Week 2 Colts Offensive Rankings and Analysis:

Each week during the season, I will be walking through the data from the previous Colts game and analyzing the numbers to form a sort of “what happened” narrative, as well as comparing the Colts against all other teams in the league. For a glossary of the stats listed, reference Season Stats. Thanks to Pro Football Reference, NFL.com, Football Outsiders, and the nflFastR project for being awesome sources of weekly data.

In week 2, it took 6 drives for the Colts offense to finally get on the scoreboard with a Matt Gay field goal and then they waited until the 2nd to last drive to score their only TD. I’t’s a bold strategy Cotton.

The Colts simply couldn’t move the chains (22nd DSR) and on the occasions when they did, they couldn’t avoid drive killing mistakes.

TEAM TOTALS

(Use the right-left arrows to toggle between stats for the week and the season).

Indy could only muster 1.0 Points per Drive, placing them as the 28th ranked offense of the week, which is in line with their DSR (22nd). However, that is quite at odds with their 6th highest yards per play and the 4th highest 1st downs per play.

Those contradictory stats are because of the style of play that is becoming a pattern for the team. They have had success getting the high value explosive plays that earn lots of yards and first downs, but then outside of those plays, they fall flat. This illustrated in week 2 by having the 6th most explosive plays (tied), but only the 24th ranked 3rd down conversion rate.

Until they can learn to be more consistent, they will keep stalling out drives. They need to learn to grind their way down the field with smaller, higher probability successful plays.

PASS TOTALS

(Use the right-left arrows to toggle between stats for the week and the season).

Passing was a nightmare. The 26th ranked EPA per dropback and 25th ranked Passing Success Rate pretty much describe the effort. Ignoring the game ending hail-mary interception, Anthony Richardson threw 2 picks and while that’s not ideal, it certainly is not the end of the world.

The real issue is that Richardson is just plain inaccurate. Yes, there were dropped passes, but every QB has dropped passes and they still manage higher than a 50% completion rate. I don’t know if that is fixable or not, but if he can just start completing passes between 5 and 15 yards, it will fix a LOT of problems with the offense.

RUSH TOTALS

(Use the right-left arrows to toggle between stats for the week and the season).

The run game was again very efficient. The team had the highest yards per carry (ypc) and the highest first down rate (1st/c). Factoring in situation, the run game was the 9th best of the week (arsr). Unfortunately, being down 2 scores the whole game limited the team’s ability to run more.

CONCLUSION & LOOK AHEAD

Apologies for Derek Carr and Alvin Kamara who destroyed the scale for this next graph.

About the only positive thing I can say about the week 2 offense is that they are in a good company of teams that had similar successful rushing and poor passing, sitting alongside the Chiefs and Lions . . . and the Titans

Week 3 brings the Bears to Lucas Oil Stadium. Chicago’s defense has had a good start to 2024. They have yielded the 4th fewest points per drive and the 4th lowest Drive Success Rate.

They are strong against the pass, giving up the 5th lowest EPA per dropback to opposing QBs (Stroud, Levis). They are pretty stingy on deep passing, allowing the 11th fewest 20+ yard completions. So this is kind of a nightmare match-up for Richardson.

They are pretty good against the run too, allowing the 12th lowest adj Rush Success Rate to opponents. However, they have given up a lot of big runs (7th most 10+ yards), so this could be a good opporutnity for Jonathan Taylor to do his thing.