INDIANAPOLIS — Mo Alie-Cox knew the moment he realized the Colts had the Titans on their heels Sunday.
The Colts were already rolling, pounding the ball down Tennessee’s defensive throat with the ground game, and as Indianapolis lined up for the snap, a Titans defender thought he knew what was coming next.
Tennessee’s linebacker started yelling for the Titans to watch out for a screen pass, only to get a harsh dose of reality from the defensive end in a game the Colts held on to win 38-30, keeping their slim playoff hopes alive with the sort of throwback rushing performance that felt like it came from a bygone era.
“’Man, they’re about to give it to Jonathan Taylor,’” Alie-Cox remembers the end saying. “’He’s about to run for 300 on us.’”
Taylor did not quite get there.
But the Titan was essentially right. Indianapolis ran for a franchise-record 335 yards in Sunday’s win over the Titans, bludgeoning Tennessee behind the breakaway legs of Taylor.
The Colts superstar rushed 29 times for 218 yards and three touchdowns, turning in his best game of the season one week after making the worst mistake of his career with a fumble just before he crossed the goal line in Denver. Quarterback Anthony Richardson added 70 yards and a touchdown of his own on nine carries, and Taylor’s backups, Trey Sermon and Tyler Goodson, provided the remaining 47 yards on the kind of day Indianapolis has been envisioning since the Colts drafted the dynamic Richardson with the No. 4 pick of the 2023 NFL Draft.
“Everything was kind of clicking there, and those are hard to come by sometimes in this league, but the guys up front offensively were just rolling,” Indianapolis head coach Shane Steichen said. “I mean, it was rolling. … We were popping the big ones, and we were close on a few other ones too.”
Doyel:Colts beat Titans in a game, like the season, that defies logic; keep playoff hopes alive
Pairing Taylor, one of the NFL’s best home-run hitters, with the size and speed of the dynamic Richardson was always supposed to produce days like this.
The formula has always been simple. By forcing defenses to account for the game-breaking abilities of Richardson, the Colts can take attention away from Taylor, giving the former All-Pro the space he needs to put teams away.
“Sometimes it’s that one extra defender, or maybe it’s that guy six inches, maybe a foot (farther away), he took a step to the right, his eyes took him over there just for a second,” Taylor said. “That may be all you need to get an open field.”
Injuries to Richardson and Taylor robbed Indianapolis of the opportunity to see the pair work in tandem in their first season together.
Injuries and Richardson’s two-week benching have put the pairing through stops and starts again this season, and they’ve played behind a banged-up offensive line that has started 10 different players in 2024.
Despite all of that adversity, the potential the two bring to the running game has been evident. The Colts entered Sunday’s game averaging 130 yards per game and 4.6 yards per carry in games when Taylor and Richardson played together, numbers that would place Indianapolis in the top 10 in both categories; Indianapolis averaged 104.6 yards per game and 4.2 yards per carry in games where one was missing, numbers that would rank in the bottom of the league in both categories.
But the Taylor-Richardson running game hadn’t truly exploded.
Not the way the Colts went nuclear on Sunday. Indianapolis got off to a slow start offensively against the Titans, held back by Richardson’s inconsistency on the first two series of the game and a costly red-zone interception.
Steichen called runs on the next 12 plays.
After the game, the Indianapolis head coach said the devotion to the run had little to do with Richardson’s interception and lots to do with the way the Colts started gashing Tennessee.
“We just started popping them,” Steichen said. “When something’s working, you’re not going to get away from it.”
That’s not always true.
A lot of NFL coaches remain committed to the passing game, even when the running game is working. The reasons are obvious: Throwing produces more yards than running on a per-play basis, and that leads to more points.
Steichen is typically one of those coaches. When he was hired in Indianapolis, Steichen described his philosophy as “Throw to score, run to win,” and he’s largely stuck to that philosophy, often throwing early in games.
Sunday was different.
A Titans run defense that has been solid this season — the Titans entered Sunday’s game ranked sixth in the NFL in yards allowed per carry (4.1) and 12th in yards per game (115.2) — had no answers for the Colts running game.
“I think it’s one of those things where you have to give (Steichen) that confidence,” Colts center Ryan Kelly said. “You can’t keep sticking with the runs if they’re not working. … It takes a lot to stick with us and run it like that, especially when I think his ideal thing is to air the ball out a little bit.”
There have been a few games where Steichen has gotten away from the running game this season, most notably a 16-10 loss to the Packers where Taylor had just 12 carries, his second-lowest total of the season, and a tendency in the first half of the season to limit Richardson’s designed runs.
He has leaned into the running game hard as the season progressed.
Taylor is averaging 19.8 carries per game in the 12 games he’s played; Richardson is now up to 7.8 carries per game, the number rising as the season progresses. There have been games where Steichen has probably leaned on the running game too much, notably giving Taylor 24 carries on a day when he picked up 57 yards against the Jets.
The key to Steichen’s philosophy is simple.
“The way Shane calls a game, if something works, he’s going to keep on calling it,” Alie-Cox said. ““I think we probably ran out of run plays.”
After a midseason lull when teams started focusing on Taylor, the Colts have rebounded by diversifying the running game, scheming up ways to get their breakaway threat into the open.
“You keep wearing on them, you keep pressing them, and then some of those plays, it wasn’t a power run, it wasn’t a zone run,” Kelly said. “It was a schemed run where Mo has to do his job, (Drew Ogletree) has to do his job, everybody’s got to seal the block exactly perfectly to get that lane, and then J.T.’s vision to see it, his patience to hold off until it opens up and make a guy miss on the back end, it’s a beautiful thing.”
The Colts now have the running game they hoped when they paired Richardson and Taylor together.
In the 10 games they’ve played together, Indianapolis is averaging 150.5 rushing yards per game and nearly five yards per carry, otherworldly numbers that would rank among the best in the NFL over a full season.
A 335-yard performance will help those numbers.
But there’s a harsh reality behind Sunday’s eye-popping statistics. The Colts can run the ball, but they are not going to rush for a franchise record in every game. Richardson has to be able to provide a better complement as a thrower for the offense to fully take advantage of the running game Richardson and Taylor provide.
There will be games when a good defense makes life a little harder on the running game, refuses to give up the big play to Taylor, forces Indianapolis into more third-and-long situations.
Richardson still has to prove he can make throws in those games.
What Sunday’s game proves is that the Colts offense is capable of dominating the line of scrimmage in a way rarely seen in the modern NFL, and that Steichen will put the game on Taylor’s legs if the Colts are steamrolling their opponent.
Taylor can still take over a game.
“I know he’s been looking to have one of these type of games all year,” Richardson said.
Even when the defense knows what’s coming.
