This time last year, we were debating Anthony Richardson vs. Daniel Jones. Now we’re debating whether or not Jones is worth $50 million per year. Coming off a breakout season, Jones would be a safe bet to stay hot in 2026, but a torn Achilles muddies the waters for his second season in Indianapolis.

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2025 Indianapolis Colts Stats (Rank)

Points per game: 27.4 (8th)
Total yards per game: 345.9 (9th)
Plays per game: 59.9 (19th)
Dropbacks per game: 37.9 (19th)
Dropback EPA per play: 0.1 (11th)
Designed rush attempts per game: 25.4 (20th)
Rush EPA per play: 0.05 (1st)

Make or break year for Shane Steichen and Co.

Shane Steichen and the Colts entered the 2025 season at a crossroads. The team desperately wanted Richardson to be a thing, but Jones had different plans. He decisively won that camp battle and never looked back. Jones was putting up career efficiency numbers midway through the season and Steichen looked like a lock to make the playoffs for the first time in three seasons as the Colts’ boss. The Colts were at 8-0, but even before Jones suffered his season-ending Achilles injury, cracks in the facade were beginning to form. His efficiency dropped in his final five games and the Colts lost four of those contests. Things got so bad after Jones went down that Phillip Rivers was drawn out of retirement for “one last job” that went as well as it does in the movies. The late-season collapse left Steichen out of the playoffs for the third time in three tries. The Colts bet the house on this iteration of the roster when they brought back Jones and Alec Pierce on pricey deals. It’s now or never for Steichen and his staff.

▶ Passing Game

QB: Daniel Jones, Riley Leonard, Anthony Richardson
WR: Alec Pierce, Ashton Dulin
WR: Josh Downs, Anthony Gould
WR: Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, Deion Burks
TE: Tyler Warren, Mo Alie-Cox

We’ll get to Jones’ midseason slump in a minute, but viewing his Colts debut as a whole, he was wildly impressive. Jones ranked top-10 in both EPA per play and completion percent over expected. Pro Football Focus charted him with top-10 rates of both accurate and accurate plus throws. Add in five rushing touchdowns and Jones was on pace to finish as the QB8 by points per game before exiting Week 14 early. This, however, isn’t the complete story. Jones turned the ball over a staggering five times in Week 9 versus the Steelers. He stemmed the bleeding on bad plays over the next few weeks but still struggled in most efficiency metrics. Four of his five worst games by EPA per play came from Week 9 to Week 14. Jones went from averaging .344 EPA per play over his first eight games to -.03 over his final five. The big shift was his inability to handle pressure. Jones threw six touchdowns and had a 9.8 percent pressure-to-sack rate in his early-season split. Those numbers dropped to one score and a 22 percent P2S when defenses got to him from Week 9 onward. Jones has never been particularly good under pressure, so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that his numbers came crashing back to earth. Even if that aspect of his game is here to stay, it’s also hard to deny how efficient he was to start the season. All signs point to Jones being ready for Week 1, and fantasy managers are only being asked to pay a QB25 pricetag to find out who the real Daniel Jones is.

As long as Jones retains his deep ball, Alec Pierce will be happy. The veteran wideout posted a breakout season in 2025 with 1,007 yards on a paltry 47 grabs. He scored seven times and led the league in yards per reception for the second season in a row. Despite the career year, Pierce’s role as a modest-volume deep threat didn’t change. He simply hit more home runs than the previous season. It was the first 1,000-yard season for a player with an aDOT over 20 since the turn of the century. There have only been five 20+ aDOT seasons accompanied by even 700 yards over that timeframe. Naturally, Pierce’s 2024 is another one of the five. Though it’s possible Pierce keeps up his league-leading efficiency for a third straight season, he is already doing something almost no receiver in my lifetime has. Realistically, he will need to earn more intermediate and short targets to hit four digits again. With foot surgery sidelining him for the entire offseason and potentially most of training camp, it’s hard to imagine his role changing much in 2026.

