Daniel Jones' Colts Still Have Nothing On Kurt Warner and the 1999 Rams

When it comes to unexpected early-season breakouts, the original Greatest Show still reigns supreme.

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Another week of the 2025 NFL season is in the books, and once again the Indianapolis Colts looked like a Super Bowl team. This time, it was dropping 40 points on the Las Vegas Raiders with Daniel Jones throwing for an efficient 212 yards on 20-of-29 passing with 2 TDs and Jonathan Taylor adding 3 more on the ground, as the Indy defense made Geno Smith’s life miserable on the other side of the ball.

Now, the Pete Carroll-edition Raiders may be a bad football team — they rank 28th in my points-per-game power ratings and 26th in the Elo rankings, not far from where they figured to be ahead of the season. So are the Dolphins and Titans, for that matter, each of whom the Colts also laid three-touchdown beatings upon so far. But blowing out bad opponents is one of the surprising, counterintuitive hallmarks of an elite team, and Indianapolis (with its league-best +14.8 PPG margin) has already shown an aptitude for that, while also staying competitive against the better teams they’ve faced.

In that way, and many others, I can’t stop thinking about the emergence of these Colts as a modern analogue for another team that announced itself, seemingly out of nowhere, with a series of huge wins over bad teams: the 1999 St. Louis Rams.

I’ve written about the Greatest Show on Turf Rams before, interviewing Dick Vermeil and exploring how his team changed offensive football forever — turning old-school football’s “establish the run” orthodoxy upside down while proving that teams who pass early and often could win championships, too. With Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk, Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, Orlando Pace and many more of my favorite players on the roster, it’s probably fair to say that team has lived rent-free in my head for over 25 years.¹

But Jones and the Colts are certainly doing their best Warner/Rams impression so far this year. So naturally, I had to see how their numbers stacked up — and just how close Indiana Jones and the Colts Crusade has come to channeling its own version of the Greatest Show on Turf.