It’s time for NFL Thursday, and we don’t do as much historical analysis here anymore. We’d like to get back to that, but for now, we’ll keep looking at current issues—like the reflected in this headline. The Indianapolis Colts re-signed their 2025 starting quarterback, Daniel Jones, to a two-year, $88M deal this week, and we’re just flabbergasted at the high cost some QBs are making, especially when it’s a better idea to spend less on a younger QB and build a more expensive team around him. Even Indy did this.

Last year. With Jones.

He was a retread starter, after six mostly disappointing years with the New York Giants. His best year had come in 2022 when he was in his age-25 season, and then he regressed tremendously for various reasons in 2023-2024. All it took was 13 good games in 2025 with the Colts for them to ruin their salary-cap management with this deal. And now, they’ll struggle to surround him with the quality players he needs to succeed. Jones is not the type of QB who makes everyone around him better; he’s a caretaker QB, only.

In that 2022 season where he posted a 9-6-1 record as a starter with a 92.5 QB rating—and even won a playoff game—he had Saquon Barkley at running back, posting over 1,600 yards from scrimmage. Jones himself ran for over 700 yards that season, and he had six different receivers who gained over 225 yards through the air—giving him lots of targets, most of them mediocre. But it really was Barkley that made that offense work—and Jones’ own rushing efforts. He only threw for 15 touchdowns in the air, too.

He ran for seven more on the ground. Again, this was his best season in New York: the following year, Jones was abysmal, posting just one victory in six starts. So what happened? The Giants actually had a better WR corps, but Barkley wasn’t as effective as the primary weapon on offense, and Jones struggled as a result. He also injured his neck and his knee, since there was more pressure on the passing game to deliver with Barkley not playing as well as he had the prior year. This is what we mean: he’s not a star QB.

We will point that on March 7, 2023, Jones signed a four-year, $160M contract extension with the Giants after winning the Comeback Player of the Year vote at age 25—never a good thing. He proceeded to get injured and deliver three wins in 16 starts over the next two seasons before being released in November 2024. Maybe the Colts will have better luck in 2026, but betting so much money on that is pure folly. Paying a caretaker QB so much is a doomsday proposition in the NFL (examples aplenty).

Yet even last year with Indianapolis, Jones wasn’t that much of a revelation to deserve such a ridiculous deal: his 100.2 QB rating was a career high, yes, but his interception rate (2.1) was the same as his career rate. Back in 2022, he topped the NFL in that statistical category (1.1), showing again what an outlier that season was for Jones, and his 2025 rate was a full point worse. He had some other numbers that were also career highs, but we have to consider why he suddenly was so much better than 2023-2024.

His teammates.

RB Jonathan Taylor was a machine, gaining almost 2,000 yards from scrimmage—including 1,585 yards on the ground with 18 rushing TDs. That makes any QB look better, and Taylor himself has missed 17 games in his six-year NFL career. He’s no lock to stay healthy, and if he goes down, the Colts would be stuck with a QB who can’t carry a team by himself as evidenced by his track record. Last year, the Indy offense also had three receivers who caught between 780-1,000 yards’ worth of passes. That’s stellar.

Alas, Jones still got hurt and missed four games himself, so again, we see he is not a star QB: he’s just a complementary piece of a large puzzle for the Colts. Yet? He will be making an obscene amount of money to do something that most backups should be able to do with that kind of supporting cast: step in and conduct a talented corps of skill-position players around them. We’ve seen this happen in other cities with other teams and QBs this decade, yet Jones has people convinced he’s a star QB. Time will tell, obvi.

We’re fine being wrong, but as usual, we don’t think we are wrong right now. We generally like Jones as a person, and we actually do hope he does prove us wrong, but past precedent is hard to overcome, as is a statistical profile that really isn’t that promising.