After Monday, the 2023 Colts will never be together again. Change is inevitable in the NFL. Players will leave in free agency while others will join the team. The NFL Draft is three and a half months away. Guys will get signed, cut, traded, waived, drafted – and in eight months, when the 2024 season kicks off, the Colts will be a different team.
And that’s why missing the playoffs in 2023, with a remarkably resilient team that built a collective resolve, felt like such a stinging missed opportunity.
“Great group of guys,” quarterback Gardner Minshew II, one of the Colts’ impending unrestricted free agents, said. “A lot of adversity this year, different people in and out of the lineup, but I think we always faced the challenge ahead and did everything we could. It didn’t go our way at the end. But I’m proud of the work that we put in this year, the things that we accomplished. We’ll really look back on this, especially as time goes on, with more and more favor and gratitude for everything we did.”
But for the players who will return in 2024, or the impending free agents who hope to be back, whatever lingering bitterness existed was cut by a feeling that’s been in short supply the last two locker cleanout days.
2021’s locker cleanout day was defined by a numb, reflexive “we have to learn from this” attitude following a stunning season-ending loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. A year ago, the prevailing vibe was uncertainty as the Colts cleared out of 56th Street.
This year, the disappointment also came with a side of hope. If this team in 2023 could be 15 yards from the playoffs with everything it had to overcome, just imagine what Shane Steichen and this group can do in 2024. A lot of those good vibes came from knowing who from the core of the 2023 team will be back next year. But a lot of them also come from having a head coach in Steichen who believes in his players – and whose players believe in…
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