Why Annual Late-Season Collapses For Colts?
- Colts' 5-year playoff drought marked by consistent late-season struggles under Ballard's watch.
- Ballard admits he doesn't have a clear answer for why the team can't finish seasons strongly.
- Ballard believes the team's ability to handle adversity, not just toughness, is an area that needs improvement.
INDIANAPOLIS – Chris Ballard doesn’t have an answer to one of the uglier stains on his GM resume.
Marred in a 5-year playoff drought, one of the longest active streaks in the entire NFL, Ballard’s Colts have had a bit of a common trend in those seasons ending without meaningful football.
Wilting as the season moves along.
Not all of the December/January closings have looked the same, but the end result has been more losing than winning, and years watching the postseason, despite the number of playoff teams increasing from 6 to 7 in each conference back in 2020.
And it’s happened under Ballard’s watch, with 3 different head coaches leading the Colts throughout these troubles.
When the Colts 2025 season came to a close, Ballard was asked about these late-season issues.
“I remember back to training camp, y’all were harping on start of the season (the Week 1 drought) and I go, ‘Yeah I mean, that’s important but we got to find a way to finish the season,’” Ballard says. “And that has been one of the major issues we have. I mean, you can go back to ’21, ’23, ’24, ’25. For years we have not finished, and we’ve got to evaluate and figure out why. I’m not going to sit up here and say I’ve got an answer to that right now, but that is real. Because we’ve not finished.”
Here’s a closer look at those end of the season problems:
2021: The start of the 5-year playoff drought began with the Colts losing a home game to the interim-coach Raiders in Week 17, and then the 2-win Jaguars to end the season. Had the Colts won either, they would have made the postseason.
2022: The interim coach jolt didn’t last with Jeff Saturday. The Colts won their first game with Saturday, then lost 7 in a row to end the year, with some historically bad moments, allowing 33 fourth-quarter points to the Cowboys and then setting an NFL record by blowing a 33-point halftime lead against the Vikings.
2023: While a Week 18 “win and get in” game was there for the Colts (a 23-19 loss to the Texans), December losses to Jake Browning and the Bengals along with Taylor Heinicke and the Falcons put all the pressure on that season finale.
2024: A massive December game waited in Denver, with the Colts folding in the second half, losing 31-13 in a critically important game. The true blow was giving up 45 points to Drew Lock and the Giants in a Week 17 loss, as playoff hopes were still alive.
2025: Seven straight losses to end the season, including four within the division to playoff bound Jacksonville and Houston. As injury adversity hit the ’25 Colts, the product on the field wilted like no other.
Following the end of the 2024 season, similar questions were asked of Ballard.
Then, the Colts GM went out of his way to say the team needed to add more “tough guys” in hopes of changing the tune late in years.
As that injury adversity hit the Colts in 2025, they couldn’t overcome it, not even for one game.
Is Ballard pointing back to the “tough guys” comment?
“Look, I will tell you this about this (2025) team, they fought,” Ballard said of the 2025 Colts. “I thought the locker room, staff, organization, they fought. There was no quit in this team at any point, even when we started having injuries, there was no quit.
“Toughness is a fair question. I think handling adversity, I don’t think we were non-tough, that’s for sure. But handling adversity better, I think that’s a better way to put it.”
