Hopefully, Indianapolis Colts fans get more beautiful touchdown celebrations like this often on Thursday night when they travel to face the Houston Texans.
Last week, the Colts offense took off and was able to get back to running the football. Indianapolis racked up 264 rushing yards on the day, and that’s after losing running back Marlon Mack early in the second half with a hand injury.
Week 7 against the Texans was a strong showing from the Colts’ passing offense. Jacoby Brissett had his best game of the season throwing for 326 yards and four touchdowns. Things are a little bit different this time around.
Let’s take a look at three keys for the offense in this pivotal AFC South matchup:
1. Establish the run
It’s the mantra of the Indianapolis offense: “Run the damn ball.” On the season the Colts have the number four ranked rush offense, averaging 141 yards per game. The last few weeks though, the run offense hasn’t been there. But last week they got back to what they do best.
Against a lowly-ranked Jacksonville Jaguars run defense the Colts were able to run for 264 yards and average 7.3 yards per carry. Good news for Indianapolis, the Houston run defense isn’t any better than the one they saw last Sunday against Jacksonville.
Every since star defensive player J.J. Watt was put on season-ending injured reserve, the Texans run defense has been putrid to say the least. Since the Watt injury, the Texans are allowing 6.61 yards per carry, that’s 31st in the NFL, 32nd is the Jaguars.
2. Score touchdowns in the red-zone
This key is reflective of how good the Texans offense is at scoring touchdowns in the red zone themselves. Not only do the Colts need to hold the Texans to field goals in the red zone, but they must also score touchdowns when they reach the red-zone themselves.
In Week 7, Indianapolis was a perfect 4-4 in the red-zone, while Houston was only 2-5. So while the Colts scored 28 points in the red zone, the Texans only scored 23 points total, and that was the difference in the game.
With the Colts’ lack of big plays and explosiveness to their offense, they must grind out possessions and finish them in the end zone, because they should expect the Texans to do the same on Thursday night.
3. Can they create chunk plays?
As mentioned, this Colts offense isn’t about chunk plays left and right. It is very much a grind-it-out offense that doesn’t take many shots downfield. Could that change Thursday night? We will see.
Both teams are coming in on short rest so the gameplan for both teams should be relatively vanilla—could the Colts take advantage of that?
Good news for Indianapolis as they could get their explosive playmaker back in wide receiver T.Y. Hilton, who has a long history of success in Houston.
The Texans will be coming in short-handed with a few of their secondary guys on the injury report entering the midweek game.
Could the Colts take advantage of the lack of depth in the Texans’ secondary and creat some chunk plays on Thursday night? They will need to in order to ensure a victory.
