient when Nelson went down with an early-season ankle injury. Reed stepped into the lineup and played good football for the Colts, the same way Matt Pryor stabilized the right tackle position in 2021, although the team’s decision to hand Pryor the left tackle job in 2022 was disastrous.
Outside of Pinter, the Colts do not appear to have that veteran presence available right now, although as Ballard indicated, they can still add veterans to the mix.
Primarily, though, improvement up front is going to have to come from within, from making the same five guys into a much more cohesive unit than the one that struggled so much last season.
“The integrity of the offensive line room is paramount,” Kelly said. “You can have the best schemes, you can have the best guys evaluating defenses, but if you’re not collectively five-as-one, and that room is not a place you want to go and want to be at, it doesn’t matter what you do.”
And the Colts appear to be counting heavily on Sparano Jr., to provide almost all of that improvement.
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05-03-2023, 08:54 AM
lts offensive line with no outside additions
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