The Colts Scored Like Contenders. The Model Has Questions.

Fantasy football has a very simple relationship with last season.

If something good happened, we assume it will happen again.

If something bad happened, we produce a 900-word explanation for why it was actually caused by weather, injuries, coaching, Mercury being in retrograde, or one offensive lineman we had never heard of until Tuesday.

The 2025 Colts require both skills.

Indianapolis started 8–2 with what the team itself described as the NFL's best offense and a +115 point differential.

Then the Colts lost seven straight games and missed the playoffs.

Same team.

Same season.

Somehow.

They still finished averaging 27.4 points per game, eighth in the NFL.

AutoDraftYears projects 22.0 in 2026.

A decline of 5.4 points per game.

So the real question isn't whether the 2025 Colts offense was good.

It was.

It's:

Which part of 2025 are we actually paying for in fantasy drafts?

2025 Was Basically Two Separate Seasons

For ten games, Indianapolis looked like one of the biggest surprises in football.

Daniel Jones arrived after his Giants career had gone somewhere between disappointing and witness protection and immediately played the best football of his career.

Before his season ended, Jones completed 68% of his passes, averaged 8.1 yards per attempt and posted a 100.2 passer rating — all career highs.

Jonathan Taylor looked like Jonathan Taylor again, except angrier.

He rushed for 1,585 yards and 18 touchdowns and led the NFL with 20 total touchdowns.

Rookie tight end Tyler Warren immediately became a major part of the offense, catching 76 passes for 817 yards, a Colts rookie tight-end record.

Alec Pierce produced his first 1,000-yard season and led the NFL in yards per reception for the second consecutive year, finishing at 21.3 yards per catch.

This was not one running back dragging a broken offense around Indianapolis like a carry-on bag with a bad wheel.

The offense was working.

Then the quarterback situation became a medical documentary.

Jones began dealing with a fibula injury around Week 12 and played through it before tearing his Achilles in Week 14. Anthony Richardson was already on injured reserve after suffering an eye injury in pregame warmups earlier in the season.

The Colts eventually brought Philip Rivers out of retirement to start three games before rookie Riley Leonard started Week 18.

There are normal quarterback-depth-chart problems.

Then there is calling Philip Rivers.

Indianapolis went from 8–2 to 8–9.

That matters when looking at the final scoring number.

The Colts really did average 27.4 points.

But that average is doing some aggressive marriage counseling between two very different versions of the offense.

The Model Doesn't Expect the First Version Back

AutoDraftYears projects Indianapolis to score 22.0 points per game in 2026, down from 27.4.

That would move the Colts from seventh in the model's 2025 scoring measure to 23rd.

The recent history makes that less outrageous than it initially sounds.

The five-year average is 23.3.

So 22.0 is not a prediction that the offense falls apart.

It is basically a prediction that Indianapolis returns to the neighborhood it lived in before Daniel Jones briefly turned Lucas Oil Stadium into Greatest Show on Turf cosplay.

And the forecast does not expect some dramatic philosophical change.

Pass rate moves from 55.3% to 55.0%.

Snaps actually rise from 58.2 to 61.2 per game.

The Colts are projected to run more plays and throw at roughly the same rate.

They're just expected to score fewer points with them.

That's the regression.

Jonathan Taylor Is Holding Up the Property Value

The positional environments make the model's opinion fairly obvious.

Running back: good.

Everyone else: perhaps browse nearby neighborhoods.

It is one of the widest internal splits in these team projections. Indianapolis has a top-10 RB environment surrounded by three positions ranked 28th.

Which explains why this is not really a Jonathan Taylor fade article.

It's about everyone behind him.

Comparable offenses to the Colts' projected 22.0 PPG, 55.0% pass rate, 61.2 snaps and 3.3 red-zone trips produced 2.7 fantasy starters on average.

The league-wide average across the full 320-team-season sample is 2.6.

So Indianapolis is not a fantasy wasteland.

There should be useful players.

We just shouldn't assume there will be useful players everywhere.

The Market Is Not Particularly Excited Either

At the team level, the market and model mostly agree.

Market roster rank: 29th.

Model roster rank: 28th.

One spot apart.

That's comfortably inside the eight-place threshold I use for meaningful team-level disagreement.

Nobody is secretly sleeping on Indianapolis.

The interesting part is how the market distributes its limited optimism.

Market and Model are ranks within the position. Edge is the model's position rank against the market's, after removing the drift that affects every player at that price — so it reads as “the model likes him this many places more than it likes the typical player who costs this much.” A call needs the edge to clear the position's bar (QB 5, RB 15, WR 11, TE 5 places), set at two-thirds of that position's own spread.

No buys.

One actual fade.

Jonathan Taylor Can Ignore Most of This

Taylor goes around pick 8 as RB4.

The model ranks him RB5, projects 19 PPG and gives him an 86 Role Score.

