Rodney McLeod stabbed the ball out of the sky and felt his heart pumping, his legs moving almost on their own.
He dove for the pylon, and once the brown leather kissed the orange fabric, the Colts strong safety jumped up and waved his arms from his helmet to his belt line, as if trying to unleash some feeling stuck inside. He'd always wanted to score a touchdown, to feel that roar of the crowd and the smiles of teammates well up inside him. It took him 12 seasons and 161 starts to do it.
For a minute, McLeod found that warm, nostalgic energy in a fall that kept pushing it down. This was the final game of a rollercoaster of a Colts season that has plunged from hope to belief to confusion to anger to shame and back to reflection.
It ended with a conversion on 4th-and-12 followed by one on 4th-and-20 and the Texans delivering one final kill shot on a two-point conversion that the Colts didn't have it left in them to stop.
Moments later, McLeod was throwing a black T-shirt on to leave the stadium. He'd just finished arguably his best of 12 seasons, finishing third on the team in tackles and playing all 17 games, all after the free agent market suggested he was done. He was one of the last out of the locker room.
You move slowly when it might be the final time.
"We give so much sacrifice for the game and for the sport. It takes a lot of our time and our bodies," McLeod said. "You have to take a step back and have those tough conversations to determine what's best going forward."
He's not sure where he's going. He can't tell if it's time to leave.
This is life inside the Colts locker room, in a 2022 season that took turns nobody could have predicted. They played 17 games and won four, plus a tie, with two head coaches, three offensive coordinators, three starting quarterbacks and a nation’s eyes watching as they laid bodies, futures and emotions on the line.
It’s felt to some like they’ve been two franchises trading places, like they’ve had multiple seasons wrapped in one. Just ask Dayo Odeyingbo about his progress back from an Achilles tear, when he started feeling healthy, what it was like early in the season, and he'll stare blankly.
“I can’t even remember,” he’ll say.
This is what a season unlike any other does to the characters living it.
They forget the things they want to remember. They remember the things they want to forget.
Indianapolis Colts rookie Rodney Thomas II endured a rookie season like few others, where he led the team in interceptions but also visited his high school friend, Damar Hamlin, in the hospital as he recovered from cardiac arrest.
A foxhole of 53 men
In a season with so many twists and turns, from quarterback purgatory to an MVP, from Super Bowl hopes to one firing after another, the spotlight brightens and the foxhole grows tighter. The Hard Knocks cameras have left the building, turning the games into wellness checks as the franchise lives in debate shows and news tickers.
The lives move on in the shadows.
Nowhere is the dichotomy between public and private lives more acutely drawn than for the athletes of the most disrupted team in America’s favorite sport. For 60 hours a week, grown men push through pain and doubt and change to try to answer a narrative for four hours on Sunday afternoons.
"When we talk about rolling over, that’s something that I don’t think is appropriate," wide receiver Parris Campbell said. "We don’t take that lightly.”
But as the losses grew more historic -- from the worst fourth quarter in NFL history against the Cowboys to the biggest collapse in NFL history against the Vikings and the fifth-longest losing streak in Indianapolis history -- the players felt just a little more alone.
Nobody quite understands what they go through, or who they really are beneath the rubble. Nobody except the men they wear the horseshoe with.
That’s why after it finally ended in the most fitting way it could, with a Hail Mary pass tossed into the sky on 4th-and-20 and up over a Colts defenders’ outstretched arms and into a Texans tight end’s hands, the men in the center embraced in a hug. McLeod and Franklin both came over to console Thomas II, the rookie who led the team in interceptions but jumped just a little too early, the latest man to live with the memory of what didn’t come together.
"I know it hurts," Franklin said, "But he’ll be stronger because of it.”
Thomas II has become a vessel for this team’s emotions, one of the many roles nobody signed up for. He arrived as the team’s seventh and final pick of the draft, as a 25-year-old from Yale who was going to try free safety or cornerback and see if he could make the roster. Then suddenly he was starting at free safety, with Julian Blackmon hurt, and Patrick Mahomes was throwing at him, and Thomas II didn’t flinch at all.
