Colts Hosting Joint Practices With Chicago

The Indianapolis Colts are making franchise history this week with joint practices.

For the first time in franchise history the Indianapolis Colts will host joint practices with the Chicago Bears. The joint practices will be held on Wednesday and Thursday at the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center ahead of their preseason game on Saturday, August 22nd.

This new venture in preseason training is interesting to say the least. Since the new Collective Bargaining Agreement many teams have shied away from contact in training camp and the early weeks of preseason are spent instructing on fundamentals like tackling and penalty prevention.

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The reason for such mistakes is simple. Through OTA’s, mini-camp and training camp the players get used to what their teammates are going to do in drills and scrimmage. When the 1-on-1’s begin each of them know what the other is going to do before the ball is snapped.

This skews the evaluation process slightly for coaches until players get to see other styles, looks and schemes in preseason games. Basically, they have to break their habits down once they realize that they have no idea what the guy in the other jersey is going to do. This change of pace is key.

Hosting a few joint practices helps both teams immensely. The players get exposure to new looks outside of game reps which provides coaches a larger sample size to evaluate the players individually. Once you add the reps from joint practices with the additional 30-40 snaps they get in the preseason games it is easy to see the benefit this is the evaluation process.

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With three games before the mandatory cuts begin, any opportunity to evaluate and correct behaviors before game-time is beneficial.

Colts head coach Chuck Pagano discussed his thoughts on the joint practices with Colts.com:

"“You get tired of beating on one another during training camp, so to have an opportunity, if you can find somebody that’ll work with you and want to do some work against you, is a great change of pace,” Pagano said earlier this offseason.“Plus, you get to see from a schematic standpoint maybe a different offense, a different defense from an alignment standpoint. If you’re going against an odd front the entire time or whatever, it gives you an opportunity to maybe go against a different look and some different players. I’m definitely a proponent of it.”"

Both joint practices are closed to the public. The Colts kickoff with the Bears at 7:30 pm on Saturday August 22nd. You can tune-in to the game locally on WXIN Fox 59 or catch the replay on NFL Network. If you can’t watch the game, you can catch the audio broadcasts on 107.5 FM, 1070 the Fan or stream it live from the Colts App.

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