Jonathan Taylor, Colts Agree To Contract Extension
- Colts agree to 2-year extension with Taylor, worth up to $47M with $39M guaranteed.
- Taylor, 27, is poised to surpass Edgerrin James as Colts' all-time leading rusher, possibly this season.
- Despite heavy workload, Taylor has maintained health, playing every game in 2022 with no injury issues.
Jonathan Taylor, Colts Agree To Contract Extension
INDIANAPOLIS – Compared to the immense amount of drama that played out three years ago, this Jonathan Taylor contract extension was borderline boring.
That’s good for business.
And the business is a reported two-year extension for Taylor (through the 2028 season) and the Colts, for a contract worth up to $47 million, with $39 million guaranteed.
With this news, it’s likely the 27-year-old Taylor will become the franchise’s all-time leading rusher, potentially as early as this year.
Currently, Taylor has 7,598 career rushing yards. He’s 2nd on the Colts all-time list, looking up at Edgerrin James and his 9,226 yards.
A 1,628-yard season from Taylor is needed, and he’s coming off a 1,585-yard campaign last year, despite a super quiet end to the year.
Taylor was 1 of 11 NFL running backs to not miss a single game last season.
Not only did Taylor, suit up every week, he also didn’t show up on the injury report for any of the team’s 51 practices/walk throughs last year.
That incredible run of health led to Taylor carrying the ball 323 times, 12 more than any other player in the league.
Still a handful of months away from turning 28 years old, and with 1,551 carries at the NFL level, on top of the 926 carries in 3 years at Wisconsin, Taylor is reaching a workload level where many running backs start to turn the other direction when it comes to reps and production.
Earlier this offseason, Shane Steichen acknowledged the question about Taylor’s activity level.
Have you looked at Jonathan Taylor’s workload at all and said he’s got to dial it back a little bit?
“That’s a fair assessment,” the head coach began.
“I think he led the league last year in carries, but talking to him after the season, he said he felt good. But yeah, obviously he’s a hell of a player. It’s hard to take him off the field when he’s running so good, but getting Seth (McGowan) in the fold and DJ (Giddens) and see how those guys come along in training camp, and we’ll go from there.”
Taylor will enter the 2026 season having played in 27 straight games, with double-digit carries in all of those contests.
It’s easily the longest such streak in the NFL.
Last season, Taylor’s efficiency was oftentimes a direct correlation between Colts win and losses.
Similar to many offensive related items, Taylor saw his numbers take quite the dip in the second half of last year.
When the Colts won 7 of their first 8 games, Taylor had the following yards per carry: 3.9, 6.6, 6.0, 4.5 (loss), 3.9, 5.9, 5.9, 12.8.
As the Colts then lost 8 of their final 9 games, Taylor had these yards per carry numbers: 3.2, 7.6 (win), 3.6, 4.0, 3.5, 2.9, 3.3, 1.9.
This notable discrepancy was a major part of the Colts off-season evaluations.
“Just finding the ability to be really, really consistent with everything that we do,” offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter says when asked about the drastic differences in the run game success. “It’s really a process driven run game where all 11 of those guys got to do their job at a high level against a defense who’s trying to stop that thing. As you go through a year, you pop the big runs by being consistent over and over and over and getting the running back into some space. Obviously, JT (Jonathan Taylor) being so special once he does get into that space, you’ve got to be careful trying to make the big play happen with a great block or a great run, or a great anything, you’ve just got to sort of churn out those consistent runs, and then the big runs come. Later in the year, we’ve just got to sort of clean up some of the process oriented things that we needed to do at every position, including myself. Just cleaning up the way we went about our work at the end of the year so we could sort of win our side of that competition against the defense.”
And now Taylor remains a pillar Colt, becoming a rare running back to have signed 3 separate mutli-year contracts with one organization.
Father Time is a scary thing when you talk about running backs with the workload of Taylor, even dating back to his collegiate days at Wisconsin.
But Taylor continues to defy it.
With Thursday’s news, the Colts clearly think he will continue to be a unicorn on a path to Canton, Ohio.
