Colts' Quincy Wilson comes clean about rocky rookie season

All these months later, with one coaching staff out the door and another in its place, Quincy Wilson is ready to come clean. Put plenty of it on me, he said Tuesday, shouldering the blame for a rocky rookie season.

The second-year, baby-faced Indianapolis Colts corner, a highly touted second-round pick from 2017, admitted to not being “mentally strong” and not arriving in “NFL shape” before last season, a year for him that was marred by healthy scratches, discord with the coaching staff and plenty of unfulfilled promise.

The story then: Week after week passed, Wilson was healthy, and Wilson watched.

All told he was inactive eight times during the regular season, available to play but benched, at times in favor of free agents plucked off the street days earlier. The Colts’ previous coaching staff vowed he wasn’t earning it in practice, something Wilson acknowledged Tuesday for the first time.

“When Quincy practices and plays better than the other guys, he’ll be up playing,” former defensive coordinator Ted Monachino said last season, adding that Wilson was “young and a little immature.”

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Wilson certainly was young. Born in 1996, he’s only months older than Adam Vinatieri’s NFL career.

“He was hurt,” GM Chris Ballard said of Wilson Monday night in a lengthy conversation with reporters inside the team’s draft room. “I think there’s always more to the story, is all I’m going to say. Hey, did he have a great rookie year? No, he didn’t. I thought he played well at the end. I thought he had a good play at the end that was really good.”

Ballard’s right. Wilson’s game-saving interception in Week 17 against the Texans clinched the Colts’ fourth victory of the season. But the prevailing sentiment: The Colts shouldn’t have had to wait 17 weeks for the second-round pick to make a play.

Injuries being what they were by December of last year, the Colts had no choice: Wilson had to play. He was just about all that was left. He started the team’s final four games, and performed well enough to excite Ballard about his role for the coming year. The Colts signed just one corner – little known Kenneth Acker – in free agency, and of their 11 draft picks over the weekend, spent exactly zero on the secondary.

The message: The door’s open; it’s time to earn it, young man.

Wilson plans to.

“Last season taught me a whole lot,” he said. “I could sit here and talk for days about what it taught me ... I thought we were gonna take a corner (in the draft), but we didn’t, so that means they’re putting full faith in me, Nate (Hairston), Kenny (Moore) and Pierre (Desir). We just gotta step up and make it happen.”

A year ago, Wilson said, he showed up to the Colts’ facility overweight and out of his element. At times, he coasted on the practice field, so the coaches dropped him on the depth chart. As the losses piled up, fans wondered why the second-overall pick couldn’t get on the field. So did Wilson, even though he wouldn’t acknowledge it publicly.

“I don’t know,” he’d say when asked why he wasn’t playing more. “You’ll have to ask the coaches.”

In reality Wilson knew.

“There were some things that I couldn’t control, there’s no secret about that, but no, I was not mentally strong (then),” he said. “I could’ve folded and just said forget it, but I didn’t, and when it was my time to play at the end of the year, I did.”

Of those lessons, hard as they were to swallow: “You just gotta treat every practice like it’s a game. You can’t just go out there and feel like I can be whatever today. Every day, you gotta prove it.”

Aiding Wilson this spring, as so many of the Colts’ defensive players have noted over the previous few weeks, is the team’s switch to a 4-3 scheme. For Wilson it will be less press man coverage – among the toughest jobs in football – and more read-and-react. The pressure rests on the front-seven, ideally allowing the backend the time and freedom to make plays on the ball.

“(In) press, it’s back to the quarterback, and you have to make a play on the ball in half a second,” Wilson said. “Now I can read the quarterback, read the receivers.”

He said Tuesday he wasn’t in shape when he arrived at the Colts facility because of a packed pre-draft schedule and all the team visits he took before hearing his name called in the second round. “It was hard to find time to work out,” he said. This year, Wilson remained in Indianapolis and made certain not to repeat the same mistakes.

“100 percent, I feel like I’m a better player than last year,” he said. “I just had to lose some weight to get my body to run fast ... but I’m there now.”

It’s April, so those words don’t really mean anything. Wilson will have to prove it on the practice fields, come August and September and October – something he didn’t do a year ago. Earning it then will back up claims like this, the one he made during free agency, after last year’s top cornerback, Rashaan Melvin, departed for Oakland. “Indy’s in need of a new No. 1 cornerback,” a reporter tweeted.

“No they are not,” Wilson fired back.

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