But that resolve paled to what he needed two months later. When Damar Hamlin collapsed on Monday Night Football and needed CPR and a stretcher and a terrifying ride to the hospital as a game was canceled, every Colts player felt something. The things they carried this year spilled out in their texts and talks with another entering the final week of a year that never wanted to end.
“We all play the same game Damar does," Campbell said. "I think about his family. You think about your own family. You really think about what this game really is and the risks that you go through."
For a locker room of 53 players grabbing their phones in search of updates, Thomas II suddenly became a touchpoint. He went to high school with Hamlin in Pittsburgh. The two met up after Thomas II’s very first game, a preseason contest in Buffalo, which suddenly felt like years ago. Except it wasn’t, because two young men wearing NFL jerseys held the dreams and anxieties of an exhilarating game in their eyes as the cameras clicked. And four months later, the beginning of a journey was threatened with an end.
That was the fear Thomas II was suppressing as he drove alone in a car to the University of Cincinnati hospital on his way to see Hamlin, in hopes that he’d wake again after cardiac arrest. Teammates felt it. They knew their free safety needed more than good run fits and fist bumps now.
Zaire Franklin, the captain of the defense, sent him a text. He said he didn't need an answer back.
“Know I'm here for you," it read.
It was a message Colts players said and showed constantly to each other this season. The day before it ended with that Hail Mary on 4th-and-20, members of the starting defense such as DeForest Buckner, McLeod and Kenny Moore II gathered around Julian Blackmon as their free safety took the plunge to get baptized.
They had to lift as they climbed and hold together as things started to slip.
Due to injuries, a scheme change and a minor contract holdout, Kenny Moore II was one of the Indianapolis Colts stars who struggled the most in the transition from 2021 to 2022.
A season of enduring
The changes came swiftly, as the Colts fired a quarterback, an offensive coordinator, a head coach and a quarterback again, all before Thanksgiving. But the anxieties had crept up earlier than that.
"Whether you guys know it or not, a lot of us are dealing with stuff -- physically, as well as mentally," cornerback Kenny Moore II said after a Week 5 overtime win over the Broncos. "It's much love and respect for everybody in the room that we're all going through something."
Something was off inside key playmakers last spring, even when the franchise’s image grew bright and hopeful again. The Colts traded for Yannick Ngakoue and Matt Ryan and then signed Stephon Gilmore, and hopes of an AFC South title and a home playoff game rose. Those changes inspired the players, and they voiced that in every interview.
But it didn’t erase all the pain.
Running back Nyheim Hines said he woke up every morning in February and thought about the collapse in Jacksonville, when all the Colts had to do was beat a two-win team with an interim coach and instead lost 26-11 and the season was over. “Hard Knocks” broadcast the public and private gutting of the locker room, and those thoughts echoed inside players as they took vacations, put cell phones on airplane mode and tried to shut the world off.
Moore II spent a week in the foothills of Alaska, waking up with temperatures in the teens, washing the emotions down with frigid air. He visited military men and women who saw him not for his most recent games but as a star and a source of joy.
Moore II needed the pick-me-up. That collapse hit him hard after a season where he rose to Pro Bowl and Walter Payton Man of the Year levels, and now his defensive coaches were leaving, and he needed that confidence to try something he felt he owed to his family and his future: He was going to hold out for a reworked contract.
He wanted to do it in his lighthearted style, still in the building with his teammates, still showing up at Indianapolis events but not practicing. But he lost both battles that spring, as the Colts passed on an extension and a narrative formed with some fans that Moore II wasn’t all-in for a city.
"I haven't really been able to express myself this season," Moore II said. "I was basically in the shadows."
