The NFL’s two-month roster-building sprint begins this week at the Indiana Convention Center as teams conduct formal interviews, pour over medical records and evaluate a mountain of data collected during the NFL Combine.
Between the beginning of those formal team interviews on Monday, Feb. 24 and the final pick of the 2025 NFL Draft on Saturday, April 27, the complexion of every team’s roster will change. The NFL Combine is a massive exercise in information gathering; for a week, Indianapolis – which is uniquely set up for all 32 teams to maximize their time during the NFL Combine – becomes the center of the NFL universe.
And while various events precede the NFL Combine – namely college showcases like the Senior Bowl and East-West Shrine Bowl – nothing turns the league’s full attention to free agency and the NFL Draft like the next few days in downtown Indianapolis.
So for the Colts, the question we’ll be able to answer over the next two months is this: How will general manager Chris Ballard add competition to a roster coming off a 9-8 season in 2023, then an 8-9 season in 2024?
“I didn’t create enough competition on the roster for it to want to achieve in the way it needed to achieve,” Ballard said in January, a few days after the Colts’ 2024 season ended. “There’s got to be some stress. There has to be. There has to be real stress within that locker room, an uncomfortability that if I don’t play well enough, my (butt) will not be on the field playing. That directly falls on my shoulders. I mean, it’s a lesson. It’s a crappy lesson that I learned. I do a pretty good job self-evaluating. Now I’m hardheaded, and I will talk myself way back into I was right. But this occurrence, I was wrong. I was wrong.”
Ballard, in that quote, was discussing the Colts’ offseason focus a year ago, which was on continuity. Several veteran free agents were re-signed; the only outside additions in free agency were a backup quarterback (Joe…
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