If the back half of this Colts season is a rehearsal for interim coach Jeff Saturday, the end to Monday night’s loss to the Steelers likely won’t earn him a passing grade.
Indianapolis fell to Pittsburgh on Monday, 24–17, with Saturday squandering some valuable time on his team’s final drive thanks to a failure to effectively use his timeouts.
The Matt Ryan-led offense took over at the Colts’ own seven-yard line with 3:52 left in the game. The team moved down the field at a relatively leisurely pace, but found itself in a time crunch in the last 90 seconds or so of game time. After taking a seven-yard sack to set up a second-and-17 from the Steelers’ 40-yard line, Ryan scrambled for 14 yards to get to a manageable third-and-3. Even after that play, Saturday elected to hold onto all of his timeouts, allowing 25 seconds to come off the clock before Jonathan Taylor was stuffed on a run on the next play. Saturday finally took his first timeout after that play.
Ryan threw an incomplete pass to Parris Campbell on fourth down to end the Colts’ hopes.
After the game, the nascent coach said that he wasn’t worried about the clock, and gave a strange explanation about how he wasn’t sure where Ryan would be marked down, even though he wound up three yards short of the first-down marker.
“I thought we had plenty of time, I wasn’t really concerned,” Saturday said, via NFL.com. “We still had timeouts. I wasn’t too concerned. When [Ryan] was going down, I couldn’t tell where they were gonna start him from going down, right? If he was gonna get the first down. And then we got there, I expected us to get on the ball and have another play, a little bit quicker than that. But again, this wasn’t a press for time. We just didn’t make enough plays.”
Because the Colts turned the ball over on downs at the Steelers’ 26-yard line with 30 seconds left, the team didn’t technically run out of time due to Saturday’s decision, but had Taylor or Ryan picked up a first down, there’s a fair chance that his clock management would’ve come back to bite him. In any case, it was bad process in a crucial moment of a winnable game.
With the loss, the Colts slip to 4-7-1. The team is in 10th place in the AFC, and are three games behind the Titans in the AFC South. Saturday is 1–2 as head coach, after debuting with a win over the Raiders.
