When Indianapolis Colts general manager Chris Ballard pulled the trigger on the most ambitious trade package he'd ever gone through to make star cornerback Sauce Gardner a Colt, it was viewed as the all-in move to get the Colts to true Super Bowl contention. Since that trade went through, the Colts have instead gone through a nightmarish midseason collapse.
Unfortunately, the team now looks far more likely to miss the playoffs than sniff anything close to a Super Bowl. That fact is not all due to Sauce, but it does make the hefty compensation that Indy forked over to get him on the team hurt all the more.
Even at the time the trade went through, many were calling it an overpay. Even Colts fans themselves acknowledged that two first-round picks were probably too rich for a cornerback who isn't solidly the best in the league, even if, when Gardner is at his best, he's in that conversation.
However, given everything that's gone down since the deal, it's gone from an acceptable overpay to nothing short of an utter catastrophe.
Blockbuster Colts Sauce Gardner trade now looks catastrophic in hindsight
Was this a flashy move? Yes. Was it the right move? No. When it happened, it seemed reasonable. But that was back when the Colts were the number one seed in the entire AFC. Fans could console themselves by saying that the first-round picks were going to be late selections anyway, and they could look at it as paying a premium to get elite talent now on what looked to be a Super Bowl-contending squad.
Now, the team is anything but a Super Bowl contender. The man who seemed to be the franchise's savior at one point, quarterback Daniel Jones, has now gone from fractured fibula to torn Achilles. Jones will miss all of this year and could very easily miss a good chunk of the 2026 season.
The days when the biggest worries that the Colts had about Jones were how they were going to pay him enough money to keep him in Indianapolis are now long past.
Not only is the quarterback situation again a complete unknown for the umpteenth time since franchise quarterback Andrew Luck's retirement, but the rest of the roster is falling apart as well. Gardner is injured for the foreseeable future, and Charvarius Ward is entering concussion protocol for the third time this year.
Not only that, but injuries across the offensive and defensive lines, once the strengths of the team, are stacking up. Both Braden Smith and Deforest Buckner are currently injured, and the Colts are coming up against one of the toughest stretches of schedule that a team could face to end the year.
The Colts will finish the year playing the Seahawks, 49ers, Jaguars again, and end with the Texans. Can they really be expected to beat any of those teams with Riley Leonard or a 44-year-old Phillip Rivers manning the ship? It's entirely possible that this Colts team, the same one that once looked so dominant, will finish the year with a losing record.
The trade for Sauce Gardner is not the only reason for this historic Indianapolis collapse, but it certainly exacerbates just how difficult this hole will be for the Colts to climb out of.
They have a roster that's now filled with gaping holes, and clearly are not in Super Bowl contention. It's going to be tough to fix the construction of the roster when the team doesn't have its first-round pick for the next two drafts.