Daniel Jones gave every Colts fan reason to panic even in a win

On paper, the Indianapolis Colts' OT win over the Atlanta Falcons in Berlin on Sunday morning was a much-needed rebound after an ugly loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers last weekend. Indy's offense was once again a machine, racking up seven yards per play and 519 total yards — 244 of which came on the ground courtesy of MVP candidate Jonathan Taylor, who scored a go-ahead TD from 85 yards out in the fourth before scoring the game-winner in overtime. The NFL's most dangerous attack through the first half of the season looked the part once again, and the Colts keep pace atop the AFC at 8-2.

Of course, for any Colts fans who experienced that game live rather than on paper, they might not be feeling quite so optimistic about things moving forward. Or at least they shouldn't be: Because while Indianapolis was able to avoid turning one bad week into a losing streak, Sunday's win over Atlanta felt a lot like last Sunday's loss to the Steelers in one very significant way. And it might be time to have some hard conversations about Daniel Jones as a result.

Daniel Jones' familiar bugaboo is the one thing that can derail the Colts

It's hard to overstate just how productive Jones has been so far this season, and he put up another tidy stat line against the Falcons, completing 19-of-26 passes for 255 yards while adding 53 yards on the ground on just seven carries. But if you're wondering how a game in which Indy moved the ball more or less at will all day required overtime, the answer is simple: Jones threw a pick and lost a fumble while taking a whopping seven sacks.

That's just one week after throwing three picks and taking five sacks in Pittsburgh. When the Colts stay on schedule, they're not just the best offense in the league but one of the best offenses in modern NFL history. When things go wrong, though, they go very, very wrong. Which would be easy enough to chalk up as an aberration; it's just two weeks, after all, and this team is still 8-2 and putting up points by the bushel.

Then again ... well, this is Daniel Jones we're talking about. I don't want to take away from how good he's been so far this season; he's made real improvements as a player, and he deserves plenty of credit for turning his career around after he was run out of New York. But the biggest reason he was run out of New York was a penchant for putting the ball in harm's way and taking way too many sacks. So it's not a great sign that, as he faces more and more pressure as defenses try to find a way to slow this Colts offense down, he's responding by putting the ball in harm's way and taking way too many sacks.

Maybe this is all much ado about a small sample size. Maybe Jones really has turned a new leaf and will keep on shredding all the way to the Super Bowl, and maybe I'm just an (admittedly somewhat bitter) Giants fan for harping on this. But as things stand, Indy has basically all the ingredients needed to claim a wide-open AFC this season. If you're looking for a weakness, it seems pretty clear after the last two weeks: Put pressure on Jones and wait for him to hand you the game and take the ball out of Taylor and Shane Steichen's hands.

Because really, we've seen some promising stretches of play out of Jones before — he has taken a team to the Divisional Round, after all. But those stretches always devolved in the same predictable way, and while the Colts have given him a better infrastructure than Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen could ever dream of, it's hard to shake the preconceived notions we had about Jones just a few weeks ago.

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