On Friday afternoon, former Indianapolis Colts longtime Pro Bowl center Ryan Kelly announced his retirement from professional football as a current member of the Minnesota Vikings:<\/p>\n
Originally a 2016 first round pick of Indianapolis, Kelly would go on to make 121 career starts for the Colts at center over his first 9 seasons\u2014en route to becoming a 4x NFL Pro Bowler and NFL 2nd-Team All-Pro during that same span at his position. He was one of the Colts consistent anchors along their interior offensive line.<\/p>\n
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Unfortunately, Kelly was limited to just 10 starts during his final season in Indianapolis during 2024 because of re-occurring concussions, before ultimately hitting free agency. The Colts elected to transition to 2nd-year center Tanor Bortolini as Kelly\u2019s heir apparent and replacement instead, which ended up paying off dividends this past season as Bortolini broke out during his debut as a full-time starter.<\/p>\n
As a veteran free agent, Kelly signed a 2-year, $18 million contract with the Vikings last offseason but was limited to just 8 starts after suffering three more concussions last season before being placed on season-ending injured reserve to finish what would ultimately be his final NFL season\u2014his 10th in the league.<\/p>\n
Had the 32-year-old not retired as a result of his lingering and re-occurring head injury history, Kelly very well may have found himself as a veteran salary cap casualty of the Vikings this early offseason regardless.<\/p>\n
That being said, we\u2019d like to congratulate Kelly on having a heck of a prior playing career as one of the best all-time centers in Colts franchise history\u2014and a former longstanding leader in their locker room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday afternoon, former Indianapolis Colts longtime Pro Bowl center Ryan Kelly announced his retirement from professional football…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":797282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,253,723,2004,392,1360,259,6,4912,8316,2788],"class_list":["post-797281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-football","tag-houston-texans","tag-in","tag-indianapolis","tag-indianapolis-colts","tag-lucas-oil-stadium","tag-minnesota-vikings","tag-nfl","tag-pro-bowl","tag-ryan-kelly","tag-tanor-bortolini"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116185112691220983","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}