Colts halt Patriots' win streak and take big step towards playoff spot

INDIANAPOLIS — The Indianapolis Colts landed a critical win for their playoff hopes Saturday night, beating the hated New England Patriots for the first time since 2009 and putting a capper on their comeback from a 1-4 start.

Playing a physical, brawling style that didn’t look much like the old Colts-Patriots rivalry games, Indianapolis (8-6) proved it’s the tougher team, outlasting New England 27-17 on Jonathan Taylor’s game-breaking 67-yard touchdown run to seal it.

By beating the Patriots (9-5), the Colts’ playoff odds shot up to 88% according to fivethirtyeight.com, and now Taylor is firmly in the middle of the MVP race.

1. Jonathan Taylor found his MVP moment

Taylor’s MVP case had been missing a signature moment.

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Saturday night was perfect. A prime-time game, the only game on TV, against a Patriots defense that has been one of the NFL’s best this season, and the Colts badly needed Taylor to come up big on the worst night of Carson Wentz’s tenure so far.

Facing off against a New England pass defense that has been the NFL’s best all season, Wentz completed just 5-of-12 passes for 57 yards and threw a terrible interception in the second half.

The Colts needed Taylor to carry them. He did the dirty work on their first touchdown drive, ripping off the hard yards to set up a beautiful touchdown shovel pass to Nyheim Hines.

Then New England settled in and made life tough on Taylor, determined not to let the Colts’ big back beat them.

Taylor did it anyway. At first, it was just grinding out tough yards in the second half, churning out plays and shortening the clock. The Patriots came back in the fourth quarter, cutting the lead to three, and it looked like Taylor was going to have to come up with tough yards for a first down.

Instead, he broke through a stacked New England line and raced away with a 67-yard touchdown run that puts the Colts firmly in the driver’s seat for the playoff race, and puts Taylor squarely in the middle of the MVP race. He finished with 170 yards on 29 carries.

2. Matt Eberflus beats Josh McDaniels in battle of X's and O's

The Colts defensive coordinator refused to play up any hard feelings between himself and the Patriots offensive coordinator, who famously backed out on Indianapolis after he’d already been a part of hiring Eberflus, by saying it was more of an X’s and O’s matchup.

Eberflus and a Colts defense led by the linebackers won the matchup resoundingly.

Coming off of a shutout over the woeful Houston Texans, the Colts kept it rolling, refusing to allow a point through the first three quarters.

Darius Leonard and Bobby Okereke played a critical role in those three quarters. Leonard picked off Mac Jones in the red zone at the end of the first half, and Okereke —who had drawn some headlines in New England for saying the Colts wanted to stop the run and the rookie Jones beat them — made maybe the best play of his Indianapolis career to start the second half. Facing a third down, Okereke laid out for a diving interception that set up a field goal.

New England finally cracked the Colts defense for 17 points in the second half, but Indianapolis came up with enough stops and forced the Patriots to use so much clock that the Colts were able to hang on for a critical win despite their worst offensive performance of the season.

3. Colts hand it to Patriots on special teams

Bill Belichick has become famous for the attention he pays to special teams, and it’s rare to see New England struggle in the kicking game.

But Indianapolis has built an impressive special teams unit of its own under Bubba Ventrone, and outside of Michael Badgley’s 49-yard field goal miss in the second half, the Colts outplayed a Patriots special teams unit that entered the game ranked fourth in the NFL in DVOA, an analytic that grades teams on a per-play basis and weighs the strength of opponent.

New England return man Gunner Olszewski made two questionable decisions, trying to return a kick with someone right in front of him and then bringing a kick out of the end zone. On the first, Olswzewski was lucky that his fumble went out of bounds, and on the second he took a vicious hit from Ashton Dulin short of the 20-yard line. The Patriots jumped offsides on a missed field goal by Badgley later in the game, allowing him a second chance that he made.

Ultimately, Ventrone’s vaunted punt block team landed the biggest blow. Indianapolis already had two touchdowns on opponent punts this season, and Matthew Adams laid out to block an early Patriots attempt, sending the ball flying back into the end zone, where E.J. Speed recovered it for his second special-teams touchdown of the season.

In a defensive game with few big plays offensively, the touchdown on special teams ended up making a big difference.