Consistency, Familiarity Key For Colts As Team Reports For Offseason Workout Program

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INDIANAPOLIS — Last April, in his very first team meeting as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Frank Reich laid out the expectations for his players moving forward; a locker room that thrives on trust, toughness and teamwork.


A little more than a year later, not much has changed at the Colts’ West 56th Street facility. On Monday, the players returned to the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center for the start of the offseason workout program, and, with a good majority of the 2018 roster back to begin preparations for the 2019 season, Reich said his message was going to be “pretty similar.”


“I’m going to say it in a slightly different way but it’s gonna mean the same thing,” Reich told reporters Saturday at the team’s Local Pro Day. “You know, last year at that meeting we laid a foundation, and I was thinking about it, like, ‘Well, we’re not going to have a new foundation. But the goal is to build another story to go higher on that mountain,’ all those things. So the higher you go when you build, the more important it is to make sure that foundation is deep and secure.”


The Colts are coming off one of their more successful seasons in recent years, having turned in a 10-6 regular season record and earning a playoff berth for the first time in four seasons. There, they went on the road to defeat their AFC South Division rival Houston Texans, 21-7, in the Wild Card Round before falling to the top-seeded Kansas City Chiefs, 31-13, in the Divisional Round.


Along the way, quarterback Andrew Luck worked all the way back from missing the entire 2017 season to earn NFL Comeback Player of the Year honors and turn in a career year; meanwhile, the team saw two members of its extremely successful 2018 NFL Draft class — linebacker Darius Leonard and Quenton Nelson — become the first rookie teammates to be named First-Team All-Pro since Pro Football Hall of Famers Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers accomplished that feat with the Chicago Bears in 1965.


That being said, the 2018 season certainly had its share of challenges. Most notably, the Colts became just the third team since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger to start off their season with a 1-5 record and come all the way back to make the playoffs.


While the team’s overall expectations — getting into the postseason, winning your division and eventually hoisting that Lombardi Trophy — remain the same, the Colts now know just how important it will be to avoid another slow start in 2019.


The work needed to accomplish those goals started Monday.


“We have the same attitude,” Leonard told reporters on Monday. “We still talk about getting one percent better every day and just outworking the next guy beside us. So we know what it felt like last year. I mean, like you said, the roster hasn’t changed much, so that 1-5 start, we don’t want that; it still sticks out in the back of our minds. So we’re gonna come in and get an early start and keep working.”