The Colts’ blockbuster swing for Sauce Gardner is looking rougher by the week, and Week 9 only made the picture uglier.
Indianapolis was in a very different place a year ago. At this point last season, the Colts sat at 7-2 and looked like a real AFC threat. Now they’re 2-7 and sliding, with the November 10 trade deadline looming and plenty of second-guessing already baked in.
The move itself was the kind of all-in gamble teams make when they think they’re close. Indianapolis sent two first-round picks and Adonai Mitchell to the New York Jets for Gardner, a star cornerback with a shutdown reputation. The price sparked criticism right away, but the logic was clear: if the Colts believed they were built to chase a title, this was the sort of aggressive swing that fit the moment.
More than 365 days later, the return has been hard to justify.
Gardner has been either underwhelming or unavailable since arriving, and his Week 9 outing against the Dallas Cowboys added another frustrating chapter. He was on the wrong end of a 46-yard strike to Ryan Flournoy that helped set up the game-winning touchdown. On the day, he allowed three catches on five targets for 57 yards and two first downs.
The raw numbers don’t tell the whole story, but the context does. The Colts didn’t just pay a steep price for Gardner - they put their future on the line to get him. Since the trade, they’ve gotten almost nothing back in the way of payoff, and the team is 3-13 in that stretch.
Gardner’s play hasn’t been disastrous every week. In his four games in 2025, he held passers to a 52.9 completion rate for 77 yards and no touchdowns. But even that hasn’t been enough to soften the blow of what Indianapolis gave up to land him.
And that’s where the frustration really lives. Cornerbacks get beat.
That’s part of the job. But when a team surrenders premium draft capital and then watches the results go sideways anyway, the margin for error disappears fast.
The Colts are now staring at life without a first-round pick in 2026, and the same problem waits in the promising 2027 class. They also don’t know who will be making those selections, because the Gardner trade, along with re-signing Daniel Jones, may have finally pushed Chris Ballard to the edge.
If there’s any silver lining for Colts fans, it might be that this move could help cost Ballard his job. Even then, it’s hard to call that a win. For now, the Gardner trade stands as one of the most shocking deals of the 2025 deadline, and Indianapolis has almost nothing to show for it.
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