Last Sunday at halftime of the Colts/Vikings game, Daniel Jones left the field for the locker room. This, it turns out, was his most effective response to Minnesota’s pass rush.

Unfortunately, he came back.

On the Colts’ first possession of the third quarter, Eric Wilson and Jalen Redmond sacked him for ten yards. Blake Cashman then arrived to remove another thirteen. Two snaps. Twenty-three yards backward. Indianapolis had emerged from the locker room and immediately come under sustained bombardment.

This was not some fresh atrocity choreographed by the coaching staff at halftime. It was quite consistent with the plan.

Minnesota blitzed on 85.2 percent of Jones’s dropbacks.

85.2.

One is reminded of Marshawn Lynch explaining his approach to running through defenders in a 2016 interview with Jon Wertheim. The interviewer wondered whether there was a deeper metaphor. Marshawn’s explanation was more candid.

85.2%

AKA the highest rate in a game since Next Gen Stats began tracking in 2016. There was very little suspense about whether reinforcements were coming. The suspense concerned whether DJ would leave with his original complement of bones, arranged in the order Indianapolis had supplied them.

Pressure arrived on 60.9 percent of those blitzes. All four sacks came against the blitz. Jones threw for 108 yards; the sacks wiped out forty-four. Sixty-four net passing yards survived.

This was an air campaign moving backward.

Flores had hardly entered the season as a peacekeeping force. By September 25, Minnesota was already blitzing at a 79.3% clip, highest in the league. The nearest team was Carolina at 52.6. The second-most aggressive defense in football was practically distributing blankets by comparison.

And then Daniel Jones arrived, and Flores apparently found room in this already unreasonable military budget for further expenditure at the expense of a particularly vulnerable victim, whose work had not established him as the gold standard of either ball security or consistency. An already excessive bombardment had encountered a man unlikely to make a convincing case for de-escalation.

Indianapolis gave Jones a two-year, $88 million contract in March. From a clean pocket, he completed nine of eleven passes for eighty-three yards on Sunday. Under pressure, his completion rate fell to 36.4 percent. Indianapolis had purchased a quarterback who performed considerably better when nobody was attacking him. Flores, naturally, declined to honor the operating instructions.

In the end, six points separated the teams; considerably more separated Jones from command of the situation. Eighty-eight million dollars, and Minnesota was moving him around the field like furniture in a building scheduled for demolition. Indianapolis had already sent two first-round picks and Adonai Mitchell to the Jets for Sauce Gardner. By Tuesday, Quenton Nelson was headed to Seattle and DeForest Buckner back to San Francisco for a third, a fourth and a fifth between them. The Colts are now selling parts of the building. The expensive furniture still remains, while next year’s first-round pick belongs to the Jets.

The score remained an insultingly reasonable description of what had happened. A one-possession game. Competitive football. A perfectly salvageable afternoon, provided Indianapolis could persuade the man being shelled to remain at the coordinates Minnesota already had.

Jones saved his most accommodating work for the final possession. After a thirteen-yard completion to Josh Downs, he had first-and-ten at his own forty-four and seventy-five seconds to salvage the afternoon. He threw toward Will Mallory, into a lane that had already very comfortably been occupied by Harrison Smith for what seemed like a while. Flores had spent the game finding increasingly elaborate ways to get his defenders to the football. DJ finally spared him the trouble of arranging transportation.

Smith intercepted it without a terribly complex tactical adjustment. Eighty-eight million dollars, and Jones had concluded the evening by offering Minnesota complimentary delivery.

Eventually the clock reached zero. For the first time all game, Flores encountered something he could not send his defensive line through.