Twenty months before he'd arrive at Colts training camp and ask for a trade, Jonathan Taylor could feel the floor of the locker room shake. Rap music was blaring.

A chant could be heard outside the door:

“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”

This 21-year-old running back scored five touchdowns in a 41-15 thrashing of the Bills and their No. 1-ranked defense. He totaled four rushing scores and one receiving with 175 yards rushing to become the first player in NFL history with such a stat line.

He scored one by soaring through the air, over the heads of the linemen.

“A (expletive) superhero,” tight end Mo Alie-Cox said that day.

GO DEEPER: How Jonathan Taylor's historic performance vs. Bills raised the belief the Colts have in themselves

Owner Jim Irsay beamed, for he’s a sucker for football history and legendary Colts players. Here, he was witnessing the birth of both.

That week, general manager Chris Ballard told an assistant coach on “Hard Knocks” that Taylor was already a top-five offensive weapon in the NFL. He didn’t use the phrase running back. And nor did Taylor’s teammates as they launched MVP campaigns.

With a telepathic vision to see holes before they open, a spring-like step to launch into cut-back lanes and a 4.39 speed to run away from people or through them at 226 pounds, this young man seemed too elusive to stuff into a box.

“He’s remarkable,” running back Nyheim Hines said. “The complete package.”

In his legs and in his heart, Taylor was starting to feel it, too. So when the chant finished and all eyes turned to him, his smile spread so wide, it was fair to wonder what space the words had to run through.

But he found some anyway.

“What we did today,” Taylor told the Colts, “We did it as a family."

That family could use a therapist these days.

The Colts are eight days into training camp, and Taylor has yet to suit up. He wears a hoodie pulled tight to his forehead and stares out with a blank face. He doesn’t engage teammates much beyond a few isolated conversations. His smile is hard to find.

A year and a half after the 2021 season when Taylor won the rushing title by nearly 500 yards, he doesn’t want to play for the Colts. The Colts want him here, but only for right now. They know they can franchise tag him next year and the year after that if they’d like; given the rate will start at just over $10.09 million, or the lowest for any position in football other than specialists.

His request for a trade to a team that will value him more has fallen on deaf ears.

"We will not trade Jonathan Taylor,” Irsay said to IndyStar. “That is a certainty. Not now, or not in October.”

The Colts own his current contract, and they’ll dictate the next. The top-end running back contracts out there are for between $12 million and $16 million, but this summer has dragged that market into a recession. Taylor is just the latest star back to feel the sting, joining Josh Jacobs, Saquon Barkley, Tony Pollard and Austin Ekeler. The Saturday before training camp, these names hopped on a Zoom call to toss around ideas of what, if anything, they could do about it.

It's not that teams don't want these players around; they're just agreeing collectively not to pay them more than they must. To front offices, even elite running backs are like leased cars. They can run up the mileage until the age starts to show, and they can move on to a new set of wheels before the decline sets in.

Five days before he reported to camp, Taylor voiced his angst on Twitter.

He’s become a marionette in his own life, months after he got married and began the planning process of dreams. That’s why he’s going nuclear. He has a few emotions simmering in him now, like oil in a pan that’s just getting used to the flame.

…

Relationships live and die in a space called trust, and nobody spent more time thinking about that this past January than Taylor. He felt like he had two weddings to plan this year – one with his childhood sweetheart, Ayanna Chapman; and one with the Colts.

Before he could get to either, he needed to get his mind and body right. The previous season took a toll unlike the others, from the 4-12-1 finish to the six games he missed due to a high-ankle sprain to the others he trudged through with an ankle that felt like a slinky.

He knew repeating his 1,811 yards and 18 touchdowns from 2021, the most dominant rushing season from any player in the past decade, was a dream. Failing to hit even half of those stat totals was a hit to the pride. But it wasn’t the hardest part.

