August in Central Indiana brings the state fair, back-to-school season, and, for Colts fans, another familiar preseason reality: losses.
Indianapolis is set to open its 2026 exhibition slate Aug. 13 at the New England Patriots, and the history around this team in August is hard to ignore. Since 2005, the Colts have the NFL’s worst preseason record, going 27-50 for a .351 winning percentage.
That puts them just ahead of the Atlanta Falcons, who are at .355 over the same span and will come to Indianapolis for a preseason game Aug. 22.
The common belief is that the Tony Dungy-Peyton Manning Colts were basically allergic to preseason success. That’s not quite accurate.
Indianapolis won seven of its first 12 exhibition games under Dungy. But the tone changed fast.
The Colts lost all five preseason games before the 2005 season, and from there the losses piled up. Between 2005 and 2010, Manning’s final six active seasons in Indianapolis, the Colts went 4-22 in preseason play.
That .153 winning percentage was the worst in the league over that stretch.
For Colts fans, though, those August results were easy to live with. Indianapolis won 75 regular-season games during that same span, the most in the NFL, and added a Super Bowl title along with another trip to the big game.
Manning’s move to Denver in 2012 didn’t change the preseason story there much, either. The Broncos went 10-6 in exhibition games during his four seasons in the Mile High City.
The bigger picture is a little more encouraging for Indianapolis, even if “encouraging” is doing a lot of work. Since 2011, the Colts have been below average in preseason games rather than historically bad. Over the last 15 years, they are 23-28 in the preseason, a .451 mark that ties for 12th-worst in the league.
Whether any of that means anything is the real question. The list of the five worst preseason teams since 2005 includes the Arizona Cardinals and Las Vegas Raiders, two franchises with plenty of long-term struggles. But it also includes the Kansas City Chiefs, who have gone 27-48 in the preseason over that span and still collected three recent Super Bowl titles.
At the top, the Baltimore Ravens have set the pace. They won 24 preseason games in a row from 2016 to 2023 and own a 53-23 record over the last two decades, the best in the NFL.
Denver, Seattle, Houston and Pittsburgh round out the top five, and all five have been steady regular-season teams since 2005. Even Houston, the “worst” team among them, has won eight division titles.
So the lesson is pretty simple: if you have the best quarterback in football, like the Colts did with Manning or the Chiefs do now with Patrick Mahomes, preseason results don’t mean much. If you don’t, they still probably don’t mean much. But for Indianapolis, it wouldn’t hurt to stack a few more wins in August.
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