Basically:

Yes, Jonathan Taylor remains Jonathan Taylor.

His 2025 workload and production certainly support that interpretation. He handled 323 carries, rushed for 1,585 yards and scored 18 times on the ground.

More importantly, Indianapolis owns the 10th-ranked RB environment despite grading 28th everywhere else.

So if you want Taylor in the first round, the team-level regression case does not talk me out of him.

You're buying the renovated unit.

Tyler Warren Is Where Price Starts to Matter

Warren's rookie season makes this uncomfortable.

Because he was good.

Seventy-six catches and 817 yards as a rookie tight end is not something I want to wave away because a spreadsheet has concerns.

His model profile is strong too:

Role Score: 82.

Risk: Low.

Model rank: TE7.

The problem is that he costs TE4.

Inside the 28th-ranked TE environment.

That's not enough for a fade. His adjusted edge is only -3.

But once we're paying TE4 prices, “this player is talented” is no longer the entire conversation.

Everyone in this part of the draft is talented.

Now we need the price to cooperate too.

I like Warren.

I am less excited about paying as though the 2025 offensive ceiling is simply coming back.

Alec Pierce Is the Player I Would Actually Move

And this is where the data ruined a perfectly good football story.

Pierce was excellent in 2025.

He caught 47 passes for 1,003 yards and six touchdowns. He averaged an absurd 21.3 yards per reception and became the first player since Flipper Anderson in 1989–90 to average at least 20 yards per catch on 35-plus receptions in consecutive seasons.

I would very much enjoy telling you that means WR39 is cheap.

The model would like me to stop.

Market: WR39.

Model: WR61.

Adjusted edge: -20.

That's well past the WR fade threshold of -11.

His Role Score is 68.

The receiver environment ranks 28th.

This is exactly the kind of player fantasy managers talk themselves into because the previous season is sitting right there.

A thousand yards!

Six touchdowns!

Twenty-one yards per catch!

Yes.

Those things happened.

The question is what we are paying for them to happen again.

At WR39, apparently quite a bit.

Deep-ball production is wonderful when you're getting it cheaply.

It becomes slightly more stressful when the bill arrives.

Josh Downs Is Boring in a Useful Way

Downs is almost perfectly priced.

Market: WR44.

Model: WR42.

Adjusted edge: -2.

Nothing to see here.

Same bad WR environment.

Very different conclusion.

That's important.

A poor team environment does not automatically make a player a fade.

A poor environment plus an optimistic price does.

The market has already made most of the adjustment with Downs.

The model doesn't believe it has done enough with Pierce.

Indianapolis also added Keenan Allen this offseason, and the board has him at WR92 in the market against WR53 in the model — a thin enough price that he never has to be a headline. He is another mouth in a 28th-ranked receiver room, which is mostly an argument against paying up for anyone in it.

What Should Fantasy Managers Actually Do?

Don't treat Indianapolis' 27.4 points per game as the baseline.

But don't dismiss it as fake either.

The Colts showed us for ten games that this combination of Jones, Taylor, Steichen and the surrounding skill talent can work at a very high level.

Then injuries turned the quarterback room into an alumni event.

The model is simply refusing to pay for the best ten-game version repeating itself.

That leads me to three different decisions.

Jonathan Taylor: pay the price. His role and positional environment survive the team regression.

Tyler Warren: draftable, but TE4 is rich enough that I won't chase him.

Alec Pierce: this is where I change my board. WR39 versus WR61 is too much optimism inside the 28th-ranked WR environment.

And Downs?

Fine.

Sometimes fantasy analysis reaches the thrilling conclusion that a player costs approximately what he should cost.

We persevere.

What Could Make This Wrong?

Daniel Jones could make the model look foolish.

His 2025 performance before the injuries was legitimately good, not merely fortunate-looking box-score production. He finished third among qualifying quarterbacks in yards per attempt and sixth in passer rating.

And his Achilles recovery progressed far enough for him to be a full participant when Indianapolis opened 2026 training camp.

If healthy Jones looks like early-2025 Jones, 22.0 PPG may be too pessimistic.

The number I would watch early is red-zone trips.

Indianapolis falls from 3.9 per game in 2025 to 3.3 in the model forecast.

If the Colts continue getting near the goal line four times every Sunday, there will be more fantasy production available than this projection expects.

If that number falls toward 3.3?

Then the secondary pieces become much harder to support.

Last season taught us the Colts can score.

It also taught us that six weeks is more than enough time for an NFL season to turn into Philip Rivers warming up on the sideline.

Fantasy football remains a stable and sensible hobby.

Sources: Auto Draft Years FF Model workbook — Team Data By Year, Team Stat Ranking, 2026 Team Context; Auto Draft Years 2026 consensus board (16 authoritative market sources); Player outcomes 2016–2025, Pro Football Reference via the project dataset. Team environment grades, forecasts and player model ranks are proprietary. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time; none is typed in by hand.