Who’s left after The Purge?
To start, there’s head coach Shane Steichen, who now has the most impossible job in football. If he feels abandoned by ownership and management, you couldn’t blame him. The Colts just traded off four front-line starters at the deadline, making a bad, 2-7 team even worse. In the deepest recesses of his heart, he knows he has almost no chance to win as he auditions for his next job in the NFL.
That said, he knows what had to be done. He doesn’t like what’s been done – now he’s got to design a passing attack featuring Anthony Gould, Laquon Treadwell, Ashton Dulin, Deon Burks and Nick Westbrook-Ikhine – but he knows it was time to replenish the coffers with draft capital for the next general manager. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you’ve lost 14 of 16 games; this garage sale is on Steichen as much as the players.
In the end, the Colts walked away from deadline day with an additional third-round pick, two fourths, two fifths and a sixth. In all, the Colts have 12 draft choices next year, which they can use to select a player or build a package to move up into the first round. Some of us thought it would have made more sense to trade Jonathan Taylor, but that will likely happen in March. I doubt they get as solid an offer as the one they got from the run-desperate Giants this week, but that was Tuesday’s column.
Anyway, we asked Steichen what his message to his diminished team was one day after the trade deadline.
“Go compete, man,” he said. “I mean, we get an opportunity to play this game that we love, and that’s what it comes down to. At the end of the day, it’s a business. There are tough decisions that have to be made. It’s all a part of it. I couldn’t be more excited for the guys that get these opportunities to go out and play the game that they love, too.”
There’s Daniel Jones, who has almost no success throwing to his front-line receivers and will now have to proceed with a group of depth players. That group – Dulins, Gould, Burks, Treadwell and Westbrook-Ikhine – have a combined 27 catches between them this year.