How Jonathan Taylor cares for his body

That came in the loss of power he felt in his own body. The story of Taylor’s rise is one of elite abilities, yes, but also of a manic and scientific approach to maintaining and protecting them. He slides into a “Bod Pod” each summer to calculate the body fat he shed through an offseason of speed training, Pilates and plyometrics. He has such a detailed post-game routine of tub work, yoga and training that he’s almost always the last Colts player to leave the locker room, sometimes by more than a half hour.

The making of Jonathan Taylor: How Colts star RB took his body to another level this offseason

He believes in building the muscle and flexibility to contort his body wherever it needs to go to make a safe landing, like a ballerina in football pads.

“With football, the injury rate is 100%,” he said a couple years ago. “The only thing you can do is maximize the maximization. Maximize everything you’re doing to prepare in order to minimize your risk of injury.”

In that sense, a part of him saw the high-ankle sprain coming all along.

The first month of the season became a perfect storm of a patchwork offensive line and an immobile quarterback in Matt Ryan handing off to Taylor and feeling the defense converge.

An ankle sprain in Week 4 against the Titans started the unraveling of his 2022 season. Yes, he was running a little bouncy before that, and after it his pass protection took a dip. But the details can slip under pain and stress.

The ankle was the thread that connected them all. He hurt it three times between Weeks 4 and 15, with the final one shutting down his season.

The ankle surgery he planned for two weeks after the season was about more than repairing a ligament. It was about restoring faith in his body and a fearlessness in his running.

It was about gaining control of the biggest year of his life.

And it was about marrying his desires with those of the team he wanted to represent for years to come. There were a couple different wounds to heal here, as he and the Colts didn’t always agree on the state of his ankle the year before. They expected him to play a game against the Jaguars in Week 6, only for him to show up to the walkthrough the day before and tell them he wasn’t ready to go.

They needed a bounce-back together.

But optimism was high when Taylor arrived for surgery Jan. 25, six days after his 23rd birthday. The Colts signed off on a plan with renowned ankle expert Dr. Robert Anderson, Taylor told NFL Network.

The procedure was called arthroscopic debridement, a minimally invasive clean-up with a return to play of two to four weeks, a source with knowledge of these procedures told IndyStar.

“I’ll be on my feet in no time,” Taylor told NFL.com after the surgery. “I’ll be ready to go.”

Those weeks of forced inactivity came at a cathartic time. Taylor was fresh off his first football season since early in high school that was anything short of magnificent. In a span of six years, he’d topped 1,800 rushing yards five times across three different levels, shattering New Jersey high school and Division I college records and leading spectators at each stop to wonder if struggle was even in his vocabulary.

Taylor had always feared some kind of a slip, that moment when gravity and geometry align and the hero lands not on a stone but in the lava. How could he not after his NFL debut against the Jaguars, when Marlon Mack, the Colts' reigning 1,000-yard rusher, collapsed after a first-quarter run and was carted off the field with a torn Achilles?

Mack was in the final year of his rookie contract then. He's run for 185 yards in the three years since and never signed a contract worth more than $2 million.

Things fall apart, that's just physics, and you don’t have to tell that to a man like Taylor, who tried to major in astrophysics at Harvard before he chose Wisconsin and split his time majoring in astronomy and physics.

Getting drafted to the NFL was about trading those classes for some real-world application, which explains the plyometrics and Pilates, the rehab and the postgame sessions. He was running from fate.

But his first major injury brought something new into his life: a pause. After surgery, his body needed rest, which forced his mind to slow down and move to a different part of his life: the one he was building with his fiancé, Ayanna Chapman. They had plans to make ahead of their wedding day in early March.

One day, the two rode on a swan pedal boat through the Central Canal, surrounded by the skyscrapers lining the city they were ready to make a long-term home.

This became a spring of hope for the future, which intersected naturally with the biggest decision the Colts have made in Taylor's time here. They had the No. 4 pick in the NFL Draft and were going to take a quarterback. It’d be the first one they drafted in the first round since Andrew Luck, who retired the preseason before the Colts drafted Taylor.

