Before Chris Ballard became the Colts’ General Manager, he admired quarterback Andrew Luck from a distance and things haven’t changed with his new proximity.
Ballard said it is “really special” to see how much Luck cares about his teammates and the team’s success, something that waned over the last two years under former G.M. Ryan Grigson. Even in the first three years when the Colts were making the playoffs, Grigson was criticized for not finding the right talent to complement the quarterback and Ballard said that he’s committed to changing that.
“Everybody knows how hard that position is to find,” Ballard said, via Albert Breer of TheMMQB.com. “When you have a guy with special talent at the position and he’s got special character on top of it, that’s a pretty good thing. But the one big thing I’ve made a point of here, it’s not just Andrew. We’ve got to have the best 53-man roster, and that includes Andrew. That’s how we’ll help him, by making the roster around him better both offensively and defensively. That’s what we’re gonna do. It can’t be just about Andrew.”
Ballard identified the defensive front seven as a place in need of improvement and went with a volume approach to addressing it by signing Johnathan Hankins, Jabaal Sheard, John Simon, Sean Spence, Barkavious Mingo, Al Woods and Margus Hunt as free agents before drafting three more players in the front seven. If that group can gel over the next few months, the Colts should be putting a better defense on the field than they’ve had the last couple of years and that would make for an encouraging start to Ballard’s run in Indy.