Is this the man who can finally keep the Colts healthy?

Zak Keefer | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Everything you don't want to know about Colts injuries The Colts have hired Rusty Jones to address their being one of the most injured teams in the NFL

INDIANAPOLIS — Picture the man whose job it is to keep 53 chiseled bodies from succumbing to the weekly violence inherent to professional football, and that man looks nothing like this man. Where are the bulging muscles? The skin-tight athletic tees? This guy’s never seen a CrossFit gym in his life. He’s 150 pounds soaking wet. He wears T-shirts that sag from his 64-year-old frame. He looks like a high school math teacher.

He was happily retired, vacationing in Amsterdam back in January, when his phone buzzed, an old friend begging him to come back to football. “Best in the business,” is what Chris Ballard calls him. Then the Indianapolis Colts’ general manager takes it a step further. “Rusty Jones may be as good a free agent acquisition as we’ve made.”

Stunning praise for a guy who’s been cashing NFL pension checks for five years, content to trek across the Atlantic and spend time with his rock-star-in-the-making son, Tyler. After all, Christmas in Ireland beats Christmas in Buffalo. Jones spent three decades fixing broken NFL bodies. He needed a reprieve. “Where you been?” an old friend, Bill Polian, asked him at a funeral a few years back. “I took a nap, Bill,” Jones told him. “After 28 years, I was tired.”

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But Ballard pressed. He held ambitious designs on reviving this stagnant Colts’ franchise, and he wanted the man who got Bruce Smith to buy in 30 years ago, the man who got Brian Urlacher to buy in 15 years ago, to get his guys to buy in now. He wanted to overhaul everything. The way they ate, the way they slept, the way they worked, the way they recovered. He gave Jones a fancy title – Director of Sports Performance. Gave him complete oversight, all the way down to every last bench press, every last calorie. The aim wasn’t simply performance; it was to turn one of the NFL’s most injury-prone teams into one of the most durable.

Bottom line: The Colts needed their studs on the field, not the sideline. Four times in the past seven years Indianapolis has finished in the bottom seven of the league in adjusted games lost to injury, a metric compiled by Football Outsiders that takes into account a player’s role on the team and his their status during the week leading up to the game.

OK. Jones was in. All he had to do was meet the new head coach. It was early February, and they talked for an hour. A day later Ballard called with the verdict. “Josh loved everything, he’s totally on board,” he told Jones. A week later there was no Josh.

Jones found out the news about 4 a.m., when he decided to get up to go to the bathroom at his mother-in-law’s house in Delaware. He was supposed to catch a bus from there to the airport, then a flight to Indianapolis to be at Josh McDaniels’ introductory news conference that afternoon. Suddenly, there was no introductory news conference. There was no coach. McDaniels had backed out. Ballard had sent Jones a text about 1 a.m.

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“Don’t worry about anything,” he wrote. “Nothing’s going to change. I’m gonna interview Frank Reich and a few others.”

Jones’ eyes lit up. “FRANK REICH!” he texted back.

The two shuffled into a conference room a week later, Reich, the Colts’ backup plan at head coach, and Jones, the aging sports performance pioneer. They talked about all those years together in Buffalo. They talked about the old heart rate monitors Jones would beg Frank to wear during practice. Then they talked about the Colts. “Listen, Frank, you’ve been around this league, and you’re the head coach now,” Jones told him. “If you’ve got a young guy you wanna bring in here, I understand. I’ll step away.”

Reich looked at him and laughed.

“Are you kidding me?”

***

Jones was the first to turn football performance into a science, the first to tailor strength and nutrition plans to each individual player, the first to digitally map out 300 items of food. He started this way back in 1985, his first year with the Bills, back when no one in the NFL was even thinking about body composition or nutrition or anaerobic intake. He bought a $4,000 computer and began to catalog every single meal every player on the roster ate over the course of the season. When the team told him they weren’t paying for the computer, Jones used two grand out of his own pocket and borrowed the rest.

No one knew it at the time, but he was changing the industry.

Across 19 years in Buffalo, he helped Bruce Smith become the most menacing sack-artist in league history. “Bruce bought into the nutrition stuff right away,” Jones remembers proudly. He molded the Bills’ offensive line into a well-conditioned machine, one with the endurance to tire teams out with their famed K-gun, no-huddle attack – an offense the backup QB, a kid out of Maryland named Frank Reich, helped devise. Buffalo rode Smith’s prowess off the edge and the K-gun to four straight Super Bowls.

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The next stop was Chicago, where Jones fixed Brian Urlacher’s balky hamstring. The Bears’ linebacker had missed seven games the year before Jones arrived; one season in, Urlacher was a 16-game starter and the league’s Defensive Player of the Year. He didn’t miss a game with a muscle pull for seven years. Now he’s in the Hall of Fame.

