Buffalo Bills’ Week 10 opponent preview: Is Indianapolis Colts’ offense trending down?

I'm always looking for interesting angles to pursue as a writer with Buffalo Rumblings, and I stumbled on something I found fascinating while prepping work for the Buffalo Bills at Indianapolis Colts matchup. My original thought was to do splits between Anthony Richardson's performance and Joe Flacco's work, to see which quarterback the Colts have been better off rolling with.

When I started stat diving on that idea, the stat-minded side of my brain thought it saw a patter. Regardless of who's been under center, the Colts' offense has been trending down as the season wears on. Don't believe me?

Reading the Tables Okay, fine. These are technically charts — but stop trying to ruin my fun. I tried to keep these pretty simple, but here are a couple pointers.

This did start as a Richardson vs. Flacco concept, so the quarterback who played each game is indicated by their initials after each opponent. The one marked "JF*" was started by Richardson but Flacco was the primary quarterback, taking over after an early hip injury. The only item outside Indy's color scheme is the red trendline. The trendline extends a week, which isn't exactly an extrapolation for what might happen against Buffalo but might help ballpark it. Indianapolis Colts' points scored These will be brief conversation points from yours truly, but as usual I'll haunt the comments. We're looking at points scored, which is actually the data that led to my decision to do this trend analysis rather than direct splits based on quarterbacks.

Note that there's some meaning to the Richardson/Flacco split, with an obvious spike when Flacco replaced Richardson against the Pittsburgh Steelers , and the following week. That said, Flacco dipped right back down against the Tennessee Titans and the points output against the Vikings was bad with Flacco running the show.

As a matter of fact, that week I could have changed the data to say "6" rather than "13" points. The only touchdown from the Colts came from their defense, and this is talking about offensive output.

Indianapolis Colts' yards per play What's wild to me about this particular chart is how closely the actual results follow the trendline. Now, obviously, trendlines are made after the data input, but what this shows is low volatility — which suggests a higher likelihood of accuracy to the trend, aka "decline." Flacco's presence is accompanied by a one-week boost against the Jacksonville Jaguars (first game starting) but then turned around and helped fuel the biggest outlier in the other direction against the Titans as well.

Indianapolis Colts' rushing offense The run game has some interesting data. Overall, the trendline shows a similar pattern but the anomaly against the Houston Texans in the more recent matchup sticks out. There's an even bigger spike against the Green Bay Packers in Week 2. Looking at the numbers from the game, the longest run in either game was 29 yards by running back Jonathan Taylor against the Packers. Taylor had a 28-yarder against the Texans.

If we remove those runs, Taylor still averaged 6.7 yards against Green Bay and just over 4.0 yards per carry against Houston. Put differently, even with the spikes on either side of the trendline, the idea of declining offensive output holds up pretty well here too.

Indianapolis Colts' passing offense Here's the steepest trendline we've seen yet. Going back to the idea of splitting the data between the two quarterbacks, we see similar results to what we've already seen. There may be something to the idea of Flacco being the steadier hand, but not enough to reverse the trend completely.

A few more Indianapolis Colts charts Completion percentage Adding this layer of data in makes things pretty wild. The trend here is pretty flat and I wouldn't read into this personally at all and call it a "decline." In fact, considering how wildly out of whack Richardson was against the Texans in their second tilt this season, this trendline could easily be going the other way.

This chart, more than any of the others here, justifies my early idea of running splits between the two quarterbacks. Anthony Richardson's best game was exactly 50% completions which is incredibly bad. Richardson is looking pretty far up at Flacco's worst game of 57.89% completions.

This is odd on the surface as Flacco's significantly higher completion rate hasn't led to more points or yards. Again, the team seems to be getting worse on offense, even with Flacco getting plenty of chances to improve their fortune. This strongly suggests that Richardson is making up some of the disparity in completion rate by hitting longer passes.

This is supported with Next Gen Stats, which lists Richardson as having 13.2 intended air yards (IAY) on average which is tops in the league. Richardson also leads the league in complete air yards (CAY) with 9.4 on average. Flacco isn't a slouch by any means with 8.4 IAY and 5.8 CAY but falls well short or Richardson's numbers.

Indianapolis Colts' third-down conversion percentage And we're right back to the same trends we've been seeing when it comes to third-down conversion rate. Interestingly, there was a Flacco boost initially here and perhaps it will come back, but the most recent outing was pretty ugly.

Indianapolis Colts' first downs Lastly we have the number of first downs the Colts have achieved per game. This is only our second flat line. I won't bother trying to make too much sense of this as it might require a separate deep dive to do it justice and we're already nearing 1,000 words on this . What I will say is the numbers once again seem to show a temporary Flacco boost which did not reappear with the second round of Flacco this season (Vikings game).

The Final Straw I'll reiterate that even though I extended the trendline to include a possible landing point for this week's game against the Buffalo Bills, this is not intended to be an extrapolation. I mention that because the single biggest concern with the data is that the second go-around with Flacco is so far only one week long.

There's some reason to believe Flacco can provide a boost to a meager offense and that line could start moving back up. The simplicity of "regression to the mean" also comes to mind. Or even the simple premise that sometimes it's just your day and perhaps the Colts/Flacco will have one of those.

That said, when it comes to the Bills facing off against the Colts, I have two thoughts. First, while there might be a "Flacco boost," the data right now does have some good reason to think it's not enough to create any wild ascension. That pairs well with my second thought on the matter. There's no recent history to suggest Joe Flacco will spontaneously return to his peak form from a decade or more ago. That's not intended to be disrespectful to Flacco who I've always enjoyed watching, but Father Time remains undefeated.