After Taylor played with five starting quarterbacks in three years, the draft brought the hope of more stability entering his life. On April 27, the Colts drafted Anthony Richardson, who, at 6-4 and 244 pounds with 4.44-second speed, just happened to be the most athletic quarterback prospect in the history of the sport.

Taylor was one of the first two teammates to text Richardson upon the selection, along with Michael Pittman Jr. As Richardson rode on Irsay’s private jet from Kansas City to Indianapolis, dreams began to form before he’d even descended from the clouds.

It's hard to find a moment in NFL history where a quarterback this athletic played with a running back this electric. They'd be doing it in a Shane Steichen scheme that the Eagles just rode to the Super Bowl.

“We’re about to run it up and have some fun,” Richardson said.

Taylor was running on such confidence in the direction of his life this spring that eight days before the draft, when it was time to discuss his contract desires publicly, he could only think about the high road. He’d watched Irsay and Ballard reward draft pick after draft pick before their final contract year for delivering on and off the field, from Quenton Nelson to Braden Smith to Shaquille Leonard to Nyheim Hines to Kenny Moore II.

He rode that confidence in his words.

“I’m under contract for four years,” Taylor said. “I put pen to paper. So that’s where I’m at right now. I made an obligation to them. They made an obligation to me.”

That obligation, he felt, was that if he did all the right things, the rewards were going to come.

"If you succeed..."

…

Two of the earliest seeds of division between Taylor and the Colts were the biggest decisions they made this offseason: hiring Steichen and drafting Richardson.

With Steichen, the Colts had hired a coach who could use deception and run-pass-option designs to unleash multiple rushers in a backfield. He just did it with a 1,200-yard running back in Miles Sanders and a 700-yard quarterback in Jalen Hurts as the Eagles led the NFL in rushing efficiency against the league average, per Football Outsiders.

The hire placed a larger responsibility for the run game on the play designer than on any individual piece.

That is, except for one piece. Richardson was the first major acquisition in the partnership between Steichen and Ballard, and his presence would set the priorities and timelines for everything. Here was a 20-year-old with the upside of the moon but the rawness of a kid who'd made 13 starts above high school.

But the upside at that position did some healing for a franchise still reeling from Luck’s retirement at age 29. Nobody has worn that pain and longing more than Irsay, who became so fascinated by Richardson that he called him the morning of the draft out of fear that someone else might take him first.

In the days following the pick, Irsay compared Richardson to a superhero.

Though the future was exciting, the focus in the building became on the present. Like coal miners focused only on the six inches in front of their faces, the Colts went about each day of the offseason program like a step-by-step plan in building a quarterback, from installing the playbook to calling plays into his headset to introducing something as mundane as the five-step drop from the shotgun.

It became easier to forget about the contract talk with a running back who wasn't practicing, still working back off that ankle surgery.

In early May, Taylor returned to Indianapolis to host his annual event with Chunky Soup that would donate 1 million meals to people in need. In a moment that is a coincidence of timing but can still feel poetic, local news outlets weren't able to cover Taylor's event because they were at a rookie minicamp where Richardson was making some of his first throws as a member of the Colts.

Not long after, Taylor sat down with Ballard. The conversation ran long but did not produce a contract offer.

The Colts were hesitant to hand out extensions to any current player that early in the Richardson-Steichen tenure, both because of questions of schematic fit and of their own contention timeline.

The Colts also had questions about his return from the ankle injury since he wasn’t practicing, about whether he could rebound from a year with 861 yards and four touchdowns and some shaky moments in pass protection. In the most recent game they saw him play against the Cowboys, Taylor missed two blitz pickups that resulted in shots on the quarterback.

“The market is what the market is,” Ballard would say in a press conference in July, “but saying that, like I’ve always told y’all, you pay good players. You pay guys that are going to help you win regardless of the position. We think very highly of Jonathan. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a great season as a team and he’s coming off the injury.”

