Indianapolis Colts’ fans haven’t had all that much to cheer about since Andrew Luck’s surprise retirement after the 2018 season. One of the more pleasant stories in those drab days concerned Will Fries.
Fries was selected in the seventh round of the 2021 draft. The end of the seventh round, just ten spots away from being Mr. Irrelevant. The last of 13 guards taken that year. Nonetheless, Fries was starting at right guard by his second season and was firmly entrenched by his third. He did it with hard work, toughness, and smarts. It was the kind of make-good story everyone loves.
When he got hurt in 2024, it put both the player and the team in a bit of a bind. Fries’s rookie contract was up. He was scheduled to be a free agent. What would the market be? A steady young guard on the rise. An injury. Could Chris Ballard afford to re-sign him? That’s the standard blueprint, isn’t it? Identify a quality player in the draft, develop him, and lock him up long term. Then repeat the process at another position.
Matt Goncalves is making Indianapolis Colts’ fans forget all about Will Fries
In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 season, many publications urged Ballard to make retaining Fries a priority. Many fans agreed. Sign him, and the team is set at guard for the foreseeable future. But it soon became clear that despite his injury, the price tag for Fries was going to be high. Ballard had a tough decision.
In hindsight, two things probably impacted what the GM chose to do. The first was the reality of roster construction in the salary cap era. The second was the presence of Matt Goncalves.
The Colts were already paying left guard Quenton Nelson commensurate with what a future Hall of Famer still in his prime deserves. Shelling out major dollars to the right guard would throw the roster balance out of whack. Few teams can afford to have so much of their cap space devoted to two interior linemen.
Ballard needed to extend left tackle Bernhard Raimann, and that was going to be very difficult if he was to equal the market price for Fries. Minnesota ended up signing Fries to a five-year, $87 million deal, roughly half of which was guaranteed. Though bonuses reduce his cap hit this season to a little under six million, it will balloon in subsequent years into the $20 million range.
Meanwhile, Matt Goncalves was about to enter his second year. The 2024 third-round pick out of Pittsburgh still had three years left on a rookie contract that owed him a little over a million dollars per season. Clearly, he was a better bargain. The question was, could he play?
Goncalves entered the league as a tackle. In his rookie year, that’s where he took his snaps. When Fries went down last year, another rookie – UDFA Dalton Tucker – picked up some of the slack. Late in the season, the team brought Mark Glowinski back to town to provide some veteran play. But neither Glowinski nor Tucker looked like a viable option to start in 2025.
A plan emerged to shift Goncalves inside to right guard. Shifting a college tackle to guard is fairly common in today’s NFL. The Cowboys' Tyler Smith made the transition and then made the Pro Bowl. One of the veterans Ballard was urged to sign this offseason – the since-retired Brandon Scherff – was a college tackle who became an All-Pro guard in the NFL.
So far, the move has worked even better than most fans could have hoped. Despite a relatively poor game against Arizona in Week 6, Goncalves currently grades out as the 24th-best guard in the league, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required). That has him ranked ahead of the aforementioned Tyler Smith as well as Carolina’s Robert Hunt – both Pro Bowlers in 2024.
Even more significantly, he is ranked twelve spots ahead of Will Fries.
PFF rankings are not perfect. Matt Goncalves, rankings aside, may not be better than Will Fries. But that ranking, combined with the eye test, is a pretty good indicator of the fact that Ballard made the right decision. Goncalves is pairing with Nelson (second in the PFF rankings) to give Indianapolis one of the best guard tandems in the league.
And at just 24 years old, he has nowhere to go but up.