The Colts’ offseason has drawn its share of criticism, and ESPN’s Seth Walder put a C+ on Chris Ballard’s work. The grade has some support.
The reasoning behind it? That’s where the argument starts to wobble.
Indianapolis brought back both Daniel Jones and Alec Pierce, but the way it got there created the debate. The team used the transition tag on Jones, which meant it could not tag Pierce. Walder’s view was that the Colts should have done the opposite, and that keeping Pierce under a tag would have prevented the club from paying so much to bring him back.
But that framing misses the bigger picture: Indianapolis paid a premium for both players. Whether the tag landed on Jones or Pierce, the Colts still likely would have ended up spending big to keep each one. Ballard had painted himself into a corner, and letting either player walk would have been a disastrous outcome.
If there was a choice to be made, the safer one was Jones. Quarterback is the most important job in football, and risking his departure while protecting a receiver who had never reached 50 catches in a season would have been a strange gamble.
Walder was right about one thing: Pierce’s deal was expensive. The receiver got $116 million over four years, with $60 million guaranteed in the first two seasons. That is a massive number, even by today’s standards.
Jones also got paid handsomely, with as much as $88 million over two seasons. On an average annual basis, that was more than the transition tag. The Colts clearly spent aggressively at both spots.
Still, it’s not obvious Indianapolis was bidding only against itself. Pierce’s market likely had real interest, and the logic for paying him was easy enough to see.
Wide receiver prices keep climbing, Pierce is only 26, and he has led the league in yards per catch in each of the past two seasons. He still has not had a 50-catch season, but the upside is obvious.
His offseason ankle surgery probably didn’t do much to cool his market either. It was described as fixing an issue, not repairing an injury that cost him games.
Jones’ situation was simpler. He got paid because he’s a quarterback, and quarterbacks cost a fortune in the NFL. Even so, he’ll have to prove himself in year two with the Colts, since the team has an escape hatch if he doesn’t play well in 2026.
So yes, the C+ makes sense as a snapshot of the offseason. But the critique of how the Colts handled the tags doesn’t really hold up.
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