Words swarmed in his head but didn’t make it out of his throat. He began tweeting less, and one time he sent a message to the fans after a loss filled with boos and deleted it within minutes. He searched for a lift in the games, but those didn’t come either, as he was caught in a new scheme and a lessened role and only got his hand on four passes all season without a single interception.
After his season ended with an ankle injury, he finally released what he couldn't quite show.
"Wearing that No. 23 has been a true honor," Moore II said before getting choked up. "Playing at Lucas Oil, the fans deserve so much more. Just having my last name on the back of that jersey, it means more than anyone could know."
Players have had to ask themselves where the talent went at times. How did a defense with a personality built on turnovers struggle to get to the ball? How could the NFL's best rushing team struggle to get out of the backfield or to hold on to the ball?
The answers were sometimes there if they listened to their bodies. There was DeForest Buckner’s elbow, wrapped in a bionic brace; Yannick Ngakoue’s chronic back pain; Jonathan Taylor’s high-ankle sprain; Matt Ryan’s separated shoulder at age 37; Bobby Okereke’s finger, which split the skin and was stitched together in the middle of a game.
The bye week wouldn’t come until December, but they all felt pressure to not only play but to also play better in order to turn the season around.
"In your head, you're like, 'Man, I want to be out there. I'm a rookie. I don't want them thinking I'm soft,'" said tight end Jelani Woods, who also endured the loss of two college teammates in a shooting at the University of Virginia. "You try to push it and push it when you're not supposed to, and you can make yourself look even worse at times and then you go back down that drain."
'DEVASTATING': Rookie Colts TE Jelani Woods opens up on Virginia teammates, shooting victims
Indianapolis Colts second-round rookie tight end Jelani Woods saw some ups and downs in 2022, including a game-winning touchdown catch to beat the Kansas City Chiefs.
A 'Welcome to the NFL' like none other
For the rookies, this season was their introduction to the the highest level of football. Expectations rose as the structure shook, and the players with the least experience and perspective had to find something to hold on to, some way out of the dark.
Alec Pierce spent four seasons at Cincinnati catching passes from only one quarterback, Desmond Ridder, and rode that success to the College Football Playoff and then to the second round of the draft. But after spending the first seven weeks running routes to Ryan’s preferred landmarks and earning the trust of a 15-year veteran, everything shifted. By his 14th game, he was already onto his third different starting quarterback.
"A rookie wall," receivers coach Reggie Wayne said late in the season. "I told him earlier this week, you've got to climb over that rookie wall."
For a receiving corps aged 25 and younger, the changes disrupted the genesis of a timing- and repetition-based occupation. A process-oriented franchise suddenly kept mixing ingredients together and leaving the players to push through the smoke.
"It's crazy," Campbell said after the 26-3 loss to the Patriots. "Out of all of these questions, I really don't have a defined answer, which I'm sorry for."
Perhaps no young player wore more of the burden this season than Bernhard Raimann. Drafted in the third round out of Central Michigan, the Austrian native arrived with a wide smile, a firm handshake and the pride of a country at the spectacle of an NFL training camp packed with screaming fans. But when Matt Pryor and Dennis Kelly couldn’t get it done at left tackle, he suddenly found himself holding the blindside for an injured Ryan in a spot next to Quenton Nelson, with Taylor trying to bounce off his left hip to create those badly needed explosive runs.
As the Colts hit some franchise lows for offense, the blindside protector internalized those, convinced some part of him was holding back the most expensive offensive line in football. In reality, he was set up to fail, given the starting spot on next to no practice time before a Thursday game in Denver, asked to fix a weakness of the team he didn’t break.
After the Colts lost to the Patriots in a game where Sam Ehlinger took nine sacks, Raimann had tears streaming down his cheeks on the way to the team bus.
“I remember telling him, I said, ‘Look, you’re going to have days like this in this league,’” general manager Chris Ballard said. “And I said, ‘But your mental toughness and your ability to reset is important.’ And I said, ‘And for you to make it, you have to do that.’”
