Insider: How Matt Ryan has the Colts at ease entering another trip to Jacksonville

When the Colts walked off the field after a seventh straight loss in Jacksonville in January, they felt empty inside.

With a 26-11 loss to a team that would pick No. 1 in the NFL Draft, they lost more than a game and a spot in the playoffs. Something more innate and central to the genesis of a competitor slipped away, too.

"We have allowed and I have allowed doubt, fear and a lack of faith slip into our DNA," owner Jim Irsay said in the coming days.

Through primetime wins over the Patriots and Cardinals and a blowout road win over the Bills, thanks to a league-high seven Pro Bowlers and a culture that looked so tight to the world on "Hard Knocks," the Colts greatly overestimated themselves.

"A lot of people saw it as our Super Bowl," Shaquille Leonard said of the win over Arizona that put the Colts one win from the playoffs. "We felt invincible."

For a while, it was hard to argue with the results. But contenders in a conference with Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert don't average 170 passing yards a game, as the Colts did in the final eight. They don't consistently beat elite teams by completing five passes, like they did against the Patriots.

They don't fall double-digits down to the 2-14 Jaguars and feel like they can't come back.

"Golly," Carson Wentz said as he walked off the field with Jonathan Taylor, whose rushing title his team wasted. "Hard to swallow."

The loss in Jacksonville sent the Colts into an identity crisis. Leonard spoke of a need to let it "burn through our heart," and then he disappeared for months to address his mental health. Irsay released videos by the week about the loss of their competitive spirit.

"I thought about it every week," running back Nyheim Hines said. "There are probably a lot of people like me who would like to move on, but we’re never going to forget it. I know I’m going to go home and think about all the things I didn’t do and that we didn’t execute the last three weeks of the year."

The latest failure in Jacksonville was so emphatic, so public and so familiar that it begged for help from the outside.

So the Colts moved on from Wentz and traded a third-round pick for Matt Ryan. Here was a four-time Pro Bowler, a league MVP and a 14-year starter who had taken the Falcons to places the Colts thought they were entitled to be before last year's collapse.

Ryan was 37 years old and hadn't been to the playoffs in four seasons. Buying into him would require another act of faith.

But if you want to know why the Colts appear looser ahead of this trip to Jacksonville than the last, it likely starts with the man behind center. Multiple starters spoke about the Week 1 tie to the rebuilding Texans more as an unfortunate blip rather than an inflection point for change.

They find positives in a correlative stat: They threw for 352 yards to erase a 17-point fourth-quarter deficit.

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For the first three quarters, the Colts played like they did against the Jaguars.

When the fourth quarter arrived with the Texans leading 20-3, the Colts found a new gear on offense. They ran up-tempo with Jonathan Taylor and then began to attack Houston's zones with route adjustments to get the ball to players other than Michael Pittman Jr. On critical downs, Ryan went back to receivers who'd struggled before, like Ashton Dulin, who had dropped a touchdown pass.

Ryan's debut wasn't perfect, as he fumbled four times and threw an interception. But he fought for 50 pass attempts, the best of which helped the Colts overcome the kind of second-half deficit they felt hopeless against on their last trip to Jacksonville.

"What I can take from Week 1 with Matt was how poised he was throughout the entire game, no matter what the situation was," wide receiver Parris Campbell said. "He brought that leadership to the sideline, rallying the guys, telling us to just take a deep breath and to stay the course and to take it a play at a time.

"Once the time came where we got on a roll, I think that all stemmed from him staying so poised and leading us and showing us the way."

This talk can seem rah-rah, but it's coming after a tie to the Texans.

It echoes what Colts players said this spring, when Ryan arrived and delivered a PowerPoint presentation on how to be a good teammate. He quizzed them about their plays in the hallway and ate lunch with leaders and rookies alike.

They found it to be genuine because, with an average age of 26, the Colts roster grew up watching Ryan on those Falcons teams. He arrived in Atlanta after the previous quarterback was sent to prison for organizing a dogfighting ring, and he left 14 years and 10 playoff games later after leading the Falcons to become the first team that was 100% vaccinated.

“It’s all on the quarterback," Hines said. "Quarterback play is everything."

The Colts are following Ryan as they prepare to break perhaps the most mind-numbing curse between two teams in the NFL. They have lost seven straight road games to Jacksonville, a streak that has happened 21 times between two teams since 2002 but never to the improbability of this. The Jaguars have a .292 winning percentage in those seven years. The Colts were favorites in five of those seven games.

Good luck sharing those stats with the Colts this week.

"Just put that to the side," defensive end Yannick Ngakoue said. "Certain guys weren't here for that whole ordeal."

Said Leonard, "All you hear about is Jacksonville last year. It's like talking about your ex-girlfriend when you're with somebody new. Gotta learn from your ex, make your life better and just continue to get better from there."

He's come a long way from asking his teammates to let a loss in Jacksonville to burn through their hearts.

This week has featured no such speeches so far.

"On Monday, I walked into meeting room today and it’s like okay, I can just turn around and walk out," Colts coach Frank Reich said. "We’re dialed in."

The Colts are on their fifth starting quarterback in five seasons. This one happens to be 4-0 in his career against the Jaguars.

But with 14 seasons and 233 starts, Ryan's career is much bigger than one game or one field. That makes him inherently different than how some young Colts players viewed themselves this spring.

They see a sage vet called in to cure a disease.

Whether they're right will be tested Sunday. Another loss to Jacksonville would drop them to 0-1-1 with Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs up next.

"You can't live in your fears," Reich likes to say.

For a seemingly tenuous moment, his team is trying to live without any.

Contact Colts insider Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: How Matt Ryan has team at ease entering trip to Jacksonville