INDIANAPOLIS – After he’d reached the conclusion of what he called “the most mentally challenging battles that I’ve ever been through,” Spencer Shrader’s phone rang Sunday. Colts special teams coordinator Brian Mason was on the other line, and when the placekicker heard the good news – “He calls and tells me that I’m going to be starting for the Colts…” – all Shrader could do was sigh.
“And he’s kinda like, ‘That’s your reaction?!’” Shrader told reporters Thursday. “And I was like, ‘Well, no, I’m incredibly grateful and blessed.’ I was praying about that and working towards that but you have to prepare yourself emotionally for any outcome and it kinda took a while for that to set in and for that to feel real.
“I think people on the outside, they look at preseason and say, ‘Do these (games) really matter? They don’t count.’ But for us, that’s our life, you know? Every single day, you’re battling and battling, and so much goes into it, and so I do feel extremely blessed and grateful to be here.”
On Sunday, the Colts named Shrader the team’s Week 1 starting kicker for the second consecutive season, but the 12 months in between couldn’t have been more chaotic. Shrader joined the Colts in the 2024 offseason as an undrafted free agent extra leg in camp meant to push then-starter Matt Gay, and after the conclusion of camp, Shrader hung around Indianapolis before getting called up for brief stints with the Jets and Chiefs to make his NFL debut.
By the next spring, though Gay remained under contract, the Colts felt confident enough in Shrader to sign him as the team’s long-term plan at placekicker and cut the veteran Gay loose. Shrader’s first four-plus weeks in 2025 were nearly blemish-free, going 13-for-14 on field goals for the hottest offense in the NFL before an illegal hit from the Raiders’ Tristin McCollum left the Colts kicker with a torn ACL and MCL in his kicking leg.
He’d be sidelined from kicking for eight months – during which the Colts eventually landed on Blake Grupe as their end-of-season savior at the position. All the fellow Notre Dame standout did was go a perfect 21-for-21 on all kicks and set the franchise record for longest made field goal at 60 yards to boot.
In the offseason, Grupe signed a one-year contract to formally spark an intense kicking battle in Indianapolis, and two weeks into that battle in training camp, it was Grupe who held a comfortable lead.
“It was all that I could do to just keep up with him in camp and stay even,” said Shrader, who sat 20-for-30 on kicks in practice through the first two weeks of training camp. Grupe? 27-for-30. “He was kicking at such a high level that it just continually reminded me to just kick against myself every single day, and then finally I felt like myself towards the end.
“You go out and perform badly in a practice, and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen now?’ It was a really, really difficult camp. Camp is always a physical battle, but not so much for us specialists as it is a mental battle, and every single day, I’m trying to pull myself out of a bad mentality if things went bad, and if things were good, I’m trying to bring myself back down to neutral.”
The competition seemingly began to turn as joint practices and preseason games ramped up. In New England for the preseason opener Aug. 13, Shrader nailed a 61-yard field goal in the closing minutes of the fourth quarter – the same distance of a Grupe miss. Back in practice, Grupe continued to be narrowly better, but by the final week ahead of roster cuts, the pair sat with a 5% difference in kicking percentage throughout camp – though Grupe was 0-for-2 in games with an egregious miss from 36 yards against Atlanta, while Shrader was 4-for-4 with all his makes beyond 45 yards.
On Saturday, Grupe managed to doink in his longest make from 46 yard to pair with another kick through the uprights from 36 yards. Meanwhile, Shrader added another clip to his highlight reel – soaring one through from 60 yards out that might’ve still made it from 70.
The consensus leaving Lucas Oil Stadium that evening was that Shrader was a shoo-in for the job, but the 27-year-old did everything he could to remain in the dark and not get his hopes up.
“From the outside, everybody is like, ‘Oh, he’s drilling kicks in games…’ but when that’s you, it’s up in the air. You don’t know the final decision that’s going to happen,” he said. “I do a really good job of staying off social media and not reading what’s being said on the outside. I had people reaching out to me like, ‘Oh, it’s looking good for you,’ but I don’t feel that in the moment because I’m so caught up in, ‘What can I do every single day to get better?’
“It really is a mental grind, week-to-week, and that’s why I prepared myself mentally for the decision, because I think it might be one thing from the outside with everybody like, ‘Oh, he’s drilling 60- and 61-yarders,’ but when that’s you and it’s up in the air, you don’t know the final decision that’s going to happen. There were many points where I was like, ‘Man, this might be my last kick for the Colts’ or ‘This might be my last day with the Colts, so go out there and make the most of it.’”
Joel A. Erickson and Nathan Brown cover the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts K Spencer Shrader found out Sunday he’d made team. His reaction? A sigh of relief
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