“If you have the ball in your hands, you’re not only carrying yourself and your family, but the whole organization. The entire franchise is in your hands.” – Tom Rathman

INDIANAPOLIS — Twice a week he requires every last one of the Indianapolis Colts’ skill position players to shuffle into a room and hear him preach. The meetings are passionate and purposeful. They are essential.

“Other than his family,” one running back says, “it’s like the most important thing in the world to him. It’s family No. 1, ball security No. 2.”

Tom Rathman would love that statement – “That’s what wins games,” he points out. He doesn’t take the topic lightly; his players won’t, either. On Tuesdays, the team’s venerable running backs coach pores through every single offensive snap from Sunday’s game, culling images of good ball security and bad, showing them on screen for everyone in the room to see. Did you squeeze it on the five points – fingertips, palm, forearm, bicep, ribcage?

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Then on Fridays he dissects every single fumble the coming opponent has forced over the past two seasons. Did you grip it the way I want you to? Body, ball, boundary? This is what they're going to try to do.

He teaches. He screams. He pleads.

It’s typically exhaustive, sometimes tedious, always necessary.

“I wish you could just be in there and hear him talk about it,” says Rathman’s boss, Colts coach Frank Reich. “You feel it when he stands up to talk about it, like, ‘I better pay attention. This guy might come and grab me by the neck and hurt me.’”

That’s Rathman, a throwback with a football name that seems straight out of a football movie. He’s a Nebraska boy who became a Nebraska legend, then a beloved San Francisco 49er and two-time Super Bowl champ. “If you look up NFL fullback in the dictionary,” a former 49ers staffer once said, “you’ll see a picture of Rathbone."

Now he’s an obsessive position coach for these resurgent Indianapolis Colts, tutoring three young backs long on potential but short on experience, stressing to anyone else on the roster who routinely touches the football how incredibly valuable it is.

Hence the meetings. Twice a week. Every week.

The man loathes fumbling the football. Soon enough, his players will too. He will make certain of it.

“They’re probably the most intense meetings ever,” says one of those running backs, rookie Nyheim Hines. “At one point someone put up on the screen one of his trading cards from back in the day. He didn’t have the ball tucked away perfectly, and he looked like he was hurt to his soul because he was showing us bad ball security.”

“That’s when I knew he was crazy about this stuff,” adds another rookie back, Jordan Wilkins.

“I’ve never heard a coach talk about ball security more than him,” chimes in receiver Zach Pascal.

Rathman doesn’t deny he’s fiery. He makes no apologies for it, either. The numbers are obvious but no less telling: Teams that finish +1 in the turnover battle win 67 percent of the time. Teams that finish +2 win more than 81 percent of the time.

“I think you have to be intense,” Rathman says. “There’s a certain way we’re going to carry the football, and that’s how I’m going to coach it.”

In a meeting early on this season, in front of the entire team, Reich pointed to Rathman’s career credentials: nine years in the league, nearly 900 touches, just seven fumbles. To be exact: One fumble every 123 touches. He was the archetypal fullback in the old NFL, a league built on the ground not the air. He carried it. He caught it. He blocked. He won alongside Joe Montana and Jerry Rice and Dwight Clark.

And maybe it all goes back to his first practice in San Francisco, when legendary coach Bill Walsh put it so bluntly after the rookie bobbled the football early in the workout. “If you keep fumbling the ball like that,” Walsh shouted at Rathman, “your (expletive) is gonna go back to Nebraska!”

Rathman heeded the Hall of Fame coach’s words. He fumbled once in his first three seasons.

And when he was done, when it became time to become a coach, he took a cocky kid out of Miami and made him a complete back. Fourteen years later Frank Gore is fourth on the NFL’s all-time rushing list. More than any other coach he’s ever had, Gore singles out Rathman for building him into the most durable back of his generation.

“Sometimes when you make the Pro Bowl early on, you can kind of be cocky,” Gore said last week. “Once he got there, we used to bump heads because I felt like I arrived already. But I think he took my game to another level. ... I think that’s one of the reasons I’m still playing.”

In Indianapolis Rathman currently directs a room that includes Hines (one fumble), Wilkins (two), starter Marlon Mack (none) and reserve Jonathan Williams, who’s yet to see a carry. As an offense, with six giveaways, the Colts rank right in the middle of the league. Rathman isn’t satisfied. Remember: seven fumbles in nine years.

He drills them relentlessly in practice, in the meeting room, on the sidelines. “When you’re on the field, you hear him every play,” Pascal says. “Squeeze it! Squeeze it!”

Rathman was particularly fiery with Wilkins on Sunday after the rookie fumbled on the team’s second offensive possession. The momentum the unit seized early seemed to fade after that; only an Andrew Luck-led fourth-quarter rally saved the Colts in the end. “We just can’t have that,” Rathman gruffed as he exited the stadium. “That’s what we’re supposed to do as running backs, take care of the ball.”

Wilkins heard it Sunday. Hines heard it in August.

“He told me once I had more fumbles in the preseason than he did his whole career,” Hines said, shaking his head. (Rathman wasn’t technically correct, but Hines got the point.)

Ball security will prove vital down the stretch, as the Colts inch into December in the thick of the playoff race. Every possession is paramount, and the more times Luck can get his hands on the football, the better odds Indianapolis will have to do the improbable: Surge from a 1-5 start into the postseason.

Rathman’s primary ballcarriers are the second-year starter, who’s currently in the concussion protocol, and the two rookies behind him. He will preach to them – and to the rest of the offense – that he knows of what he speaks. The teams that win in the playoffs are the teams that don’t beat themselves.

If you’re carrying the football, remember, you’re not only carrying yourself and your family. The entire franchise is in your hands.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.