With Michael Pittman gone, the Colts now need a new player to step up as their top option for easy-button targets. At receiver, Josh Downs is almost the only option. Downs looked like a player worth running the entire passing game through in 2024. He was targeted on a monstrous 28 percent of his routes and, while not an every-down player, still took the field for 75 percent of the passing plays. That player vanished in 2025. Downs posted a pedestrian .22 targets per route while the Colts cut his route rate to 67 percent. This can, in part, be explained by a series of injuries. Downs missed much of training camp with a hamstring issue. He eventually sat out one game with a concussion and was listed on the injury report with hip, knee, and ankle issues throughout the year. As of late June, the Colts’ primary WR3 option is between Ashton Dulin and Nick Westbrook-Ikhine. As long as they don’t add a free agent before camp, it’s going to be hard to get Downs off the field this year.

While Downs appears to be the best bet to lead the receiver room in targets, Tyler Warren, coming off a dominant rookie season, should pace the team in opportunities overall. Warren already led the Colts in targets last year at 112, one more than Pittman. His 76 grabs go down as the fourth-most for a rookie tight end in league history. As expected, Warren was used primarily as an underneath option and he excelled in that role. He earned seven yards after the catch per reception on catches shorter than 10 yards downfield. That ranked sixth among all tight ends. He was the only tight end who ranked top-20 in YAC on short throws while also seeing more than 70 of these targets. He had 81 such opportunities. Warren’s ability to consistently churn out YAC despite defenses knowing where he’s going to be targeted was his calling card in college and it translates to the NFL right away. Warren is unsurprisingly going off draft boards as the TE4, but there’s nearly a 20-pick gap between him and Colston Loveland as the TE3.

▶ Running Game

RB: Jonathan Taylor, Seth McGowan, DJ Giddens
OL (L-R): Bernhard Raimann, Quenton Nelson, Tanor Bortolini, Matt Gonclaves, Jalen Travis

Much like the passing attack, you can’t talk about Indy’s ground game without looking at the splits with and without Jones. Jonathan Taylor was pushing for a legendary season with nearly 24 PPR points per game and a 2,000 scrimmage yard pace when his quarterback was healthy. Jones gets hurt and he posts 13.3 PPR points per game in the final month of the season, sinking most of the regular-season juggernauts he had built for fantasy managers.

Taylor averaged 1.5 yards before contact per carry and 3.9 after contact with Jones active. Those marks fell to 1.1 and 2.1 post-Jones. On the season, ESPN charted the Colts’ line with the seventh-best run block win rate. If the Colts can return to form through the air and the line continues to play well, Taylor won’t have any issues paying off his RB3 overall cost.

There isn’t much of note going on in this backfield behind Taylor. The team spent all summer last year hyping rookie backup DJ Giddens, only to keep him on the bench for most of the season. Ameer Abdullah occasionally relieved Taylor on passing downs but is now with the Jags. That leaves the RB2 job up for grabs, but Giddens isn’t being handed the keys. The Colts drafted Seth McGowan in the seventh round. McGowan brings a similar profile to Giddens. At 6’/223, Giddens has the size of a workhorse running back and did a little bit of everything in college, even if he isn’t a special runner or receiver. This will be a crucial camp battle for Zero RB drafters to watch.

▶ 2026 Indianapolis Colts Win Total

DraftKings Over/Under: 7.5

Pick: Under (+115)

The Colts enter the 2026 season teeming with upside, but they’re also tremendously fragile. Their quarterback is coming off a torn Achilles. Even before that, his efficiency was grinding to a halt for a few weeks. Their No. 1 receiver underwent offseason ankle surgery and is targeting a return late in training camp. This isn’t to say they are guaranteed to hit the under, only that they are a team with a high ceiling and a staggering floor. If you want to bet the over, you may be better off doing so by taking them to make the playoffs (+170) or win the division outright (+380).