Chris Ballard had one of those feelings Thursday night. He gets this way sometimes during the NFL Draft, when there’s a safer pick to make, even in the first round – especially in the first round – but Ballard can’t do it because he has a feeling. The Colts general manager had one in 2018 with the sixth overall pick, when he did something nobody would do that high in the first round and used it on a guard. The guard was Quenton Nelson. Worked out fine.
Ballard had another of those feelings in 2023 when he had the fourth overall pick and used it on a quarterback with 13 career starts in college. The quarterback was Anthony Richardson. We’ll see how that one works out, but we’ve seen enough to understand why Ballard did it.
Ballard did it again Thursday night. First round of the 2024 NFL Draft, Colts sitting on the No. 15 overall pick, and each of the 14 players taken above them was on the offensive side of the ball. Seemed like Ballard would, and maybe should, run that streak to 15 – didn’t it? Richardson needs another receiver or two, but the top three wideouts in this draft were gone, including Marvin Harrison Jr. of Ohio State.
And there’s Ballard in the Colts’ draft room at 56th Street, surrounded by scouts and front office executives and head coach Shane Steichen, and Ballard’s getting that feeling.
This one’s an all-timer, though, because with the 15th overall pick in the 2024 NFL Draft, the Indianapolis Colts select…
… a player who retired from football after his freshman season of college.
The Colts just drafted UCLA’s Laiatu Latu, who might just be the best pass-rusher in the draft. Might just be the best story, too.
Insider Joel A. Erickson: Our scouting report on UCLA EDGE Laiatu Latu
Laiatu Latu, Peyton Manning had same doc
Laiatu Latu came out of retirement for the same reason as Peyton Manning a decade earlier: Because Dr. Robert Watkins said he could.
Got your attention? Good. Here’s the rest of that story:
Manning was having neck issues in his final years with the Colts. You remember. He underwent two surgeries, then needed a third in September 2011. His season was over. If this surgery, by far the most invasive of the three, didn’t work? His career was over, too.
Peyton went to Dr. Robert Watkins of the Watkins Spine Center in Marina del Rey, Calif., for neck fusion surgery. Less than five months later Watkins cleared him to play football again. Manning ended up in Denver. Won a Super Bowl. You remember.
Nearly a decade later, Latu was entering his sophomore season at Washington. This was 2020, after he’d played some as a true freshman, a four-star recruit – a member of ESPN’s top 300 – out of Sacramento. He had a promising future until he cracked heads with a teammate in practice. His neck was tingling. Doctors saw the damage in his neck and performed fusion surgery. The tingling lingered. Washington’s medical staff wouldn’t clear Latu, and suggested he retire from the sport. He did, but stayed on scholarship for the 2020 and ’21 seasons. Maybe he’d be a coach.
Colts news: Colts draft pick Laiatu Latu has cited Peyton Manning’s recovery from neck injury as inspiration
But then the coach at Washington, Jimmy Lake, was fired. And Latu’s mother, Kerry, started doing some research. She heard about this neck specialist in southern California whose office had worked on more than 150 NFL players, not to mention dozens of NBA, MLB and Olympic athletes. Kerry Latu wasn’t wanting another surgery for her son. She wanted another opinion.
Laiatu Latu went to the Watkins Spine Center, where Watkins performed a handful of tests and studied scans of his neck. And in late 2021, two years into Latu’s medical retirement, Watkins told the young defensive end what he’d told Manning 10 years earlier:
You’re good to go.
Washington wouldn’t clear Latu, so he transferred to UCLA. Two seasons and 23½ sacks later, Laiatu Latu was the most technically proficient pass rusher in the 2024 NFL Draft class. Not the most physically imposing – though he certainly looks the part at 6-5, 265 pounds, and runs the 40-yard dash in 4.64 seconds – but the most technical.
ESPN analyst Booger McFarland, a star defensive lineman at LSU and not a bad one for the Colts in 2006, says Latu will come into the NFL and immediately “be one of the upper-tier skill rushers in the league.”
Said Latu Thursday night on a Zoom call with Colts reporters: “I got a bunch of moves in my repertoire. I have three main moves but I make sure that I dial down with a lot of moves because you never know what’s going to come out of you at game time.”
Latu entered the 2024 NFL Draft knowing he needed a team to give him a chance. Multiple teams had given him the red-flag treatment instead, removing him from their draft board entirely, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter. But Latu didn’t need 32 teams to believe in him. Just one.
And Chris Ballard had a feeling.
Colts ranked fifth in NFL in sacks, but wanted Latu anyway
Ballard has described the way he felt when he saw Quenton Nelson in person, sprinting past him on the practice fields at Notre Dame:
“You can feel him,” Ballard says.
Colts scout Morocco Brown had a similar “wow” sensation watching Anthony Richardson working out in 2022 at Florida, at one point texting Ballard to say:
You should see the show that I’m seeing on this practice field right now.
Ballard traveled to Gainesville later, saw it for himself, and filed it away. He told reporters at the 2023 NFL Combine that he expected to stay put at No. 4 overall and still get the best player in the draft. He had that feeling about Richardson.
Someday he’ll tell us more about his feelings on Laiatu Latu, who has a motor for sure, and not just for sacks. He also gets into the backfield for tackles for loss, leading the country with 1.8 TFL’s per game in 2023. You know how some players get three or four sacks in a game or two, but disappear in others? Not Latu. He was involved on at least one sack or TFL in all 13 of his games as a senior.
That’s among the reasons the Colts got him. It’s not like they needed another pass-rusher – not as badly as they need another receiver or cornerback, anyway. Nobody can ever have too many pass rushers, but the Colts did rank fifth in the NFL in 2023 with 51 sacks, a result of a balanced rush that saw four players record at least eight sacks: Samson Ebukam (9.5), Kwity Paye (8.5), DeForest Buckner (8) and Dayo Odeyingbo (8).
Speaking of Odeyingbo…
He’s another guy who’s here because Ballard had a feeling. Ballard drafted him in the second round in 2021, No. 54 overall, despite the torn Achilles’ Odeyingbo had suffered eight games into his final season at Vanderbilt. Ballard liked him, though. Ballard liked him so much, he conceded later, that he considered drafting Odeyingbo in the first round before selecting Paye with the No. 21 selection. When Odeyingbo was still there 33 picks later, Ballard couldn’t submit that name to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell fast enough.
When Ballard gets one of these feelings, don’t get in his way. Just get ready to see why.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
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