Colts’ decision to pay Alec Pierce, move Michael Pittman Jr. will have lasting impact in fantasy and reality

The Indianapolis Colts were the first team to shake up the wide receiver landscape this offseason with a pair of moves to kick off free agency earlier this week. 

First, Indianapolis managed to retain the services of Alec Pierce on a four-year, $116 million contract that places him among the top-10 highest-paid wide receivers on an average-per-year salary basis. He comes in just behind Lions star receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown. In order to clear space for Pierce’s new deal, the Colts had to wave goodbye to stalwart starting receiver Michael Pittman Jr., trading him in a late-round pick swap to the Pittsburgh Steelers. 

From a fantasy and production standpoint, I have mostly positive but some mixed feelings about Pierce returning to Indianapolis. 

What returning to Colts means for Pierce

Generally, I’m more pro players sticking with a team that’s getting the most out of them and there’s no doubt that Shane Steichen’s Colts got the best out of Pierce last season. The grass is not always greener on the other side. True No. 1 receivers can go anywhere, generally do not have to worry about being deployed in unfavorable ways and can produce in any circumstance. I’m a huge fan of Pierce’s game and have liked him ahead of consensus as a prospect and after his rookie year, but despite what the contract says, Pierce has yet to prove he’s at that level. 

The Colts got the most out of Pierce last season by using him more often as a condensed X-receiver lined up closer to the line of scrimmage — which gives him more space to operate as an outside receiver — and Pierce responded by expanding his ability to win on in-breaking routes like the dig. Pierce previously hadn’t shown much on that particular pattern but that’s key in cracking modern split safety coverages to create big plays over the middle. 

A good chunk of this is Pierce developing as a player in Year 4 but you also have to credit the scheme and play-caller. Frankly, I just think it’s easier to project Pierce while staying in that familiar role, rather than taking over another team’s vertical X-receiver gig where he may be miscast. 

The debate about whether Pierce can be more than what he was last year seems to center on whether he can be more than just a deep-ball receiver, aka, can he run the full route tree? I think that slightly misses the mark. Reception Perception shows that Pierce can do more than just run go routes, and that’s always been the case. He just added even more to his plate in the intermediate area. The question for Pierce is more about whether he can become a more consistently targeted player. 

Last season, among 118 wide receivers who ran 200-plus routes, Pierce ranked 67th in targets per route run (17.7%). That trailed both Pittman (36th) and Josh Downs (24th) on his own team. Obviously, Pierce’s downfield and X-receiver role makes his targets more high-yield when they hit, so nobody thought anything of it when he was being used in that fashion in 2025. 

Signing him to this deal significantly changes expectations and, fair or unfair, he’s now going to be judged based on his production relative to that money. 

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What Pittman’s departure means for Pierce, Colts offense

Pittman’s moving on will open up opportunities for Pierce to inherit. Downs will likely step into the WR2 role in two-receiver sets, tight end Tyler Warren should see more targets, but the depth behind them isn’t great. My guess is that Indianapolis will replace Pittman with a Day 2 draft-and-develop wide receiver, which is what all three of these receivers were for the Colts. It’s worked for all three of them; it did not work out for AD Mitchell two drafts ago. So it’s not a lock that this hypothetical player will be good enough off the rip to inherit a big role — I’d project Pierce and Downs’ roles as pretty secure. 

So really, what matters for Pierce to become a more high-volume player is a more varied role beyond just the vertical X-receiver archetype. Otherwise, he could fall into the problem that DK Metcalf (WR26 in fantasy) fell into last year as a downfield X-receiver-only player with a quarterback who didn’t consistently rip the throws he ran within the concepts. Even Courtland Sutton, another player in this archetype, proves some of the risks at play here. Sutton finished as the WR11 in fantasy, overall, but had four games last year with just one catch and was out-targeted by an inferior player in Troy Franklin, to no fault of his own. It just happens when you have a quarterback playing in chaos, as was the case for Bo Nix at times with the 2025 Broncos. They just become a little less willing and/or able to hang in the pocket and wait for the long-developing perimeter routes from the X to develop. 

Volatility is fine; every receiver is going to have quiet weeks. Pierce himself had five games with one or zero catches. Two of them came with Philip Rivers starting and they were sandwiched around a four-catch, 86-yard, two-touchdown game. Again, that’s all perfectly fine when he’s a complementary X-receiver on a rookie deal. When expectations and pay changes, the way the player is used must also change. That’s where it will be on the team to use Pierce pre-snap in a different way than we’ve seen to date. I think they can but my opinion and that of the staff may not overlap — one matters much more than the other if we’re trying to guess outcomes. All of this just invites new variables for a player who was deployed flawlessly relative to his skills and traits in 2024 and 2025 as the finishing piece to a wide receiver room that featured an ideal flanker in Pittman and slot in Downs. 

Going all-in on Daniel Jones comes with plenty of risk

Speaking of volatility that matters quite a bit when projecting Pierce for 2026, let’s also be clear that while the Colts are desperately hoping that what was a historically efficient offense in the first eight games of the season will just be right back to form with Daniel Jones locked up for the next couple of seasons, that is no guarantee. Rebellions may be built on hope, but so were many now broken NFL dreams. 

