The NFL's two-month roster-building sprint begins this week at the Indiana Convention Center as teams conduct formal interviews, pour over medical records and evaluate a mountain of data collected during the NFL Combine.
Between the beginning of those formal team interviews on Monday, Feb. 24 and the final pick of the 2025 NFL Draft on Saturday, April 27, the complexion of every team's roster will change. The NFL Combine is a massive exercise in information gathering; for a week, Indianapolis – which is uniquely set up for all 32 teams to maximize their time during the NFL Combine – becomes the center of the NFL universe.
And while various events precede the NFL Combine – namely college showcases like the Senior Bowl and East-West Shrine Bowl – nothing turns the league's full attention to free agency and the NFL Draft like the next few days in downtown Indianapolis.
So for the Colts, the question we'll be able to answer over the next two months is this: How will general manager Chris Ballard add competition to a roster coming off a 9-8 season in 2023, then an 8-9 season in 2024?
"I didn't create enough competition on the roster for it to want to achieve in the way it needed to achieve," Ballard said in January, a few days after the Colts' 2024 season ended. "There's got to be some stress. There has to be. There has to be real stress within that locker room, an uncomfortability that if I don't play well enough, my (butt) will not be on the field playing. That directly falls on my shoulders. I mean, it's a lesson. It's a crappy lesson that I learned. I do a pretty good job self-evaluating. Now I'm hardheaded, and I will talk myself way back into I was right. But this occurrence, I was wrong. I was wrong."
Ballard, in that quote, was discussing the Colts' offseason focus a year ago, which was on continuity. Several veteran free agents were re-signed; the only outside additions in free agency were a backup quarterback (Joe Flacco) and a rotational defensive tackle (Raekwon Davis). The Colts' expectation was building on an encouraging 2023 season – in which they fell just a few yards short of their first division title since 2014 – would yield better results in 2024.
The Colts' record instead wound up one game worse, with a handful of embarrassing losses (Week 15 against the Denver Broncos, Week 17 against the New York Giants) punctuating a disappointing season.
"We've had moments where we've brought outside free agents in and done really good with it," Ballard said. "We've got to be better about making sure we identify the right free agents that can help push this team to where it needs to go.
"Right now, we're not close. I'm going to make this really clear. Like, 'close' is losing on the last play of the Super Bowl. That's close. Going 8-9, that's not close. No. I'm not saying we won't be closer when we get to the start of the season, but right now sitting here today, we're an 8-9 football team and we've got to own that. We are not good enough. We're not, and we've got to be able to address and identify the right avenues to acquire the right players that can move the needle – and have not done that in the last four years."
Finding those needle-movers, though, is not always as straightforward as spending a bunch of money in free agency or aggressively maneuvering around the draft. Moving the needle could look like adding a veteran free agent to a position group to spur healthy competition. It could look like adding a talented player in the draft, whether he plays a position of need or not.
We'll see what Ballard says when he talks to the media at the NFL Combine on Tuesday, which'll be about a month and a half removed from his end-of-the-year press conference. No, he's not going to tip his hand as anything close to a specific thing about the Colts' offseason plan.
But if increasing competition across the roster is the goal, there are several ways the Colts can go about it. And we'll see what buttons Ballard pushes in the coming weeks.