Jonathan Taylor changes agents

By the time Taylor spoke publicly again in June, he’d switched agencies to First Round Management. The new agent, Malki Kawa, has a lighter NFL portfolio than in mixed martial arts but did help Leonard land a five-year, $98.5 million deal with $52.5 million guaranteed in training camp two years prior.

Kawa comes from the MMA sphere, where management lives more in the public eye and where the barrier for entry is lower, allowing for earlier starts and faster ascensions. That was Kawa’s experience after graduating from Florida International University in 2013, according to his LinkedIn page, where he also describes his approach as a “focus on teamwork to achieve a common goal.”

But in a sport with no teams and no athletes' union, the power often bounces between the Ultimate Fighting Championship and managers like Kawa who broker the fights. He rose to be one of the most powerful in the sport on a reputation of being combative but fiercely loyal, said a source who knows him in this space.

Those characteristics perhaps best manifested in his 11 years representing Jon Jones, the older brother of Raiders Pro Bowl edge rusher Chandler Jones and arguably the best fighter the sport has seen, and also its most radioactive. Jones swum in and out of controversy in that time, from failed drug tests to arrests on charges of battery, hit-and-run and driving while intoxicated, leading the UFC to strip him three times of his title belt. Amid the scandals, Nike dropped Jones, but Kawa stood by his side until they eventually split in 2021.

Kawa, who declined to speak for this story, arrived in Taylor’s relationship with the Colts in the equivalent of the fourth quarter. He wasn’t there during the rushing title in 2021 or the decline in 2022 or the ankle surgery.

His relationship with the Colts to that point had been through Leonard. But Kawa did once express an opinion on the man at the top of the flow chart.

“Owner for the colts is an ego maniac,” Kawa wrote on his Twitter page in January 2012. “(Bill) Polian took that sorry franchise and turned it around.”

This would be his first time representing a high-end running back, and he was entering at a time when the market was crumbling quickly. In the coming weeks, the Vikings would release four-time Pro Bowler Dalvin Cook, who is just 27. Supply suffocated demand, something Jacobs, Barkley and Pollard all felt when they received franchise tags.

By mid-June, a mood was shifting.

“You see why guys request trades," Taylor said on June 14. "They just want to feel valued by not only their coaches, their teammates, but the organization as well.

“… Hopefully they can see the value and hopefully we can explain the value. Not that it needs explanation.”

Value. That’s where this bus was ultimately speeding toward in Taylor’s life. He’d found out what that meant in one marriage this spring, and he was still waiting on the other to come through.

His final public comments in a Colts setting came in a video interview posted to the team's YouTube account as part of a series called “The Person Behind the Pads.” By now, it’s also one of the last images of him in a Colts setting with a smile on his face.

From a brown leather loveseat in the Colts facility, Taylor discussed with Colts.com's JJ Stankevitz the idea of space exploration, which has fascinated him ever since he received his first telescope in the sixth grade. He predicted that vacations to other planets would be available by 2030. His face lit up talking about what that could be like – “Just like taking a bus” – and pondered how expensive it would be.

Would this be a life reserved for billionaires, or could he get there, too?

They’re the places his mind wandered to as a boy staring through that telescope, back before he even played football. Taylor smiled and spoke with his hands as he realized he’d already closed down the space between a dream and reality.

The unknown excites him. And ever since he stopped taking classes on the stars, he’s been searching for ways to shatter that glass ceiling as a football player, too.

“There’s going to be a breakthrough,” he said. “Some place, some time, somewhere…”

…

Taylor arrived at training camp at the Grand Park Sports Complex in a black Under Armour T-Shirt that said “Taylortown Indiana."

He had a physical that day and then a meeting with Ballard. It was in this meeting, ESPN reported, that he first requested a trade. And then the Colts placed him on the Active-Physically Unable to Perform List. The designation is due to an ankle injury he suffered last season, a team source told Indy Star.

Eight practices in, he has yet to suit up.

