Will Colts Free Agency Approach Change?
INDIANAPOLIS – Chris Ballard spending in free agency has never been much of a thing.
Ever since Ballard took over as Colts GM in 2017, he has thrown up a major caution flag when it comes to handing out contracts in the early wave of free agency.
Why pay B players A money?
Doing so sends the wrong message to the locker room.
We are going to be all about draft, develop and retain.
But is that about to change?
Arguably, the biggest overall change in tone from Ballard at his season-ending press conference earlier this month was around his message about roster building/free agency.
“The hardest thing to do is evaluate your own team,” Ballard at his final press conference of the 2024 season. “I think this is across the board in the NFL. And look, I’m emotional and I care about our players, and I think sometimes I’ve let that bleed into how I built the team, all right. Coming off a year last year when we were 9-8, I thought we were playing really good football at the end of the season. We lost a tough game at the end to Houston, could have gone either way. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we’re trending up.’ Instead of really creating competition throughout and throwing new blood into the locker room, new players into the locker room, I said, ‘You know what? We’re going to run it back.’ That was a mistake. It was.
“I think (DeForest) Buckner said it. Buckner had some comments that I thought were just excellent – about complacency, about ego. He’s right. Buck is right – man enough to say it, one, which I love, and two, his assessment was right. That falls on me, it does. I bet on that we could bring players back, and they would be – they would be as upset about what happened at the end of the season last year that they’d want to rectify it. At the end of the day, we were not able to. I didn’t do a good enough job creating enough competition throughout the roster, and keep everybody on edge. Look, at the end of the day, what we do – we do it in the public eye. There’s a lot of money that people make in this profession, but Bill Parcells always talks about achievement. At the end of the day, it’s about competition and achievement. I mean that’s essentially what it boils down to. I didn’t create enough competition on the roster for it to want to achieve in the way it needed to achieve. There’s got to be some stress. There has to be. There has to be real stress within that locker room, an uncomfortability that if I don’t play well enough, my (expletive) will not be on the field playing. That directly falls on my shoulders. I mean, it’s a lesson. It’s a crappy lesson that I learned. I do a pretty good job self-evaluating. Now I’m hardheaded, and I will talk myself way back into I was right. But this occurrence, I was wrong. I was wrong.”
Given that admittance, and Ballard’s harsh “tough guys” comment later in the presser, he certainly sounds prepared to things differently when mid-March rolls around.
“We’ve had moments where we’ve brought outside free agents in and done really good with it,” Ballard, accurately, says. “We’ve got to be better about making sure we identify the right free agents that can help push this team to where it needs to go.
“Right now, we’re not close. I’m going to make this really clear. Like close is losing on the last play of the Super Bowl. That’s close. Going 8-9, that’s not close. No. I’m not saying we won’t be closer when we get to the start of the season, but right now sitting here today, we’re an 8-9 football team and we’ve got to own that. We are not good enough. We’re not, and we’ve got to be able to address and identify the right avenues to acquire the right players that can move the needle – and have not done that in the last four years. Haven’t.”
Last spring, Ballard made two somewhat notable moves in free agency—signing backup quarterback Joe Flacco and signing reserve defensive tackle Raekwon Davis.
While fans certainly love the splash that can come with a new free agent, Ballard has always been rather hesitant to even jump into the shallow end of that pool.
About a handful of in-house free agents awaits Ballard and the Colts in 2025. Nearly $30 million is there in cap space.
Will different January words mean different March actions?
