Week 7 Colts vs. Dolphins Highlights: a win is a win.

The best plays from week 7

Week seven is in the books for the Indianapolis Colts. Their 16-10 win over the Miami Dolphins brings Indy to 4-3 before their week 8 matchup against the AFC South leading, 5-2, Houston Texans. Let’s take a look at some of the best plays from today’s game.

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First Quarter

Anthony Richardson is learning

I’m not going to spend a ton of time breaking down why this is a good sign. We all know the significance of this slide.

Jaylon Carlies sighting

Carlies made his first career start with EJ Speed missing the game due to injury. Carlies has shown a lot of promise in limited snaps and picked up a sack on this one. Unfortunately he would leave the game with an ankle injury soon after this play.

A play that didn’t count

This one drew an illegal formation penalty and a defensive pass interference call. The penalties offset so officially the play never happened, but man, it was almost pretty cool.

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Second Quarter

Grant Stuard was Indy’s best linebacker today

Stuard finished the day with 19 tackles. He did a good job playing downhill, using his hands and getting off blocks to make stops before they were 5-6 yards down the field (unlike Zaire Frankln). Great day for Stuard who deserves a bigger role going forward.

Stuard in coverage

This time he does it in coverage against Odel Beckham Jr. Again, more time for Grant Stuard is really needed.

The best offensive play of the first half

It was a rough first half for Anthony Richardson but this pass and catch was nice to see for the young QB.

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Halftime

This Tweet from Jim Ayello dropped during halftime and in my opinion, it provided some much needed perspective.

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Third Quarter

Segun Olubi with the forced fumble and recovery

Great awareness on this one from the reserve linebacker. I would like to point out that it happened after the back had picked up seven yards on 1st and 10, but it happened all the same.

Tyler Goodson’s first career touchdown

Tyler Goodson has been really good this year with the opportunities he’s had and today he earned himself plenty of opportunities. This one he punched in from seven yards out for six. After the way his 2023 season ended, it’s great to see him come out on the other side and perform as well as he has.

Laiatu Latu gets another sack

A lot has been made about Latu’s high pressure rate against his lack of sack production, so it was good to see him get another sack today. Hopefully we’re about to see a streak of several weeks in a row of Laiatu Latu sacks.

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Fourth Quarter

AR over the middle to Alec Pierce

I’m going to talk about it more in my final thoughts for the week but I’m not sure why we didn’t see more of these quick hitting routes over the middle. This was just mesh but we didn’t see much from the quick hitting routes from Josh Downs that we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks. On this one Pierce runs the crosser and picks up the first down that the team desperately needed.

Just a wild throw

This ball went off of the outstretched hands of the defensive back and into the waiting arms of Michael Pittman Jr. Just a wild completion that moved the chains when the offense needed it the most.

It’s the fourth quarter, you’re up by three and there’s three and a half minutes to play, it’s 3rd and 4, what do you call?

Yeah, that’ll do it. I know there will be a lot of people who don’t love the hits that he took again in this game and I get it. I don’t love it either but at some point it’s football and this guy is going to go out and play it the way he plays it. His multiple slides this week do show that he’s learned, at least a bit, that he’s not invincible. He got down when he could afford to get down and on this play, when his team needed it to get the win, he went out, took on contact and picked up the first down. The contact to your QB1 isn’t great, I agree. But he got the job done in crunch time.

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Final Thoughts from Week Seven

Richardson’s first half of football was rough.

Richardson’s second half of football was less rough.

That’s a fantastic sign. He didn’t go in the tank when he played poorly. He didn’t lose confidence. He didn’t mope around. He never wavered and when the game was on the line he did what it took to get a win.

Look, everyone with eyes can see that he isn’t the passer that Joe Flacco is. But that’s to be expected. Flacco is a 17 year vet who started and won a Super Bowl as a pocket passer. Of course he’s going to be a better passer than 22 year old Anthony Richardson. And yeah, sometimes Richardson’s throws are tough to watch, but to his credit he never put the ball in danger with his throws (aside from the one that went off the defenders fingertips that ended with an MPJ completion but that pass was wild and I’m calling it a positive because of the result). He took checkdowns when he needed to and generally speaking he made decent decisions with the ball, sometimes the throws came out late and sometimes they came out off target but the decisions were good.

If we can get 10 more games out of Richardson like this, games where he never loses confidence, he keeps the ball mostly out of harms way and he creates opportunities on the ground for his running backs the way he did today, by the end of the season we’re going to see a ton of growth of not just Richardson but the entire Colts offense as a unit. If this is what we get from the offense week in and week out, it will start to improve each week and by the end of the season we’re going to see an offense that will be ready to roll in 2025.

I’m not saying it’s going to be a lot of fun to watch and I’m not saying we should expect to see them win a ton of games. In fact, there’s a very real chance they lose their next five in a row; Texans, Vikings, Bills, Jets and Lions. At times it’s going to be really hard to watch, but as long as Richardson continues to build confidence and get these game reps, then the future will look bright. I really don’t care what it looks like this season as long as he’s going out there in the fourth quarter, slinging the ball wildly all over the field with confidence.

One last thing, Shane Steichen called a weird game for Richardson today compared to the one he called for Joe Flacco:

There are so many deep shots being called and so few of the quick winning concepts that Steichen used with Flacco the past two weeks and I can’t help but wonder why. Obviously he’s going to call a different game for the two very different quarterbacks, the success the team had running today illustrates that. But to not give Richardson any of those looks is wild. Getting Josh Downs singled up against a linebacker on an option route over the middle is easy money for the offense and we just didn’t see it today. I wish we knew why and I hope we see it change going forward. In my opinion getting those routes going to Downs coupled with the run game flexibility that Richardson naturally brings to the offense will make this team, much, much better to watch each week.

But time will tell.

As always, go Colts.