Colts Still Haven't Named Anyone to Run Special Teams. The Clock Is Running.

Three days after Brian Mason tore multiple knee ligaments on a sideline collision, Indianapolis has not publicly identified who will run the special teams unit going into the regular season. That's the situation as of Monday. The Colts need an answer soon — preseason is done, the roster is nearly set, and the opener is close enough that whoever takes over has almost no runway to install anything new.

I wrote Thursday that this was one more thing for the organization to sort out. It still is. Mason's injury is genuinely bad luck — a freak collision on the final play of a preseason game — but the timing couldn't be much worse. Special teams is already a phase of the game where continuity matters; losing the coordinator in the final stretch of camp, with no regular-season reps left, compounds that.

The broader picture in Indianapolis is a team that has handled most of its offseason business reasonably well — Jones is healthy, Taylor is locked in on a new deal, Buckner is back — but keeps absorbing small hits that accumulate. Pierce still isn't cleared for Week 1. The secondary depth remains thin. Cam Taylor-Britt is suspended for the opener. And now the special teams staff needs to be reshuffled with essentially no time left. None of these are individually fatal. Together, they're a lot of open items for a team that went 3–6 in one-score games last year and can't afford sloppy execution in the margins.