While many teams have seen their players decline the option to attend voluntary workouts this offseason, the Indianapolis Colts came to a compromise that resulted in a revision of the schedule.
Instead of going with their intended schedule of three OTA sessions and a mandatory minicamp, the Colts will be holding voluntary workouts for the next two weeks before breaking for summer. It’s a middle ground between everyone getting work in and not having participation at all.
The idea to forgo mandatory minicamp and simply hold two weeks of workouts came from head coach Frank Reich in a collaborative effort with Chris Ballard and the team’s NFLPA representatives Ryan Kelly and Zaire Franklin.
“I thought it was really important rather than just get a week in June or three days in June for the mandatory mini-camp – what could we do, how could we work together to get a little bit more than that? Now we’ve got two weeks. We kind of got with the players, worked together and got this two-week solution that I feel good about,” Reich told reporters on Monday. “In this two weeks we can continue to lay out the vision for who we are as a team – as an offense, defense and special teams – and who we want to be as individual players. Then you can take that to that eight-week off period before training camp. If we get nothing with them or if we only get a couple days it’s hard to get everything communicated that you want.”
So now instead of the Colts going into mid-June before breaking for summer, they will work without pads for the next two weeks at the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center. It won’t be physical. Most of the focus will be on technique, routes vs. air and getting the foundation of alignments built on both sides of the ball.
Reich feels this is the best way to avoid players opting out of voluntary workouts while still getting enough work in to feel confident entering the summer.
“Now we can get on the field, remind them of the fundamentals and technique, do drills, get stuff to put on tape that they can see, talk about where we are going – why we doing this, why we are changing this and get two weeks of that,” Reich said. “Now, they get to that eight-week period, they are reminded of that and now we are ready to go when training camp starts.”
It was also the players who felt strongly about this compromise as the aforementioned Kelly believes there wasn’t a better solution.
“This is the best offer that I saw out of everybody in the NFL,” Kelly said Monday. “I think everybody’s excited to come back in on our terms. You can only work out by yourself or in a different place for so long without seeing the guys you’re going to be spending every day with, so I think it was very important, and everybody’s on board.”
The Colts had near full participation with the exception of a few. Those that didn’t participate are expected to join the team later over the next two weeks.
It might be an unorthodox way of going through the spring workouts, but it seems the Colts found a middle ground between the players’ needs and the necessity of getting work in during the spring.
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