When Joe Flacco plays football, he gets a certain kind of look in his eyes.
The quarterback, now in his 17th season in the NFL, carries himself with exactly the kind of poise you would expect from such an experienced veteran. He's calm, cool and collected and doesn't show a lot of emotions when he's on the field. He doesn't pound his chest, he doesn't yell. He just throws the football and does what he's supposed to do.
But he gets a look in his eyes.
"You talk to Joe during the game, he looks like a killer," wide receiver Josh Downs said. "So I mean, yeah, Joe came in there and played really good."
Flacco entered the Colts' matchup with the Pittsburgh Steelers near the end of the first quarter, when QB1 Anthony Richardson headed to the sidelines after sustaining a hip injury. Richardson stayed on the sidelines for two plays – a short pass from Flacco to running back Jonathan Taylor and a rushing play by Taylor – before coming back into the game. But when he still felt his injury after the next play, Richardson went back to the sidelines.
There were three minutes and 17 seconds left in the first quarter. Flacco played for the rest of the game.
The 39-year-old quarterback, playing in his first game of the 2024 season, completed 16 of 26 passes for 168 yards and two touchdowns in the Colts' 27-24 win over the Steelers, routinely connecting with Downs and Taylor, as well as wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. like they had been working together for much longer than the few months they've spent practicing together.
"(He's a) veteran presence," head coach Shane Steichen said. "Obviously, he's played a lot of football, went in there and operated pretty darn good."
And yet, Flacco still had to tell himself to calm down when he first got out on the field. He's only human, after all.
"I'm glad I'm not wearing some kind of heart rate monitor," Flacco said with a laugh. "It's just one of those things where you have to kind of go back to the basics and let everything else take care of itself."
Once Flacco completed those first two plays, he settled down. He kept telling himself not to overthink anything, and just go out and play football. When the Colts signed Flacco as their backup quarterback in March, they did so knowing his veteran presence would be highly beneficial on and off the field. They also knew that if they needed someone to step up, he would be able to do it.
"Some guys love to think about every little thing and everything that can go right, everything that can go wrong, and that's how they play best," Flacco said. "I think my personality probably lends itself decent to this type of situation because it's like 'Don't overthink it. Don't over do it. It's just a game of football. Go out there, if the guy's open, throw it to him and hit him.'"
"When you're me, when you kind of come in and you get thrown into a situation, you just trust your guys and do the right thing and see what happens," Flacco added.
That's why the connection between Flacco and his receivers so often seemed fairly effortless. He was just giving the football to the person who was open. And it was that kind of approach, and the underlying confidence it alluded to, that made it so simple for the receivers to adjust to.
"Joe just stayed ready," Downs said. "Arguably a Hall of Fame quarterback. He just came in there and played his game — trusted us and he took over."
"Really, he's more so adjusting to us because he doesn't work with us all the time, but he makes our job easy as well," Downs added. "Like, we've got a really good quarterback coming in for another really good quarterback."
It didn't really hit Downs that he was playing catch with a Super Bowl quarterback until fellow wide receiver D.J. Montgomery said something to him about it. The fact that they were playing with someone who had 4,004 passes and 245 touchdowns under his belt didn't really cross any of the Colts players' minds. To them, they were just playing with another one of their teammates and they were trying to win a football game.
And they did.
