The Indianapolis Colts are at home to take on the Buffalo Bills for their week ten matchup on Sunday at 1:00 PM EST.

Week nine came with a new starter at quarterback for our embattled team and Joe Flacco was far from the revolution Shane Steichen hoped he would be. Flacco, for his part, did nothing wrong. He was Joe Flacco. You can’t get mad at a bear because he’s a bear, and you can’t hate Joe Flacco because he’s the quarterback he’s shown to be over in his 17-year NFL career. However, Shane Steichen and his offense have some serious questions to answer.

A year ago, Steichen’s offense was ripe with quick route combinations, receivers got open underneath and high-percentage options were available to anyone playing quarterback. This season was a different story. Steichen has replaced the fast game almost exclusively with deep concepts, relying on keeping extra blockers against the blitz rather than throwing quickly after them. The offense looks modern with its formations and movements, but the strategy is something that Steichen’s mentor, Norv Turner, would recognize from the mid-1990s. Turner put his name on the map in the early 1990s with the dominant Dallas Cowboys teams. When those teams were going heavy, keeping seven blockers in the box and sending deep shots to Troy Aikman’s Michael Irvin was as viable a strategy as anything else at the time. But it just doesn’t play with any consistency in the modern NFL when the pass comes from Joe Flacco or Anthony Richardson to Alec Pierce.

That’s not meant to discredit Pierce, who has been good this season. Josh Downs, capable of being a driving force in the offense, has been an afterthought after Steichen’s downfield calls and Michael Pittman Jr. has dealt with a back injury that has left him less effective than ever before. Adonai Mitchell is a rookie going through what many rookies do and despite his well-documented struggles, he has adapted amid subpar quarterback play, poor offensive design and the frustration of coming oh-so-close to making big plays week after week to be. and for some reason you just don’t come into contact with it.

And so far I’ve just covered the passing offense, I haven’t even started on the ground game and how Steichen has designed it to only operate at a high level with a mobile quarterback at the helm. With a mobile quarterback on the field, most of the run game is designed to force the defense to take into account the quarterback’s ability to keep and control the ball himself, and the point is, it’s a great strategy! We see Saquon Barkley and Derek Henry having great years with the same idea. The quarterback takes a defender out of the play and the offensive line suddenly has an advantage more often than not. Ultimately, football is a numbers game. If you split the field down the middle, the defense will have five men on one side of the field, six on the other (insert “what about zero technology” here). If you do it right you force the defense to take one of those defenders completely out of the play to account for the quarterback, so instead of five and six you now have four and five depending on the direction of the run. So you can build in a directional advantage for blockers, knowing that a defender will not fall behind. And if that defender jumps out and takes it on the back, if they no longer consider the quarterback, then your quarterback keeps the ball and makes an explosive run.

With Joe Flacco on the field, this is no longer possible. Teams don’t have to consider Joe and Joe couldn’t keep it (and survive) if he wanted to. Steichen knows this. He knows how the run game is designed (he designed it, well, he didn’t do it as well as Eagles run game coordinator Jeff Stoutland, but you get the idea). He knows he’s going to suffer with Flacco in the game, and yet here we are.

Steichen has done nothing schematically to help his young, inexperienced, effectively starting quarterback. And then, to avoid changing an obviously broken strategy, he benched the quarterback he refused to help, and started an experienced journeyman, AND THEN he didn’t do anything schematically to help his old, former Super Bowl MVP quarterback to help, and failed to significantly improve the passing offense while absolutely undermining the run game in the process.

To call Shane Steichen’s decisions this season confusing would be an insult to confusing things like string theory. Frankly, Steichen’s decisions this season were ridiculous from the outside.

Oh, and also that defense, which was terrible in the first quarter of the season, is playing great ball. Love him or hate him, Gus Bradley has his unit playing good football and Gus is doing things schematically that I’ve never seen him do. Strange fronts and a high (for Gus) blitz percentage? From Guus? Amazing. This is the defense we needed to back up a young quarterback and it showed up just as we benched the kid.

Today, Indy is playing a Bills team with a top five scoring offense, a top ten scoring defense and a top three quarterback. But here’s the problem with this Colts team: It’s still a quarterback away. They could win this game. Steichen could decide to implement some of those concepts we saw a season ago and the offense could start moving the ball and score some points. It’s incredibly frustrating because it’s all good there. They can do it. Will they? Probably not. But maybe. And at the end of the season, if they’re still at 7-10 or 8-9, they’d happily hang their hat on “yeah, but we beat the Bills in week 10” and honestly, games like this win The game would demonstrate what I, and many others, believe: this is a good team led by a head coach who seems to be in over his head in so many ways.

Don’t bet on the Colts this week.

In fact, don’t bet on it again for the rest of this season.

But you can hope, hope costs you nothing.

As always, go Colts.

RELATED

Opposing QB Analysis: Josh Allen

This is week ten’s open thread, so stick around, chat, celebrate, commiserate, and argue in the comments! Go wild (within reason)!

Go Colts!