‘A kid’s dream’: What 10 years with the Colts means for players staying in free agency

INDIANAPOLIS — Michael Pittman Jr. could feel the future this week.

What he wants the future to be.

Facing free agency for the first time in his NFL career, Pittman had talked about a desire to test the open market, to find the best situation available, only to find himself putting pen to paper on his second Colts contract Wednesday and thinking about spending his entire career in Indianapolis.

“I think that’s every player’s dream,” Pittman said. “To stay with the same team their whole time playing.”

Pittman knows.

The son of an NFL running back, he’s spent his entire life around the league.

Nearly every player says it at some point. For some, it comes out in the press conference the night they get drafted. For others, it’s the first time they get asked about their contract situation. A few don’t let it slip, maybe don’t even realize it, until they’ve come face-to-face with the ruthless side of the NFL and been forced to find a new team.

Everybody begins their career hoping they will never have to put on another uniform.

“I think it’s just fulfilling to know that you are the guy that they drafted you to be,” Pittman said. “That, itself, is what I think everybody chases.”

Ten years with one team

Pittman, a four-year veteran, just signed a three-year contract.

The ideal is still mostly a dream.

But for the rest of the Colts who decided to stay in Indianapolis this week and made the trip to the team’s facility in crisp, sharp suits to sign their contracts on Wednesday, the dream is starting to harden into reality. Nearly all of them just signed deals that give them a realistic chance at a magical number.

Ten years with one team.

“I think that’s a certain patch on your jacket one day,” cornerback Kenny Moore II said. “I think for one to play 10 years in the league is amazing (in its own right), and then to do 10 years with one team would just be another stripe on the jacket.”

A stripe that is getting harder to earn.

A fact driven home by the start of free agency. While the Colts mostly spent the first two days of free agency retaining their own talent, the rest of the league was changing addresses, sometimes to play with their team’s biggest rival.

The ruthless nature of the league is impossible to avoid. A player gets drafted or signed into the NFL, then quickly realizes how fleeting the opportunity can be. They see teammates get released at the end of rookie minicamp, and then they realize that’s the norm, players coming and going every couple of days until the end of the season.

“I know guys that have played for three, four teams in one year,” linebacker Zaire Franklin said. “What that does to your psyche, your family, just your sense of security. …”

‘They love me here’

The dream starts with an innate desire to prove the Colts made the right choice.

The Colts who signed their contracts on Wednesday came to Indianapolis in a lot of different ways, with varying levels of security. There were two second-round picks, a fourth-rounder, a seventh-rounder, an undrafted free agent and a waiver claim at the end of his rookie training camp.

By staying, they’ve proven the organization was right to believe in their potential.

“Playing for one team for a long time, that’s a big thing,” nose tackle Grover Stewart said. “Being here 10 years, that would mean I’m doing some good things, they love me here.”

It would mean they stayed the course.

When Tyquan Lewis was at Ohio State, there were several times he was asked about the possibility of transferring, sometimes by position coaches who’d just left the Buckeyes.

He always felt like he should stay. See it through.

“When I got drafted to Indy, it was just like whatever it is this organization needs from me,” said Lewis, a veteran of six years in Indianapolis who just signed up for two more. “They gave me an opportunity. They gave me several opportunities actually. I was like, this is the place that I should be.”

The way the NFL works ends up pulling a player in other directions.

A player has to convince his team he’s worth what he can earn financially on the open market. He has to convince his team he’s the best man for the job. At some point, almost every player has to convince his team he can still be the same player after injury, the way Lewis has been forced to prove time and time again in Indianapolis.

Then there’s the old axiom, that sometimes a player just needs a change of scenery.

Franklin believes the opposite is true.

“I think that belief, that the organization believes in you, they want you there and they are willing to let you grow through small mistakes or difficulties you go through, I think that allows a lot of guys to grow,” Franklin said. “Sometimes you have to believe in your players to get the best out of them.”

‘I didn’t know where Indianapolis was on a map’

The desire to stay has a personal element.

Players like to put down roots, even if they’re from a different part of the country.

“I’m not going to lie to you, I didn’t know where Indianapolis was on the map when I got drafted. Don’t blame me, blame Philadelphia public schools,” Franklin said. “What I will say is, I truly love my time here in Indy. It’s been home for me.”

But players spend more than half the year in their team’s city.

The new city becomes home. Moore’s entrenched with IndyCar, and both Moore and Franklin have become fixtures in the community; leaders known for the time they give to charitable causes in the city. Pittman has a farm full of animals he doesn’t want to move.

“When I think back, all of my greatest life moments have been here,” Pittman said. “I got married here, I had both of my kids here, I bought my first house here. I just have a lot of major life moments just tied here.”

For some of their kids, Indianapolis is the only city they have ever known.

“We have another one on the way, my little one, she goes to school and she’s established,” punter Rigoberto Sanchez said. “Then my wife, she has a whole agenda of her own.”

Then there are the relationships they form in the locker room.

While players are constantly coming and going, there are plenty who stay for a long time, forging strong bonds. The players that stay the longest, they end up forming the culture, the core of the team. When the current group of veterans arrived, there were established Colts like Adam Vinatieri, Jack Doyle, T.Y. Hilton, Anthony Castonzo.

Not all of those guys played for just one team, and not all of them quite made it 10 years with the Colts. But Sanchez remembers seeing those players and thinking, that’s what I have to do to be successful in the NFL, to get what they have.

The relationships can be so strong a player can’t imagine them changing.

“With all the bonds I’ve got with people,” Stewart said. “I was like, ‘Shoot, I’ll be here.’”

‘A kid’s dream’

Free agency can make it tough.

Even if a player wants to stay, to make a run at 10 years with one team, it can be hard to resist the promise of more money, more snaps, more stability and security and respect in a career where everybody knows exactly what everyone else is making.

“You don’t really know how the business side of things will play out,” Moore said. “My resume is going to be everything I make it on the field, and then from there, I have no control.”

But Moore is also the type of player who always had a chance to make it to 10 years in Indianapolis.

While his career started in New England, he never played a regular-season game for the Patriots, and his career with the Colts is the stuff of legend — an undersized, overlooked player from a small school who got a chance, kept getting better and became such an integral part of the Colts that his picture’s now on the side of Lucas Oil Stadium.

“That’s just a kid’s dream,” Moore said. “We want stuff like that. We play video games, we grew up watching that for other players. To be that player that a city and a team honors, to that certain degree, I can’t even express how much that means.”

Not every player gets their picture on the side of the stadium.

But if a player makes it to 10 years with one team, he might as well have his picture up there.

By the time he reaches that mark, a player has proven he belongs.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts announced the return of six players in free agency