NFL
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He’s the epitome of understated, with a public persona that screams accountant more than NFL quarterback. Probe his teammates for something interesting about him, something revealing, something that proves he’s more than a robot who happens to play football, and you get a lot of pursed lips, tilted heads and long silences.
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Even Daniel Jones owns up to it.
“I don’t really do much besides this stuff,” he says.
This stuff would be piloting the NFL’s most efficient offense through six weeks, a year after the Giants cast Jones aside and he ended the season buried on the Vikings’ depth chart, running the scout-team offense. Even this summer, Jones was an afterthought everywhere except for the Indianapolis Colts’ own building, overshadowed by the outsized talent and endless intrigue of Anthony Richardson, Jones’ competition for the starting job.
It was a job the vast majority of the fan base desperately wanted Richardson to win.
Courting the spotlight has never been Jones’ thing. One year in New York, after his season had ended with a torn ACL in his right knee, Jones agreed to meet his old offensive coordinator, Jason Garrett, in the city for dinner. The QB showed up a few minutes late.
“I’m so pissed,” Jones said.
Then he explained. He typically jogged from his place in Hoboken, N.J., and took the ferry across the Hudson River, then rented an e-bike and pedaled into the city. But due to his injured knee, Jones couldn’t jog. He missed the ferry and had to settle for an Uber.
“These days you’ve got all these NFL stars who won’t go anywhere without their bodyguards,” Garrett says. “And this guy rides a city bike on the West Side Highway. That’s about the most Daniel Jones thing I can think of.”
At one point during dinner, Garrett had to ask: Anybody ever recognize you when you’re on the bike?
“Oh yeah,” Jones said. “I get plenty of double-takes.”
He arrived in Indianapolis with little fanfare, then quietly began to win over coaches and teammates with the habits he’d built in New York. Back then, every Friday night was the same: after a plate of Bolognese pasta, Jones would call up his offensive coordinator and run through the entire play sheet.
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Jones has gotten better over the years, he says, at knowing what to study and what answers to seek out. In Indy, his teammates have started ribbing him for being tardy to group dinners. Jones’ excuse: he’s usually still at the team facility, poring through film.
It was in Saturday night’s quarterback meeting, 16 hours before the Colts hosted the Cardinals, that Jones asked a few specific cut-ups be played on the screen. “Hey, let’s pull up Carolina No. 42,” he said. “And Carolina No. 38.” They were looks the Cardinals’ defense showed the Panthers during a Week 2 game a month earlier. “Let’s make sure we’re good on this,” Jones told the room.
It’s that obsession, that hunt for the little details that can swing a game, that has made this marriage with coach and play-caller Shane Steichen work so well. Steichen is a former quarterback himself, the teenager who’d ditch parties in high school so he could sneak into the stadium and throw to his receivers. The coach is all ball, all the time, with little room — or interest — in much else.
“That’s what you want at that position,” Steichen says. “When you’re preparing like the way he does, you don’t blink.”
Jones hasn’t. The Colts haven’t. They’re 5-1, leading the league in scoring and leading a division they haven’t won in over a decade. The 194 points the Colts have put up are the most in club history through six games, which is saying something when there’s a bronze statue of Peyton Manning outside the stadium.
Go figure: a wounded franchise’s missing piece turned out to be a quarterback who, 11 months ago, found himself at the low point of his professional career.
It was about the same time that the dam started to break in Indianapolis, after Richardson tapped out of a divisional road game because, he would later admit, he was “tired.” For the next 10 weeks, the Colts were a soap opera. A few veterans felt the need to meet with Richardson privately and urge him to take the job more seriously. Others vented publicly, calling out the team’s effort, urgency and focus. The end was so familiar — a fourth straight winter without a playoff berth — that one longtime starter directed his blame at the top. “There’s no vision,” he said.
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Privately, those words stung Chris Ballard. They pissed him off, too. But his team’s listless finish to another disappointing season also forced the longtime general manager to realize something: He’d grown stubborn and hard-headed, convinced his approach would prove him right over time. Eight years in, it hadn’t. It was time to do things differently.
In a fiery season-ending news conference, Ballard vowed to be more aggressive in free agency. He was. He also promised a legitimate quarterback competition in training camp. If Richardson wanted to keep his job, Ballard said, he’d have to earn it. Plenty around the league remained skeptical, to say nothing of the fan base. Were the Colts really going to sideline the fourth pick in the draft three years into his career?
That Ballard handed Jones a one-year, $14 million deal in free agency said something. It wasn’t backup QB money. It wasn’t starter money, either. It was open-competition money. Lodged in Ballard’s mind were some of his narrow misses in free agency over the years, namely edge rusher Danielle Hunter, who signed with the rival Texans in 2024 after the Colts chased him hard. With Jones, Ballard wanted to make certain he didn’t come in second.
