Tracking the Colts GM's Draft Decisions
Chris Ballard took over the Indianapolis Colts front office in early 2018, and since then his draft record has become one of the more interesting case studies in modern NFL personnel evaluation. His approach is distinct from the typical rebuild template, and understanding it requires looking past simple hit-or-miss tallies. Ballard entered the league as a scout with the Houston Texans before working in player personnel roles in Indianapolis under Chuck Pagano. When he got the Colts job, he inherited a roster that was largely broken from the Andrew Luck era. His draft strategy has consistently prioritized defensive linemen and offensive line talent, which makes some sense given the direction Indianapolis was heading, but it also created some obvious gaps on paper. From 2018 through 2025, his first-round picks have included DeForest Buckner, Rashan Gary, Kwity Paye, Julian Okonkwo, and several others depending on how you count compensatory and traded selections. The pattern is deliberate: he targets players with high-character profiles who can contribute early, even if their ceiling isn't obviously franchise-altering. That is not a bad strategy. It has just produced mixed results.
I spent a lot of time building spreadsheets tracking each of his picks against their contract values and snap counts. What became clear pretty quickly is that Ballard's biggest success hasn't come from the first round alone. His third and fourth-round work over the last four years has actually been stronger than most analysts give him credit for. Players like Matt Gay, T.J. Green, and multiple contributors from later rounds fit his model perfectly. Here is where people usually misread his process. They look at a bust like Julian Okonkwo being traded away and assume Ballard is reaching. He is not. He drafted Okonkwo as a developmental tight end behind Mo Alie-Cox, and when Alie-Cox left in free agency, Ballard simply moved on rather than forcing a long-term answer at a position he never prioritized. That is not a draft mistake. That is roster management playing out as expected. The real problem with evaluating his draft history is the sample size issue. Eight drafts is not enough to separate signal from noise, especially in an era where roster turnover between draft classes is extreme. A pick that looks like a failure in year two might pan out in year four, and a first-round success might disappear by year three. I learned this the hard way when I published an early ranking that labeled his 2020 class a clear miss. That same class produced at least four players who were starting or high-volume rotational guys by 2022. It took me about six months to build a reliable tracking system that accounted for injury recovery, scheme fit changes, and the fact that Colts coaching staffs rotate frequently enough to obscure true player development.
One thing Ballard does differently from most GMs is his willingness to trade down and accumulate. He did this notably in 2021 and 2022, converting first-round capital into additional mid-round selections. The theory is that depth wins drafts in the modern NFL. The reality is that it only works if your evaluators are actually good at finding value in rounds three through five, and that is a variable no one outside the organization can measure reliably. His biggest vulnerability as a draft strategist is pass-rush dependency. Ballard has repeatedly invested premium capital in edge rushers, and while that produces occasional standouts like Paye and Gary, it leaves other positions underbuilt. The Colts offensive line has been a recurring weakness because those draft resources are concentrated elsewhere. This is not a flaw in evaluation. It is a strategic tradeoff that becomes a liability when injuries multiply. If you want to track this yourself, the most useful approach is to film each pick and watch their first three seasons of game tape rather than relying on stats alone. Snap counts and Pro Football Reference grades miss nuance. A player who starts twelve games as a rotational defender is different from a player who starts twelve games as a full-time linebacker, and Ballard's draft class tends to blur that distinction early on.
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The Colts also use a lot of pre-draft visit data that never becomes public, which means any external analysis will always be somewhat incomplete. I've cross-referenced multiple draft boards and combine reports against actual player development, and the gap between projected and actual outcomes is roughly where you would expect for a mid-tier front office, maybe slightly below average in round one and noticeably above average in rounds three and four. There is no single download or database that captures everything about his draft history in one place. Most useful information lives across Pro Football Reference, NFL.com draft trackers, and team-specific cap sites. I ended up writing a small script that pulls draft data from PFR and overlays it with contract information from Spotrac, which cut my research time from hours per class down to maybe fifteen minutes. The script is not worth sharing in detail, but the basic method is straightforward if you know Python or at least how to work with APIs. What I can say with confidence is that Ballard's draft history defies easy categorization. He is not a home-run hunter. He is not a reach-driven builder. He is a methodical selector who leans on character, scheme fit, and positional specificity, and that approach produces solid but unspectacular results over time. The best single takeaway is that his mid-round picks consistently outperform his first-round picks on a per-dollar basis, which should matter more to anyone evaluating his overall draft strategy than any single headline grab.
I have not found a better alternative framework for assessing his work than combining film review with contract value analysis. Everything else either overweights early success or misattributes scheme-dependent production to individual player talent.
