Spencer Shrader's Four Field Goals and the Night Indianapolis Climbed Out of a Nine-Game Losing Streak

Two uprights stood forty-three yards away from the spot of the ball. Spencer Shrader walked out with his groin still hurting, and the entire stadium in Indianapolis understood one thing: the fate of a franchise rested on the leg of a man fans only remember when he misses. The ball was set down. Tens of thousands of people held their breath as if sharing a single lung. The ball rose, passed cleanly through the gap between the uprights, and the game closed at 19-17 for the Indianapolis Colts over the Houston Texans — their first win after nine consecutive defeats, the longest active losing streak in the National Football League.

My notebook still holds a few drops of Moscow rain, and tonight it holds one more hastily written line. I recorded the kick, but what kept me sitting long after the final whistle was the silence before the ball left Shrader's foot — the silence no scoreboard can ever print. A game can be decided by a motion shorter than two seconds, and an entire season can fit inside those two seconds.

The sport in this piece is American football, or the NFL for short, and that matters to the reader. The tools I normally use to read a football match — expected goals, passes allowed per defensive action, financial fair play, sell-on clauses, promotion and relegation — are all absent here. The NFL runs on a hard salary cap, a college draft, a free-agency market and a closed league structure with no relegation. Reading an NFL game with football's instruments produces a methodological error, and that error deserves to be named before we touch a single number.

One team learning how to lose, one team forgetting how to win

Indianapolis entered this game as a side that had hit bottom. Nine straight defeats is the longest active losing streak in the NFL, a record nobody wants to hold. Their previous win was recorded on 2 November, in a game played in Berlin as part of the league's international series. Their last win on American soil came on 26 October 2026. In other words, the memory of victory among Indianapolis fans had grown old enough to fade like a photograph left in a drawer.

The Berlin detail deserves a pause, because it tells a story far larger than one result. The NFL has long staged regular-season games abroad as part of a market-expansion strategy: selling broadcast rights, selling jerseys, cultivating a new generation of European spectators. For someone watching from Asia, as I do, this creates a familiar paradox: a sport native to America is learning to become global, while sports that were already global are learning to become local in order to keep their audiences.

Houston arrived as a divisional rival in the AFC South with an 0-3 start — only the second time in franchise history they have opened that way. Across the last six meetings, the Colts had never won. So the game carried two very different weights: for the Colts, a chance not to turn themselves into the league's punchline; for the Texans, a fixture that should have been easy.

There is a data point I want to state plainly. According to the record provided, the Colts now sit at 1-2 while also carrying a nine-game losing streak. Those two facts reconcile only if the streak carried over from last season into this one, and the October and November 2026 dates also need verification before being quoted. I raise it rather than quietly ignore it, because sports writing lives on accuracy, and accuracy begins with admitting where you are not certain.

A win built from the foot, not from the hand

The Colts scored 19 points. I pulled that number apart, and it tells a very different story from the celebration in the stands.

Seven points came from the offense: a Keenan Allen touchdown, his first in a Colts jersey — a sign that an experienced player was brought in and is gradually being integrated. The other twelve came from four successful Shrader kicks. Most of the home team's points were not produced by the offense at all. They were produced by the kicking unit, on the back of a defense that held the game clean.

Look at the passing line. Daniel Jones completed 24 of 36 passes for 235 yards and one touchdown. Taken alone, those numbers sketch a quarterback managing a game acceptably. Place beside them three lost balls and two giveaways, and the portrait changes colour entirely. The second turnover came at a moment when the team could not afford to err, and it led directly to Houston's go-ahead score. That is a turning-point error, the kind fans forgive in a rookie but not in the man handed the keys.

The run game did not hold either. Jonathan Taylor carried 23 times for just 68 yards, roughly 2.96 yards per carry — below an efficient league baseline. Twenty-three carries is a confession that the coaching staff stayed committed to the run. Sixty-eight yards is a confession that the plan did not work. When a run game is stuffed below three yards a carry, the entire offense is pushed into long-yardage passing situations, and the quarterback's margin for error multiplies.

On the other sideline, Houston completed 16 of 27 passes, rushed for 70 yards on 21 carries, roughly 3.33 yards per attempt, and managed only 223 total yards for the game. That is the output of a lost offense, and it matches an 0-3 record.

And here is the most notable point of the night. The Colts defense had allowed more than 500 yards in each of its first two games. Tonight it allowed 223. The shift is real, but the bigger question sits behind it: was it real because the Colts fixed their errors, or real because the opponent was collapsing? I lean toward the second, and I will explain why.

Shrader, meanwhile, is carrying a workload far beyond a normal kicker's. Four field goals in one game, including a 43-yard decider, delivered through a groin injury, means the team is leaning on him more than it should. A kicker in form is a gift. A kicker in form while injured is a bet that gets renewed every week.

Collective memory will remember this game wrongly

People will remember that the Colts ended a nine-game losing streak. That is true, and I do not deny it. But collective memory has a characteristic blind spot: it records the result and erases the mechanism. The result was 19-17. The mechanism was a team that lost the turnover battle, scored seven points from its offense, depended on the leg of a hurting man, and was rescued by an 0-3 opponent playing naive football.

Winning on four field goals while losing the turnover battle is a thin-margin formula. It does not scale into a season. Watching the Colts from the start of this campaign, I see a fairly clear pattern: when the offense holds the ball, this team stays in games; when the offense gives it away, everything collapses within minutes. Tonight the offense still gave the ball away twice. The only difference is that this opponent was not sharp enough to punish it.

There is a subtle strategic point here, and it deserves to be called by its proper name. A run-heavy plan willing to settle for three points per kick presents itself as a step forward in discipline. Inside it is fear. When the offense cannot hold the ball, you pass less, run more, and pray the clock moves faster than your opponent. That caution looks a great deal like character on a stat sheet, but it is how a coaching staff protects itself from questions about its own future. I have seen football's version of this fear across five decades of writing, and it has never led to a trophy.

It is also worth noting the other side. Houston sits somewhere far darker than a 17-point scoreline suggests. A second 0-3 start in franchise history, an offense producing only 223 yards, a run game below 3.4 yards an attempt. When a team expected to contend performs like that three weeks running, pressure moves quickly from players to coaches, and their story will harden into a genuine crisis if nothing changes next week.

For the Colts, there is a hidden opportunity behind all of this. If Houston keeps sliding, the AFC South opens wider than usual, and a rebuilding side like Indianapolis could find a window nobody predicted. But an opportunity is only worth something to a team that knows how not to throw it away, and so far the Colts have not proven that.

What I will track over the next two weeks is specific. Jones's giveaway count. Shrader's groin and whether the team activates a backup kicker. Taylor's rushing efficiency, where three yards a carry is the line between a living offense and a dead one. And finally the defense: whether 223 yards was a genuine correction or a gift from an opponent melting down.

What remains

They called me a dreamer, but the ball has never hidden anything from me. It simply tells its story slower than people want to hear. The Colts still carry an open question at quarterback, still carry an open question in the run game, and their defense still has to prove it can hold 223 yards against an opponent that knows how to score. Sixty-nine years in, I still believe a beautiful pass is a love letter — and so is a well-timed kick.

The scoreboard cannot hold a heart, and this sport writes its poetry in exactly the places it cannot count. Tonight that poem was titled after a kicker with a sore groin. Will it still be there next week, when the opponent no longer hands the game away?