2017 IDP Projection Marking: Indianapolis Colts

Tom Kislingbury Posted On January 24, 2018

Hi everyone and welcome to the fantasy off-season. It was a wild ride in 2017 and I’m still recovering, but there’s no real off-season in the dynasty world. In the summer I made projections for every IDP in the league I thought would be relevant. You can go back and read all of the 2017 IDP Projections here.

I was right in some places. I was wrong in some places. But either way, it’s important to be accountable and honest so I can figure out why and make adjustments in the future. I’ll be going through every team and noting where I was right and where I was wrong. To do that I’ll show what my projections were, how players actually performed, and how big the discrepancies were.

There are no two ways about it: the Colts were horrible in 2017. The Andrew Luck injury didn’t help, but basically, everything went badly. They played a ton of rookies on the offensive line, every corner got hurt, they were simply bad at linebacker, Malik Hooker got hurt, the receivers were uneven. It was just bad.
Fortunately, it’s one of the best teams for me in terms of accuracy. So I’m pretty happy with the team.

ind team

Defensive Tackle

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I’ll take three good results from three here. Just look at the tackle numbers. With Johnathan Hankins, I was four solos under and bang on for assists. I was bang on for solos and six under for assists with Al Woods. And with Grover Stewart, I was four solos and two assists under.

I was also accurate to within a single sack on all players and had two batted passes bang on.

Defensive End

I’m really sad with myself that I was so close with Henry Anderson. I love him as a player based on the flashes we saw as a rookie. But at this stage, it just seems he’s never going to fulfill that promise due to injuries. I am sad. For the record, I was one solo, four assists, and one sack out.

I was close but had some errors on Hassan Ridgeway and Margus Hunt. Neither were really IDP relevant anyway.

Linebacker

This was another great position group for me here, starting with Antonio Morrison. Remarkably, I was bang on with his 64 solos and 44 assists. I did predict he’d manage three sacks (he didn’t get any), seven PDs (he had one) and two interceptions (none) but I don’t care. Bang on for his tackle numbers!

The second LB was Jon Bostic. This was super close on tackles here too – I was just two solos and two assists over. I was also closer on sacks (one out), PDs (three out) and interceptions (two out) than with Morrison.

I wish it had been Sean Spence managing to hoover these stats up as I thought in the summer, but I’m really happy here.

Outside linebacker

Jabaal Sheard was one of the few bright spots on this defense and I was okay with him. I ended up one solo over, nine assists over, three sacks over and bang on on PDs.

John Simon missed some significant time during the season, but I was fairly close again. He underdelivered against sacks but it wasn’t a hideous projection.

Cornerback

I wasn’t great here but the whole position group was just a disaster zone. No Colts corner this season managed to play more than 552 snaps (Rashaan Melvin). Five separate players managed more than 300 snaps but fewer than 500. It was just a continual struggle to get healthy players lined up.

I could pick out some good results but honestly, it was just random given the injury concerns.

Safety

Hands up – I was actually pretty bad here. And my numbers just look weird. I had Matthias Farley down for 922 snaps but bizarrely just 25 solos and 14 assists. That looks silly now and I’ll make a big adjustment going into 2018. Fortunately, I managed to grab a few shares and he did very well for me. But it was a bad prediction.

At the other starting spot, I had some very optimistic numbers for Malik Hooker. He was hurt early, but was on pace for nowhere near the 46 solos and 18 assists I said.

In summary

Defensive back was an issue here. Corner was all over the place due to injury and I was way off at safety. However, I am super happy with the linebackers and linemen. Being out by just two solos and two assists on both starting LBs is amazingly good.

There’ll be an entirely new coaching staff in place in 2018, and we should see a good injection of talent given the Colts draft capital. But we’ve seen the Colts try and rebuild before. I just hope they manage to find some help at corner and can step up to viable levels.

Thanks for reading.

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Tom Kislingbury

Contributor at Dynasty League Football

Being from England Tom only discovered American Football in the late 90s. From there he's gone from casual defender to devoted obsessive and likes to delve into deep data primarily about defensive players. He spends his days trying to pretend the spreadsheets and graphs he makes about football are actually work for his day job. No-one is fooled.

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