INDIANAPOLIS – The last time the Indianapolis Colts won a season opener, they defeated an Oakland Raiders team featuring Terrelle Pryor at quarterback and Charles Woodson at safety.
President Barack Obama was in the first year of his second term, Apple’s latest cell phone offering was the iPhone 5, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was about half its current mark.
Yes, 2013 was a long time ago.
When the Colts debut their 2022 roster on the road against the Houston Texans on Sunday, they will be attempting to reverse a trend of historic proportions. Their eight consecutive losses in season openers is the longest current streak in the NFL, and it’s tied for the third-longest streak of season-opening losses in NFL history.
The Colts, to say the least, are exhausted with the topic. Publicly, they’ve taken a decidedly different approach to this subject in 2022: Avoidance. The Colts have downplayed the importance of breaking the streak and generally have not talked about it.
“We’re just kind of focused this year on saying, ‘You know, let’s go play our best football and let’s get it done,” owner Jim Irsay said recently, “instead of me ranting here for 10 minutes. That hasn’t seemed to work in the past.
“But you know how I feel about the openers.”
Privately, however, there has been an intense focus on achieving a better start to the season for a team that has been a notoriously slow-starting club in recent years.
Coach Frank Reich, after exhaustive planning by the team’s medical and training staffs, handled training camp and the preseason in a different fashion in an effort to change the Colts’ Week 1 fortunes.
Among the changes: The Colts pushed back their practice times from mid-morning to midday, a move aimed at getting players’ bodies acclimated to performing at a time similar to kickoff. The Colts, who also shortened their practices, generally practiced at noon throughout training camp. Is it any coincidence their season begins at 12 p.m. CT on Sunday?
“We can start setting their clocks to how we play,” general manager Chris Ballard said.
The Colts also condensed their evening meeting schedule throughout training camp by about an hour. They balanced those moves with a heightened focus on sleep, with the staff encouraging players to make use of the extra time to get additional rest.
“Shoot, our first meeting was starting at like 9 o’clock, 9:15 [a.m.],” receiver Parris Campbell said. “Then, we were getting done earlier [at night]. That just gives that time to rest and get away from ball, and take time to actually get work done on our bodies and recover.”
Even while Reich was easing up on practice intensity and reducing the lengths of meetings, he ramped up playing time for key players in the preseason.
Reich has historically been very conservative with his starters in the preseason, so it was unusual to see the starting offense and defense playing into the second quarter of the Colts’ preseason opener against the Buffalo Bills.
The idea behind the move? Reich believed more live action could promote better execution early in the season. In Reich’s four seasons, the Colts have had to overcome wretched starts in two of them -- 1-5 in 2018 and 1-4 last season.
The proof will ultimately come down to early season results, but the changes have been a hit in the locker room. It's also worth noting the Colts largely avoided major injuries in training camp, outside of punter Rigoberto Sanchez's Achilles tear sustained during wind sprints. There were just two players on the team's injury report this week: Shaquille Leonard (recovering from June back surgery to address a nerve issue) and Dennis Kelly (recovering from recent knee surgery).
“Guys bought into it,” defensive tackle DeForest Buckner said. “I definitely feel a difference in my body heading into Week 1 compared to previous years. [Reich] has been harping on this and about getting rest. I’m an early bird, but that extra half-hour or hour of sleep goes a long way.”
Have the Colts finally found the antidote they’ve been seeking for eight long years? If they have, look for this formula to be recycled in the future.
“I think all the best games we’ve had in [recent] seasons,” linebacker Zaire Franklin said, “is when we were fresh and rested and ready to go.”