INDIANAPOLIS – It’s amazing what can happen in less than four weeks.

In the hours in the immediate wake of the Colts’ error-riddled loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers on Nov. 2, Indianapolis’ six-turnover, five-sack game was largely brushed off as that game just about every team in the league experiences in a given season.

A fluke.

To some, it too was a Giants-era Daniel Jones performance – three picks and two fumbles in a pass-happy offensive performances where the run game ran into a wall and his offensive line was a sieve at times – but with eight games before it that told a polar opposite story, there didn’t seem to be any reason to presume the ensuing month was going to go like this.

Particularly after the Indianapolis front office made one of the most shocking trade deadline moves in years for All-Pro cornerback Sauce Gardner – for the hefty price of two first-round picks – and then Jonathan Taylor was back looking like a serious MVP candidate a week later and the locker room then had a bye week to heal up, self-scout and harden for a postseason-like close to the year before the real thing.

Three weeks ago, the then-8-2 Colts paced the AFC South, sat in a virtual deadlock for the top seed in the conference and were ready to begin an admittedly difficult closing stretch to stay there, but the pieces to do so seemed firmly in place.

With back-to-back losses against – at least according to records – the weakest remaining teams on their regular season schedule, worry among the fanbase has reached a fever pitch. The locker room, too, acknowledges that what lies ahead is a gut-check moment where the story of the 2025 Colts will ultimately be written.

Those seven wins in eight games to start the year – six of them to sub-.500 teams all slated to pick 12th or better in next year’s draft at the moment – will be a footnote in a couple months.

“I think after the bye week, we were already in playoff mode. We want to be No. 1. We want to win the division. We have all these goals, and the approach really doesn’t change,” Colts veteran cornerback Kenny Moore II said Sunday, following his team’s home loss to its divisional rival Houston Texans, 20-16 – Indianapolis’ second-consecutive loss, its third in four weeks and one that knocked the Colts out of the lead in the AFC South.

“(We’ve got to) look in the mirror. We’ve got a lot of things to clean up. We’ve got to attack the week, because we’ve got a big game on the road next week.”

Perhaps the most worrisome part, though, is that there doesn’t exactly seem to be a throughline. In the 1-3 stretch since the start of November, the Indianapolis defense has featured four separate combos of DeForest Buckner, Sauce Gardner and Charvarius Ward on or off the field. It’s seen Daniel Jones air it out and lose, have a ho-hum game and win and then lose with solely a horrendous fourth quarter and drop another with a performance Sunday that may have been the single best part of the offense.

Wideouts Alec Pierce, Michael Pittman Jr., Josh Downs and tight end Tyler Warren – they’ve all gotten shutdown at times; none consistently.

Jonathan Taylor, admittedly, has been boom in the win and largely bust in the losses, but in Colts head coach Shane Steichen’s offense, the unit isn’t predicated on opening up the ground game first.

Throw to score, pass to win is the Steichen mantra, after all.

Sometimes, unsuccessful runs set them behind the chains in situations where the vaunted Texans defense thrives – but uncharacteristic drops marred this one, too, including on the Colts’ final two plays of offense Sunday. Jones finished 14-for-27 for 201 yards and two touchdowns – a stat line, Steichen pointed out, that earned him a passer rating above 100, but one that wasn’t altogether fabulous.

“(It’s just) making those plays. Starting with myself, just making those three or four plays to finish games at the end,” Steichen said.

But is it really, truly fixable? Like, in a matter of days?

Because this roster, for better or worse, features:

>> An All-Pro defensive tackle – the team’s leader in both its pass rush and run-stopping – on IR for a minimum of one more game.

>> A starting quarterback with some level of discomfort in his leg that appears to have his scrambling abilities at less than 100% — and no one in his quarterback room at all capable of filling in.

>> An All-Pro cornerback with what he believes is a strained calf who might miss some time.

>> A star running back who was once a legit MVP candidate but has just 188 yards on 51 carries combined in three of his four most recent games (for 3.7 yards per carry).

“This one hurts,” linebacker Zaire Franklin said. “This one hurts but we’re going to continue to focus, because we’ve got a big one on the road next week.”

And seasoned Colts fans know exactly why next week’s trip to Jacksonville – the team’s second of four divisional games over the final six – looms so large. The franchise hasn’t won in Jacksonville in more than a decade.

It’s a fact the Colts locker room doesn’t need reminded of – “I don’t care about no history. Don’t matter nothing to me. This is a brand-new team, and that’s a brand-new team, and I don’t care about nothing that’s ever happened down there,” Franklin said, emphatically, Sunday – but it’s a fact all the same.

And with an 11th-straight loss to the Jags in seven days, combined with the following reasonable results between now and then:

>> Broncos wins over the Commanders and Raiders;

>> A Patriots win over the Giants;

>> A Ravens win over the Steelers;

>> A Bills win over the Bengals;

>> A Texans win over the Chiefs; and

>> A Chargers win over the Eagles

And the Colts will be out of the playoff picture altogether, sitting third in the division and eighth in the conference. Waiting for them will be the Seahawks and 49ers, followed by back-to-back division games to close.

“We’ve just got to continue to get better. That’s the only thing you can have. We have two losses in a row – games we know we should’ve won – but I can’t keep coming in here, saying, ‘We should’ve won this. We should’ve won that,’” Colts safety Camryn Bynum said. “We have to really look in the mirror going into this week and find exactly what went wrong.”

Joel A. Erickson and Nathan Brown cover the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter