Colts general manager Chris Ballard spoke to the media Thursday morning, reflecting on the 2025 season and outlining his goals for the offseason and the 2026 season.
Ballard began with an opening statement, in which he expressed his disappointment for how the Colts’ 8-9 season played out and his gratitude for the opportunity to continue working in the NFL and for the Colts organization. Colts Owner and CEO Carlie Irsay-Gordon, who spoke to the media on Monday, said both Ballard and head coach Shane Steichen would be returning in 2026; she said they saw progress and adaptability from both men in 2025, but expect more in 2026.
Ballard echoed those sentiments on Thursday, stressing the need for continued growth both in himself as the general manager and overall as a team.
“We’ve got to do better,” he said. “We’ve got to handle adversity better, we’ve got to finish better and I have to be better at my job.
“…The team you start out with in August is never the same team in December or January. It’s not. And we’ve got to do a better job, from a personnel standpoint, of making sure we have enough depth and solve problems along the way. There’s going to be adversity in every season. There just is. It’s the NFL. It’s a hard league. It’s hard to win, and things are going to happen, and you’ve got to find ways to be deep enough and have enough talent on the roster that you can still win games.”
Irsay-Gordon credited the Colts’ 8-2 start to the season as a reason for confidence in Ballard’s abilities as a general manager. He was aggressive in free agency, bringing in big-name players in Cam Bynum and Charvarius Ward Sr., and executed a blockbuster trade for Sauce Gardner at the trade deadline, showing his ability to adapt and change the way he assembles rosters.
“That wasn’t something he’d necessarily done before, and I think we were able to see some progress there,” she said.
While Ward and Gardner both sustained injuries (as did other key players such as Daniel Jones and DeForest Buckner), Irsay-Gordon saw Ballard’s increased aggressiveness with those acquisitions as a positive sign for the future. Injuries are no excuse for the team’s seven-game losing skid, though, and Ballard knows he has to move forward with the right approach in order to make the necessary changes and form a winning team.
“I’m never going to use health as an excuse,” he said. “I think our defensive front, we’ve got to add some fuel to the front. And we’ve got to get younger. We’ve got to get faster, unequivocally, on defense. Offensively, we’ve got to be able to run it when we want to run it. And I will say that when Daniel got hurt, it took away some things that we could do from a mobility standpoint, which I think affected it, but that’s something we’ll dig into. But just off our initial thinking, our defensive front and we’ve got get faster.”
The Colts defense finished 13th in points allowed per game (24.2) and struggled to make crucial third-down stops. Ballard said the Colts will make a point of addressing the strength of the defensive line this offseason, whether it’s in the NFL draft, free agency or in-house.
“We need to add some youth,” Ballard said. “Defensively we need to add some youth. I think offensively, we got a pretty good mix of veterans and young players.”
As for improving the run game, in the final seven games of the season Jonathan Taylor totaled 134 carries for 446 yards (an average of 3.3 yards per attempt) and three touchdowns. In that time span, Jones sustained his Achilles injury and 44-year-old Philip Rivers — who was, of course, not nearly as mobile in the pocket as Jones — took over for three games before rookie quarterback Riley Leonard played in Week 18.
Ballard said the presence of a mobile quarterback does a lot in terms of opening up the game for Taylor and the other running backs. That mobile quarterback next season could very well be Daniel Jones; Ballard said on Thursday he believes Jones, who is headed into free agency, has a “really bright future” in Indianapolis. Ballard isn’t worried about Jones’ long-term health as he recovers from his Achilles injury, and views the 28-year-old as both a possible short-term and long-term answer at quarterback.
Along with all of that, though, the Colts simply have to figure out how finish games. It was a topic Irsay-Gordon emphasized on Monday, a topic Steichen has spoken about throughout the season and a problem Ballard knows is crucial to fix.
“We got to find a way to get over those and handle those situations and execute better in those situations,” Ballard said about losing close games. “And that falls on me, too, not just staff. I mean, we got to make sure we have the players that can execute at that point.”
“We got to find a way to finish the season,” he later added. “That is one of the major issues we have. You can go back to ’21, ’23, ’24, ’25. Four years we have not finished, and we’ve got to evaluate and figure out why. I’m not going to sit here and say I’ve got an answer to that right now, but that is real. Because we’ve not. We’ve not finished.”
Irsay-Gordon said the level of urgency for Ballard (and Steichen) to succeed in 2026 has “never been higher,” and Ballard said he has always felt that kind of urgency. But at the same time, he recognizes the need for Irsay-Gordon to ultimately do what’s right for the franchise.
“If we’re not getting it done, then damn right there’s going to be some urgency,” he said. “I’ve never felt like we didn’t have it. But I will tell you this, even with the sense of where we need to be and where we need to go next year, we will still do the right thing for this organization. We will, and we’ll continue to bring in the right type of people and players to give us the best chance to win a Super Bowl.”
And even though he might not have all of the answers yet, in his conversations with Irsay-Gordon, Ballard said he made one thing clear: he has not lost any confidence in his ability do get the job done.
“I told her, unequivocally, I have not lost my shimmer or juju or confidence or whatever you want to say it is,” he said. “Even through all the struggles we’ve been through, I feel like we can still get this team to a place where the city is proud of it.”