Coming into Week 1, much of the attention was on how this Colts’ secondary was going to hold up against the Texans’ receivers. However, at the end of the day, it was the Houston run game that caused the Colts the most fits.
As a team, the Texans finished the game rushing for 213 total yards. Leading the way was running back Joe Mixon, who was acquired via a trade from Cincinnati during the offseason, totaling 159 rushing yards at over 5.0 yards per rush.
According to Colts.com, this was the first time that the Colts allowed a rusher to eclipse the 150-yard mark in the last 56 games.
“They did a great job rushing the ball today,” DeForest Buckner said. “As a D-line, we gotta do a better job with getting off blocks, obviously, not having too many busts when we’re blitzing or whatever it is. We kind of beat ourselves.”
That success on the ground for the Texans had a positive trickle-down effect to the rest of their offense. Steady gains on early downs create short down-and-distance situations where the entire playbook is open for the offense, forcing the defense to defend the entire field, which can then help open up opportunities in the passing game.
Or in short, it becomes much easier for an offense to keep a defense off-balanced and guessing when they have to defend both the run and the pass–putting an additional strain on a secondary that doesn’t need that.
The other advantage a strong run game can create is the ability to string together long drives. When it was all said and done, the Texans held the ball for 40 minutes compared to the Colts’ offense having possession for just 20 minutes.
This led to a huge discrepancy in number of plays ran, with 76 for the Texans to the Colts’ 43, and can certainly wear a defense down.
Houston was able to take advantage when Grover Stewart wasn’t on the field, which did also happen at times last season. However, with how heavily the Colts have invested into the defensive front, even with the addition of Mixon for the Texans, I’m not sure anyone saw this performance coming from the Indianapolis defense.