If you talk with anyone who has played with the Colts the last few seasons — and I have — or hell, even a Colts fan, they’re all wearing some kind of scars from having to experience the immense quarterback turnover this team has endured dating back to Andrew Luck’s shocking preseason retirement before the 2019 NFL season.

That’s why when Jones played at a high level and captained them to a masterful start in the first eight weeks, it was the oasis in the desert that Chris Ballard, the longest suffering wanderer, and Co. couldn’t help but cling to. He did more than that; he went all-in on that sample and traded two first-round picks to acquire Sauce Gardner … right in time for everything to fall apart. That’s why they’re so pot committed to this build and, reportedly, never considered another option at quarterback, no matter what fun and possibly even superior fan fiction ideas existed. To Ballard and others in the organization, stability with Jones was the only answer. They crave the ecstasy of being able to say they’re walking into this NFL season with the same man under center as they planned to start last year. To them, this is the reprieve to heal the quarterback wounds they’ve carried for years.

In order to do that, they’ve put on blinders to all the perils. The reality that Jones was already starting to regress to some of his less desirable form in Weeks 9 and 10 — before he broke his leg — when he took a whopping 12 sacks in two games. The sobering truth that Jones breaking said leg and then tearing his Achilles tendon in Week 14 was just the latest in a long history of injuries for the soon-to-be 29-year-old quarterback. Never mind the fact that our recent data on quarterbacks coming back from an Achilles injury includes two miserable examples in the first year back with 2024 Aaron Rodgers and Kirk Cousins. We haven’t even mentioned that this team has chosen to remove the most reliable wideout in the room, Pittman, from Jones’ arsenal, a guy with whom he held pristine chemistry in that magical eight-game run. 

Just because they have chosen to ignore or, at the very least, accept the danger of those risks doesn’t mean that we have to when projecting this team. 

My worry is that the Colts learned the wrong lesson from their excellent start to last season. In my view, and I could be way off on this, what the first half of 2025 showed us was proof of concept in demonstrating just how fantastic of an elite ecosystem this Colts offense is at its peak. The 2025 Colts had a high-end play-caller in Shane Steichen, an elite running back, a strong offensive line, a tight end who was a perfect finishing piece and a fantastic three-receiver set of Pierce, Pittman and Downs, who perfectly filled the X, Z and slot roles required a dangerous and diverse offense. You put just about any functional quarterback into that situation and you’re going to get high-caliber, efficient offensive play. The lesson was that you quarterback-proofed the offense but because of their scars and winding desert-walk searching for a franchise passer, they took a different view on the summary. 

To them, Jones was and is the answer; the key that unlocked everything. If it were a fully healthy version of Jones who played as he did in Weeks 1 to 8 over a full season, I’d be on board with their conclusion. Yet, it’s just not. That doesn’t mean the Colts will lose this gamble but it without a doubt increases the volatility of everyone involved with this operation in 2026. 

Let’s not overlook the impact of the Pittman trade

Lastly, I just want to emphasize that removing Pittman from the equation that added up to the elite Weeks 1 to 8 offense really does matter quite a bit. My sense from consuming other opinions about this choice to retain Pierce at $29 million and saying goodbye to Pittman’s cap hit to make it happen — a defensible decision based on Downs and Warren’s skill set overlapping with where Pittman wins and the respective age of the two wideouts — is that people have forgotten how good Pittman is at the game. 

While Pittman doesn’t make big plays like Pierce down the field, he’s an excellent zone beater who gets open in the short-to-intermediate areas with a specialty at working the middle of the field. In other words, he’s a huge factor in creating layups for a quarterback and boosting efficiency. 

The Colts will miss Pittman and I just couldn’t shake the thought while charting his 2025 film that he’s a perfect fit for Rodgers in a Mike McCarthy West Coast offense. 

McCarthy’s offense is based on quick throws and slant-based concepts tied to the quarterback’s drop. Pittman is one of the best big receivers at winning fast off the line of scrimmage on in-breakers. As we’ve seen over and over again, Rodgers craves working with veteran receivers who know where they’re supposed to be and are in the right spots with the progression of a play. Pittman is a smart wideout who has a mastery level at this part of the position. 

The only concerning variable for Pittman is that he’ll turn 29 this year and has slowed down in back-to-back seasons after fast starts due to injuries. 

If he’s healthy, Pittman’s game lines up better with the current version of Rodgers than Metcalf’s does as that volatile X-receiver on the outside. It wouldn’t shock me at all, despite their differences in annual salary, if Pittman catches more passes, if not straight out-produces Metcalf, if Rodgers is under center for 17 games with the Steelers. I don’t know if that’s enough for me to be excited about Pittman in fantasy, given the limitations of a Rodgers-based passing attack, but it will inform how I view these guys relative to consensus. For the Steelers, though, this is a shrewd move to get an ideal running mate to Metcalf, whose game is perfectly complementary and solves a WR2 problem that has haunted them for many seasons.