“You know what a player wants?” Jones asks, his straight-outta-Fenway accent forgetting the Rs but charming all the same. “They wanna trust you. The minute you help them on something, and they know you’ve helped them, you have ‘em. I’ve told people, GMs, owners, ‘Don’t expect me to come up and tell you things you think you need to know.’ You can’t lose the respect of the player doing what I do. You can’t break their trust.”

Jones’ elaborate, intricate system sweats the details, from every watt of power produced on the bench press to every calorie consumed in the cafeteria. No fast food. (Sorry, T.Y. Hilton.) No desserts. Ever. Each time a player eats, he scans a barcode for every item on his plate. Each time he finishes a set in the weight room, the numbers go straight to the app. The players, coaches and Jones’ staff — Rich Howell, head of strength and conditioning, and Anna Turner, the team nutritionist — can review everything on their iPads.

At the core of Jones’ methodology: body composition. This is everything to him. Same for Chris Ballard. “Chris is really big on body fat and lean mass, as he should be,” Jones says.” In accordance, he has streamlined the players’ nutrition and weightlifting regimens in a way that’s never been done here. Every player on the roster is assigned an ideal body fat, based on the position they play and the scheme the Colts employ. “The great thing is I’ve been with this defense for eight years (in Chicago),” Jones says. “I know all the body fats, from the defensive tackle to the nose to the end.”

It’s his job – and the players' – to get every roster spot as close to the archetype as possible. The metrics are driven by three decades of data, data Jones began compiling when Reich was a rookie in Buffalo way back in 1985. This is how a middle linebacker should be built. This is how fast a wide receiver should run. This is how much power an offensive lineman should produce.

Players will weigh in each Thursday during the regular season. If they’re overweight, they’ll be fined. “We can’t let that slide,” Jones says.

“You have to compete every Sunday with men, real men,” Jones says, almost shouting. “That’s a big part of it. I can tell you about guys who didn’t have the greatest body composition but were great players. But they were the outliers. Lance Briggs was an outlier. Did he have the perfect numbers and all that? I can’t say that he did. But as a player, he was unbelievable.”

Another Lance Briggs would be great. But the Colts are looking for as many archetypes as possible.

***

Ballard first summoned Jones to Indianapolis in May 2017, asking him to compile the body fat percentages of every player on the roster. It was ugly. Jones left less than impressed. A year later, when he returned on a full-time basis, he did the same thing. And this time was different. He was encouraged.

“Somebody read them the riot act at the end of the year,” Jones says. “Somebody said at the end of the season, ‘Don’t come back here looking like you left here.’ Because when I came back, it was completely different. There was a new sense of urgency. These guys were not happy with what happened here last year.”

In the months since, Jones has infused his three decades of experience into this young and unproven roster. He’s had T.Y. Hilton cut the junk food (“I feel like I’m 21 years old,” Hilton says) and John Simon trim a bit of the fat (“I don’t wanna have another year like last year,” offers the defensive veteran who missed more than half of last season).

“He’s an old guy with a lot of fire in him,” adds Simon, who heeds to as strict a diet as any player on this roster. “He’s got the heart of a young guy, and that’s helped him fit in here really well. He’s definitely someone you want to take advice from. Anytime he says something, you perk your ears up and listen.”

Vital to Jones’ ideal body composition for an NFL football player, and the prevention of possible injury, is each player’s hip alignment. It’s all about pelvic balance. If a player is only slightly off, over time, the chance of injury rises. Jones drills them daily on this. “He’s probably looking for me right now, wanting to work on my hips,” jokes receiver Chester Rogers. Then he looks around, as if Jones were standing over his shoulder.

But no team will ever slide through a season injury-free. The Colts couldn’t even make it out of their preseason debut without some casualties – Deon Cain’s ACL, Marlon Mack’s hamstring, Robert Turbin’s ankle. And this comes after a particularly painful 2017, one that saw the Colts send 16 players to the injured reserve list, including key pieces on both sides of the ball. Andrew Luck. Malik Hooker. Robert Turbin. Ryan Kelly. Simon. You remember.

So the team starts anew. Jones is darting around the Colts’ renovated practice facility these days, trying to get 53 bodies as healthy as possible, his first season-opener in five years just 20 days away.

He’s 64 years old. He could be at his lakehouse in New Hampshire. Could be overseas with his son. Instead he’s working on Chester Rogers’ hips and keeping T.Y. Hilton away from the cheeseburgers. He seems revitalized, this sports performance pioneer getting a whole new franchise to buy into his life’s work.

“One thing I learned a long time ago from a few coaches I worked for,” Jones says, “is that if I want to keep my job, I better have those players ready. Bottom line: I better have those players ready.”

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