Because of the rash decisions of those above them, the Colts' youngest players felt the shame of their growing pains in ways that were impossible to flush. The morning after Raimann cried on his way to the bus, the Colts fired Frank Reich and brought in Jeff Saturday. A week before, Michael Pittman Jr. dropped an Ehlinger pass on the final drive of a loss to the Commanders, and two days later, offensive coordinator Marcus Brady was fired.
"Maybe things around here would be different today if I make that catch," Pittman Jr. said the next day. "I'm feeling the weight of that."
All-Pro linebacker Shaquille Leonard is the heart and soul of the Indianapolis Colts defense but played just three games this season due to a back issue that never properly healed.
A call for leadership
As the ship swayed beneath the tidal waves, the veterans on the Colts took more charge. After the loss in New England, backup quarterback Nick Foles talked Nelson and Ehlinger through lessons on leadership. After Reich was fired, the first player to talk to the team was Ryan.
Some tried to lead from the sidelines, like All-Pro linebacker Shaquille Leonard did in the Chiefs game, when he was pumping his arms and screaming his lungs out for a defense that tipped a Mahomes pass into the arms of McLeod to pull the upset. Leonard then strode through the locker room screaming, “Keep that same energy!”
But with the team at 1-1-1 and facing the Titans, the reigning kings of the AFC South, Leonard felt he had to be on the field to produce the full Maniac Effect. Fourteen weeks after back surgery, he rushed out of the tunnel and lasted 16 snaps before he collided with Franklin, broke his nose and injured his brain.
It was one more setback to the Colts’ fuel pump of energy. The next return lasted two games, before he felt something in his back again, and the Colts shut him down for the year.
"I shouldn’t have been out there, shouldn’t have been playing. I should have just rested," Leonard said.
"I keep the receipts of everything anyone's ever said about me, and I'm looking at the tweets, I'm seeing everything, and I'm just ready to go out and prove everybody wrong once again."
As this year's winner of the Ed Block Courage Award, Leonard embodied the worst of the Colts players’ internal struggles to answer all the noise with their play. They dropped from a league-high seven Pro Bowlers in 2021 to just one in 2022, which was Nelson.
Some players found their best selves this year. Grover Stewart grew into one of the best nose tackles in the game. Thomas II defied the odds on seventh-round rookies to lead the Colts with four interceptions.
Parris Campbell had made a promise to himself to play all 17 games, more than he had in three years combined, to set up a family with two young children with his first free-agent contract. The days of rehabbing a foot and knee were humiliating, and the tweets from impatient fans just as painful, but he found a lift when his 4-year-old son, Kai, had to dress up at school as what he wanted to be some day and he wore a Colts helmet with his dad's No. 1 jersey.
“Yeah, things have been hard for me and I’ve been through a lot of stuff," Campbell said, "But at the end of the day, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. If you can see it or not, you have to believe that. You have to have that faith.”
MORE: How Parris Campbell fulfilled a 17-game promise to himself
Zaire Franklin was one of the bright spots for the Indianapolis Colts in 2022, as the linebacker stepped into a full-time role and set the franchise's single-season tackles record with 167.
Franklin stepped in for an injured Leonard and he beat his franchise record with 167 tackles. The 26-year-old spoke after every practice and every game, answering for abrupt changes and results the NFL had never seen before.
"I couldn't look at him and not give 100%," Thomas II said.
Franklin was warming up on the field in New York, with one game to go and his family in the stands, when the tears started to roll. One of his contacts fell onto the turf, just another piece lost to the season.
"I think it just taps back into why we play the game," Franklin said. "We put so much into it, and the love of the game is never away from me."
What this season built, what it destroyed, what it changed and what it couldn’t are the lessons Colts players will carry on. Some will return to Indianapolis. Others will head to different teams. A couple will retire. Some will be tempted and will keep playing anyway.
This is their story. Theirs together, and theirs alone.
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06-07-2023, 05:51 PM
We put so much into it': Life inside a Colts locker room in a 2022 season unlike any
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