Most National Football League teams will have stretches in their regular seasons where they have trouble and those that reap victories. Each year a handful of teams will break this pattern and win all year long, and a few lose the entire campaign.
There are a number of factors that contribute to this pattern. First, teams are always striving to get better, to win, and those that think some teams will tank a season to get a better draft choice have probably never been in a locker room. Sometimes, in this quest to get better, teams look to improve their long-term chances by inserting younger players that they hope will feed future success.
The Las Vegas Raiders are in that process right now.
Does that mean they have a better chance of winning down the stretch of this season? It has been horrible for Pete Carroll in his first year with the Silver and Black, and after winning on opening day over the New England Patriots, I understand there is a congressional hearing to figure out how that happened, the Raiders have won only one more time while losing ten games. Their win came over the dreadful Tennessee Titans.
While the Raiders are one of those few teams that don’t appear to have any good side of their season, the Indianapolis Colts fall right into the crosshairs of a team that may have already finished with their best part of the 2025 season. Indianapolis shot out of the gate with eight wins in their first ten games with their only two setbacks over the first half of the season suffered when turnovers played a key role in losses to the Los Angeles Rams and Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Colts success was driven by quarterback Daniel Jones; he was enjoying a Sam Darnold kind of season. That is, after years of mediocrity hitting stride and looking like a franchise QB. Last year, Darnold did it with the Vikings and led them to the playoffs with 14 regular season wins. This year, Jones was off to a similar success rate only to stumble the past couple weeks with losses to the Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans.
The past two weeks the team that leads the league in scoring has tallied only 20 and 16 points in their setbacks against the Chiefs and Texans. Is there a reason that a team that had averaged 32 points a game for ten weeks has now been held to 20 or less points the past two Sundays?
Well, in addition to the pattern of most teams having good and bad parts of their seasons, the Colts have one more problem, their quarterback has a broken leg. Jones is suffering from a fractured fibula which would send you or I to bed looking for sympathy. Not him, or Jack Youngblood, who as a member of the Los Angeles Rams in 1979 fractured his fibula in the first round of the playoffs and yet played on the bum leg all the way to the Super Bowl.
Manly kind of stuff
Now, how bad Jones’ fracture is, is open for debate. It seems he injured it earlier in the season, but it was not reported as a fracture until last week. But, if results be our guide, I would say the injury is affecting his play at a very inopportune time for the Colts prospects this year.
Their hold on the AFC South Division has melted away with their recent two losses and this week they travel to Jacksonville to meet a Jaguars team on a roll that they currently are tied with in the standings.
So, teams most often have good parts of their seasons and struggle in others. What we have this week is one team struggling, the Colts, and their opponents on a roll, the Jaguars.
Go with the roll.
Qoxhi Picks: Jacksonville Jaguars (+2) over Indianapolis Colts