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INDIANAPOLIS — Nearly all of the attention surrounding the Colts right now is on the end of next week, the team’s chances to fill its needs in the NFL Draft.
But the Indianapolis franchise has already spent the better part of two months getting to know the man who will make the biggest impact on the 2021 season.
The Colts are starting to get a sense of Carson Wentz.
“He’s got a great sense of humor, doesn’t take himself too seriously,” general manager Chris Ballard said Friday. “He’s dialed in, he works. I’d probably compare him a little more to Andrew (Luck) than to Philip (Rivers).”
Ballard admittedly is still in the early stages of getting to know Wentz — the general manager has spent most of the last couple of weeks locked in the draft room, preparing the Indianapolis board for the draft.
But the Colts have had success with both approaches, the gregarious, childlike love of the game that Rivers carried and the quieter personality of Luck. As different as their personalities might be, though, there is one clear similarity between Wentz and Rivers in the way they’ve approached their first few months after joining Indianapolis.
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Wentz has been hard at work building relationships with his new teammates. From video chats with defensive backs to throwing sessions with Michael Pittman Jr. and Dezmon Patmon in California to helping recruit T.Y. Hilton back to Indianapolis, Wentz had already been working hard to build bonds before the beginning of the Colts’ virtual offseason program earlier this week.
“He’s comfortable in his own skin,” Ballard said. “He’s been great. Great to be around, great family, great perspective on life. He’s going to be a good player for us.”
Wentz also has another advantage that helped Rivers immensely last season, and it should become apparent as soon as Indianapolis is able to take the field this spring, whenever that may be.
He’s already fluent in Frank Reich.
“When you have a familiarity with the offense and the coach that’s coaching you every day, then automatically there’s going to be a comfort level there,” Ballard said. “It’s like last year. We didn’t have any offseason. Philip came in, knew the offense. There wasn’t a lag in terms of him playing and understanding what needed to be done.”
The Colts are counting heavily on Reich’s familiarity with Wentz to get the former Eagle back to the way he was playing from 2017 to 2019, before a disastrous 2020 season in Philadelphia led the Eagles to trade their former franchise quarterback.
Indianapolis is counting on Reich’s history of helping quarterbacks shake off some of the toughest seasons and stretches of their careers.
When the Colts hired Reich, Luck was coming off of the frustration and disappointment of the shoulder injury that cost him the entire 2017 season, sent him to Europe and left the Colts with little support around him. When Indianapolis signed Rivers, the Chargers legend was coming off of a 20-interception campaign, all but written off by most of the NFL and allowed to walk away by the team that had been his for a decade and a half.
Both Luck and Rivers bounced back in a big way under the leadership of Reich, and if the Colts head coach can work the same magic with Wentz, the Colts will likely be a playoff contender again, no matter what happens in the NFL Draft next week.
“If Frank Reich can get Carson Wentz’s play to an extremely high level, and we feel that he can, Carson, unquestionably, has every single tool mentally, physically, emotionally to do that, then you’ve got something special,” Indianapolis owner Jim Irsay said on 1070 earlier week.
For that reason, and because Wentz is still in the middle of his career, there has been little speculation this season about the Colts taking a quarterback in next week’s draft, the sort of talk that dominated the end of April in 2020.
If Reich can get Wentz back to form, the team believes Indianapolis already has its franchise quarterback.
“All indications are he is ready to continue a special type of career,” Irsay said two weeks ago.
For the moment, the Colts are just getting to know their new quarterback.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts GM: Carson Wentz is more like Andrew Luck than Philip Rivers