What helped sell him on the quarterback were long conversations with two Colts’ assistants, offensive line coach Tony Sparano Jr. and new passing game coordinator Alex Tanney, both of whom had spent time with Jones in New York. They raved about his approach. They vouched for his character. Ballard knew Steichen would grow to love Jones’ no-nonsense style. No one in the building would need to ask him to work harder.
Then Jones went out and won the job, and most of the fan base fumed. Ballard heard it. He knew the narrative taking shape: that Jones was the wrong choice, that Jones would fail, same as he had in New York. Ballard spent the bulk of his season-opening news conference trying to shift the conversation, growing defensive at times. He didn’t want the season to be about the quarterback who wasn’t playing. He wanted it to be about the one who was.
Meanwhile, the players were starting to buy in. Jones, along with wideout Michael Pittman Jr., had organized a private week of work in California before training camp, footing a good chunk of the bill. Pro Bowl left guard Quenton Nelson, as well-versed in the Colts’ quarterback carousel as any player on the roster, felt the momentum start to build during camp. “We’re having more good days on offense than we used to,” he told himself at one point. “This is starting to click.”
Wideout Alec Pierce credits some rugged practices. Steichen introduced more live sessions this summer, including a few that were completely unscripted. In other words: forget the practice plan, let’s play football. The coaches were forced to dial up play calls in real time, same as they do on Sundays. “So you’ve got the players competing and the coaches competing,” Pierce explains. “That was different. That was good for us.”
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There was also the stain of last season.
“Every person had their own battle that they fought and lost in their own way,” says linebacker Zaire Franklin, whose mouth wrote checks the Colts’ defense couldn’t cash in 2024. “Everybody was like, ‘Alright, you know what? Let’s start fresh.”
From there, Franklin lists players old and new — himself, Kenny Moore II, DeForest Buckner, Jones. He adds in new defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo, who’s revitalized a leaky unit, and new owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon, who took control of the team after her father passed away in May. In some ways, it’s felt like a new era for this franchise.
So what exactly is different, other than the quarterback? What’s clicking that never seemed to in the past?
The linebacker smiles, then shakes his head.
“Honestly,” Franklin says, “we just got a group of guys who been here for a while and got tired of losing.”
As it turns out, Daniel Jones does have at least one hobby away from football. He and Pierce battled on the golf course all summer.
Still, it’s mostly ball: during his off time, Jones made the trek to Princeton, N.J. to help Garrett run his football camp, an event he hasn’t missed since the two first met in New York in 2020.
Garrett, head coach of the Cowboys from 2010-2019, the Giants’ OC from 2020-21 and now an analyst for NBC’s “Football Night in America,” had an inkling back in August that his old quarterback had found the right fit. He spent a day with Jones during training camp, watching film with him and gauging Jones’ comfort level with a new city and a new coach and a new offense. “He needed a clean slate,” Garrett says. “The image we all have of Daniel in New York is him running for his life.”
It’s been different in Indianapolis: Six weeks in, the Colts have yielded the fewest sacks in the league. Jonathan Taylor leads the NFL in rushing. Tyler Warren, just a rookie, might already be one of the best tight ends in football. And with a bevy of capable pass-catchers, like Pittman, Pierce and slot receiver Josh Downs, Jones is feasting. The Colts’ offense ranks first in points per game, first in yards per play and first in offensive success rate. More than 61 percent of their drives are ending with points.
It’s the attack Steichen envisioned when he took over: Throw to score, run to win.
The league’s taken notice. So have some of Jones’ old teammates.
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“Outside of the Philadelphia Eagles and myself, I don’t want anyone else to perform at a high level besides Daniel Jones,” Saquon Barkley told CBS Sports in September.
“Look, I know this much: Saquon and all his old teammates, they still love him,” Garrett says. “They’d run through a wall for Daniel because he sets the example for the entire building. He’s the hardest-working guy in the weight room. He’s out front on all the wind sprints, all that type of stuff. He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever been around in my playing and coaching career.”
Maybe Jones simply needed a clean slate to revive his career. Maybe the Colts’ hot start fades as the season inches into November and December. Maybe all of this is fool’s gold: After all, Indy’s five wins have come against teams a combined 10 games below .500.
Garrett knows his old quarterback won’t be any different if things go south. The texts he gets from Jones after wins and losses are identical, and just as vanilla as you’d expect: “Thanks coach. Gotta keep grinding. Gotta keep pushing. Gotta get better.”
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Zak Keefer is a senior writer at The Athletic, focusing on the NFL. He previously covered the Indianapolis Colts for nine seasons, winning the Pro Football Writers of America’s 2020 Bob Oates Award for beat writing. He wrote and narrated the six-part podcast series “Luck,” and is an adjunct professor of journalism at Indiana University. Follow Zak on Twitter @zkeefer
