INDIANAPOLIS – There were plenty of Colts fans who watched Sunday’s 23-17 home loss to the Jaguars and staunchly believed Sauce Gardner shouldn’t have been on the field.
The All-Pro cornerback – the star of the NFL’s trade deadline on Nov. 4 – says anyone who questions why he would put his already-injured body on the line with little, if anything, at stake has some work to do to get to know what drives one of the Colts’ cornerstones of the future.
Because if Gardner, who four weeks ago suffered a calf injury that sidelined him for the Colts’ following three games, could practice Friday, as he did for the first time since his injury, then there was no reason not to play.
“That ain’t how I operate,” Gardner said postgame Sunday, after the fourth-overall pick from the 2022 draft was held out of most of the back-half of the team’s Week 17 loss with calf tightness. “I’ve got so much gratitude for this game, and it’s a blessing to be able to just go out there and play.
“It’s not about the playoffs. I don’t play this game solely for the playoffs. I play this game because this is my dream. I’ve got a passion for this game, so any time that I’ve got the opportunity to play this game, that’s what I want to do. There’s a lot of people in this world that wish they could be me.”
Colts head coach Shane Steichen was asked this week how the team would manage playing time around the prospect of their playoff fate being decided by the time they took the field early Sunday afternoon. Steichen said Friday the Colts would approach Sunday no different no matter how the Saturday late-afternoon Texans-Chargers game went.
With the Texans win, the Colts lost their final strand of playoff hopes. Without that, the prevailing theory in the fan base was that players dealing with injuries should he held out.
Steichen’s reasoning around keeping Rivers as the team’s starting quarterback and not tapping in rookie sixth-rounder Riley Leonard with 18 hours of preparation made sense to many. But pulling a player of Gardner’s caliber last-minute wouldn’t have nearly the same effect on the game.
Though he left the game in the second half with some discomfort and ultimately didn’t return, Gardner said he never had a second thought about how Sunday’s game was handled.
“It was a blessing,” he said. “Every year, the people that I get to see in the building, in the locker room and the people I get to play on the field with, that group will never be the same. Every year, something’s changing.
“That was definitely motivation for me to get back on the field and be able to go out and have fun with it.”
Gardner said when he was ultimately pulled in the second half, his left calf was “tightening up a little bit on me.”
“I told them not to rule me out because I was going to try and just do my thing, but it was tightening up on me,” he continued. “Especially when I would get blocked and try to put my weight back on it, but I don’t think I re-strained it or anything crazy.”
Joel A. Erickson and Nathan Brown cover the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Why Sauce Gardner played for the Colts despite a calf injury
Reporting by Nathan Brown, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
