{"id":872017,"date":"2026-04-22T16:24:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T16:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/872017\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T16:24:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T16:24:33","slug":"colts-fans-get-promising-daniel-jones-news-but-questions-remain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/872017\/","title":{"rendered":"Colts fans get promising Daniel Jones news\u2014but questions remain"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Indianapolis Colts must have a healthy Daniel Jones in 2026. Anything else is unacceptable, not for the player, but for general manager Chris Ballard. The GM is the one who seemed desperate to bring back<\/a> a quarterback who was great in the first half of last season, and then not.<\/p>\n

That is part of the problem. Some might see what happened with Indy through rose-colored glasses, as by the time Jones tore his Achilles tendon in Week 14, Indy was already out of the playoff picture at the time. Still, the team re-signed Jones to a massive two-year contract worth at least $88 million.<\/p>\n

He needs to play on that short of a deal to earn more soon. No one was quite sure the QB would be ready by Week 1 of the 2026 season, however, and while no firm timeline is known, Ballard did deliver some seemingly positive news this week in his pre-draft press conference.<\/p>\n

Indianapolis Colts news is good for Daniel Jones, but there is more to the story<\/p>\n

Ballard told the media<\/a>, “Daniel is progressing really well. He\u2019s throwing, moving, he\u2019s in a really good spot. Final timeline, I don\u2019t know. We\u2019re all shooting for Week 1, for sure, but we\u2019ll kind of let his body dictate that (timeline).”<\/p>\n

So, there we are. The quarterback appears to possibly be on track for Week 1. Or not. The truth is that the team doesn’t really know. What it does know is that Jones might not participate in training camp or the preseason and then suddenly get real snaps once the real games begin.<\/p>\n

That is far from ideal. A smarter choice may be to let Riley Leonard, who is the presumed QB2 and getting most of the starting reps<\/a> through much of the lead-up to the regular season, take the first-team reps in Week 1. That shouldn’t cause Colts fans to fret, though. Leonard was quite good in Week 18 last season against the Houston Texans.<\/p>\n

The reason Indy lost that game wasn’t Leonard. It was the defense, a unit that at this point doesn’t look any better than it did in 2025. In some ways, it’s worse. Gone are starters Nick Cross and Zaire Franklin, and they have no obvious proven replacement.<\/p>\n

The Indianapolis Colts are counting on a lot of good players to stay healthy in 2026, such as cornerbacks Sauce Gardner and Charvarius Ward, as well as defensive lineman DeForest Buckner, but assuming all will be available for games seems like a stretch. In the NFL, players get hurt. Depth is what matters.<\/p>\n

The positive part? Riley Leonard is likely good depth at quarterback behind Daniel Jones. The issue, ironically, is the rest of the team.<\/p>\n

\"\"Add us as a preferred source on GoogleFollow<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Indianapolis Colts must have a healthy Daniel Jones in 2026. Anything else is unacceptable, not for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":872018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2059],"tags":[2005,7,2004,392,2381,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-872017","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-indianapolis-colts","8":"tag-colts","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-indianapolis","11":"tag-indianapolis-colts","12":"tag-indianapoliscolts","13":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116449291743992645","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872017","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=872017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/872018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}