A year after the Colts swung big for Sauce Gardner, the trade still isn’t the problem. The problem is everything that came after it.
When Indianapolis sent two future first-round picks and a young wide receiver to the Jets for Gardner, the move made sense in the moment. The Colts were 7-2, sitting atop the AFC and riding one of the most dangerous offenses the league had seen in years at the midpoint of the 2025 season. Chris Ballard was betting on a 24-year-old, two-time All-Pro corner who could change the shape of a defense.
That kind of gamble is rare, and it usually comes with a massive price tag. Since the turn of the century, only six defensive players have been traded for multiple first-round picks: Khalil Mack, Jalen Ramsey, Jamal Adams, Micah Parsons, Jeffery Simmons and Gardner.
Strip out the two most recent deals, and only the Rams won a playoff game with their defensive prize on the roster. Los Angeles did win a Super Bowl in Year 2 with Ramsey, and he made two first-team All-Pro teams there.
Mack made two playoff trips with Chicago, though both ended in wild-card losses. Adams lasted 34 games in four years with Seattle.
That’s the kind of hit rate Ballard was chasing: roughly a one-in-three shot that a huge draft-pick investment could turn into an immediate playoff run with a defensive centerpiece.
And Gardner has done his part.
This season, he leads all qualified defensive backs in tight windows forced when targeted at 52.4%, the only player in the league above 50%, according to Next Gen Stats. He also ranks 10th in average separation at 2.1 yards.
Per Pro Football Focus, Gardner owns the league’s best forced incompletion rate at 30% among players with at least 15 targets. No other corner is even at 25%.
He has six pass deflections and is on pace for the second-highest total of his career.
Some of the numbers are muddied by a couple of explosive completions against the Commanders in Week 4, where he was the closest defender but was assigned less than half the blame. Even so, the bigger picture is clear: Gardner is still one of the league’s most effective corners, the kind who can erase one side of the field and force quarterbacks to think twice when they test him.
So why does the deal look so ugly now?
Because Ballard made the splash move, then didn’t finish the job.
He added Gardner, and he had already gone after another All-Pro corner in Charvarius Ward in free agency. But the rest of the defense never got the same level of investment.
Through Week 8, the Colts are near the bottom of the league in quarterback hurries with 14, knockdowns with 18 and pressures with 48. Their pressure percentage sits at 18.5%, third-worst in the NFL, and they also have the ninth-most missed tackles.
That leaves Gardner and Ward trying to cover far too long, and once that happens, even elite corners can be worn down. Opposing quarterbacks have been able to work the middle and the flats, exposing an ineffective linebacker group and making life easier than it should be.
What the Colts needed was help on the edge and at linebacker - proven veteran playmakers who could make those easy throws harder and force quarterbacks into bad decisions, bad throws or sacks, the kind of chain reaction that can show up several times a game with Daniel Jones at quarterback.
Instead, the defense was left incomplete. The result, as the story goes, is a Ferrari with a Toyota Camry engine inside it.
That failure matters even more because the offense entered the season already on thin ice, with No. 1 receiver Alec Pierce and Jones rehabbing significant injuries. Without enough reinforcements at receiver, the Colts were always one injury away from trouble, and even a star corner couldn’t patch over all of it.
Now Indianapolis is staring at a very different picture than it did a year ago: from 7-2 with the AFC in sight to possibly 2-7 and headed toward a years-long rebuild, one loss away from a complete reversal before next week’s trade deadline.
Trading for Gardner wasn’t the mistake. Failing to build the defense around him was.
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