Insider: How the Colts' approach to free agency will change

INDIANAPOLIS -- It wasn't long after his introductory press conference last January that Chris Ballard made up his mind. “I’m going to get you a new defense,” he told his incumbent head coach, Chuck Pagano, after just a few weeks on the job. Then he went to work.

Over the ensuing months Ballard made good on his pledge, dismembering an aging, unproductive unit and infusing it with new blood. The total haul: 13 notable signings during free agency, eight of which came on the defensive side of the ball, via $39.5 million guaranteed. The Indianapolis Colts’ defense was younger in 2017. Probably a little bit better, too, especially as the season wore on. The team wasn’t. The Colts slumped to 4-12. Pagano was fired an hour after the season finale.

Free agency arrives once more this week, the new league year commencing Wednesday at 4 p.m. as talent-needy teams plug holes with their copious amounts of cash. The Colts, for instance, have $72.7 million to spend if they so choose, the third-fattest total in all of football. “I’d like to (spend it all),” Ballard half-joked last month. “Doesn’t mean we will.”

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There are certainly reasons to. While Ballard is a staunch draft devotee, a subscriber to the grow-your-own method of constructing a roster, he knows his team can’t sit idly by during the next few weeks. Too many holes. Too many needs. Too much mediocrity.

Ballard and his personnel staff spent three weeks in December combing through a list of potential free agents from across the league, aligning the strengths and weaknesses of the players in this year’s class with those in the coming NFL Draft with the needs the Colts have. From there, the team’s plan has been hatched, reviewed and revised. Legal tampering began Monday. Signings can become official Wednesday.

This is among the first sizable steps the Colts will take in making sure 4-12 doesn’t happen again.

The early indication Monday: the Colts will again be targeting defensive talent, particularly players that will help the team’s transition into new coordinator Matt Eberflus’ 4-3 scheme. For starters, it’s no secret this roster has no proven middle linebacker at the moment. Ballard needs to find one.

But don’t expect the haul to mirror last year’s, in dollars or in scope. Ballard turned over a defense in two months’ time; by opening day in Los Angeles, the Colts were starting seven new players on that side of the ball. That number grew as the season progressed.

This time around they will dial it back. This time around, it’s more augmentation than overhaul.

“Look, you can’t build a sustained winner – one that lasts over time – through free agency,” Ballard said at the team’s town hall in February. “You can’t do it. You’ve gotta draft your own players. At the end of the day, you’ve gotta draft and develop and then stack drafts, one, two, three drafts on top of each other where these guys are homegrown Colts ... we’ll supplement with free agency, we had to last year.”

Then, a caveat from Ballard: “The one thing we won’t do is pay a mid-level player blue money. And what I mean by blue money: top-of-the-line, high dollars for a guy that is not going to give us that type of production.”

That’s oftentimes the layer to free agency everyone forgets: Top-of-the-line players rarely hit the open market, for obvious reasons. Their teams won’t let them.

Thus mid-level players become more attractive, and sign contracts they never live up to.

The Colts’ general manager has routinely expressed caution when it comes to the allure of the open market. Fanbases treat it like Black Friday – more signings! now! – as if a team that doesn’t open the checkbook in March doesn’t have a chance to win in September. It’s an undeniably risky few weeks; bold gambles in free agency can bury a team for years to come. The Colts know this better than most. Look up the moves they in 2013. And 2014. And 2015.

Then consider how Bill Polian did it. For the most part, the Hall of Fame executive who built the Colts into the winningest team of the 2000s flat-out ignored free agency. It’d come and go, come and go, and he’d stand pat, content to draft his own and keep his own. It worked wondrously. Of the 22 starters on the Colts’ 2006 Super Bowl championship team, 20 of them were either drafted by the team or signed as an undrafted free agent (including, somewhat incredibly, all 11 on offense). The AFC champion team three years later? Nineteen of the 22 starters were homegrown.

That’s what Ballard envisions, ambitious as it is. And that’s what makes weeks like this so tricky. The Colts must hit on their investments or they’ll be paying the consequences for years to come.

“Eventually we might feel really good about signing a high-dollar free agent, and everybody in here’s going to be excited, (the media is) going to write great things, but then they’ve gotta play,” Ballard said at the town hall. “And then all that goes away. And, like I tell our guys all the time, I say, ‘Look, we put a value on a guy for a reason, because that’s his value for us.’ And we’ve gotta be able to lay our heads at night knowing we’ve done the right thing for the team.”

Ballard’s early track record in free agency is more sound than spectacular: 11 of the 13 key players he inked in free agency last year ended up playing significant snaps for the Colts last season (two signees, guard/center Brian Schwenke and linebacker Sean Spence, were cut at the end of training camp). But his stated mission – rebuild that defense almost from scratch – was accomplished. Jon Hankins, Al Woods, Jabaal Sheard and John Simon will form the backbone of the Colts’ defense for at least two more seasons.

Throw in his first draft class – defensive backs Malik Hooker, Quincy Wilson and Nate Hairston, running back Marlon Mack and edge rusher Tarell Basham – and the Colts have something to work with moving forward. What they need are difference-makers. And that’s where the third overall pick in April’s draft comes into play.

The bottom line? The Colts coming off a 4-12 season with holes all over the roster. They can address some this week, though it won’t be cheap, and it won’t come without serious risk. Just don't expect the splash of last year.

“The one thing I am is a realist,” Ballard added. “I don’t ever try to paint a picture that’s not true. We have work to do. I think at every position, we have work to do.”

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