Suddenly, a surgery he and the Colts reportedly signed off on in January was not such a mending of fences. Unlike linebacker E.J. Speed, who had the same procedure this spring, Taylor did not make it back for the veteran minicamp in June or for training camp six weeks later.

“I bounced back perfect,” Speed said.

Questions have sprung up about the severity of the injury and its relationship to a trade request he reportedly made the day the PUP ruling came down. Taylor has not suffered any other significant injuries in team settings since last season, and that includes any setbacks with the ankle, a team source told Indy Star.

It’s possible he suffered an injury away from the facility, something a Colts source posed to ESPN and Fox59 on July 30 while suggesting Taylor could go on the Non-Football Injury List, which would not entitle him to his salary come the regular season. Taylor refuted that accusation, tweeting that he never reported any back pain.

Irsay went to Twitter to share his disagreement with a suggestion to rewrite the Collective Bargaining Act so that the franchise tag number for running backs can be higher.

“Some Agents are selling ‘bad faith,’” Irsay said on Twitter.

Kawa clapped back.

“Bad faith is not paying your top offensive player,” the agent said on Twitter.

Kawa went back to the well the next day in response to a tweet from NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport hoping that the relationship between the Colts and Taylor could be fixed.

“I doubt it,” Kawa said on Twitter.

The tone of Taylor's negotiations flipped 180 degrees when Kawa came on board, but it's important not to misplace the cause and the effect. Taylor took the path of least resistance and came up empty handed. So this superhero went looking for a Joker, someone unafraid to upset the established order and introduce a little anarchy.

The Colts' first night practice arrived, and Irsay had a luxury bus pulled up through the grass to the north end of the fields at Grand Park. He sent a staffer to summon Taylor.

MORE: Jim Irsay holds hour-long bus chat with Jonathan Taylor amid contract and trade requests

The two sat inside a white bus with blue Colts lettering, Taylor with a white athletic T-Shirt pulled over his sweats and Irsay in a custom baby blue suit and striped tie. Taylor’s teammates lined the two fields out the window to one side. Richardson launched deep passes into the night, and eyes bounced from the ball’s trajectory to the spectacle taking place just beyond his reach.

According to Irsay's retelling, he and Taylor exchanged words and memories for nearly an hour. They spoke of Taylor's potential and what it could look like with Richardson. Taylor wanted action, but the billionaire across from him was only offering words.

Here sat one of the most philanthropic owners in professional sports, a man who in the past year alone has written $1 million checks to Indiana Black Expo, the Indianapolis Zoo and the Indiana University Cancer Center. He would soon pledge $20 million to ship an orca whale named Lolita from Miami to safe harbor in Seattle.

But whales don’t count against the salary cap, and that matters when Irsay draws the line on the job he has to do on the NFL's competitive margins. So he takes care of his players in other ways, by inducting them into the Ring of Honor or the Hall of Fame or by buying them wheelchairs and housing when they fall on tough times.

“Everyone knows that no organization − and I mean no organization − treats their past or present players like the Colts do,” Irsay would say later that night.

Words that were meant to be reassuring only deepened the divide. What Irsay describes about his generosity is true – and yet none of it applies to Taylor right now.

That's why he tweeted what he did three weeks ago.

“If you’re good enough, they’ll find you.

“If you work hard enough, you’ll succeed.

“… and then…”

Irsay tried to excite him about Richardson, who at one point launched a ball more than 40 yards down the left sideline. But what they saw out that window was not the same vision. Where one spotted opportunity, the other saw risk. Taylor wanted a billionaire to tell him what the pot of gold at the end of his rainbow would look like.

But Irsay only drifted further into the past.

“You guys raised me,” Irsay said he told Taylor. “I was 13 years old. You guys told me how to act when I became owner because you were my big brothers."

Irsay turned 13 in 1972, or 27 years before Taylor came into the world. He spent his childhood following his father, Bob Irsay, to Baltimore Colts practices and then started lifting with the offensive linemen, a runway to eventually inherit stake a billion-dollar industry.

When Taylor was 13, he spent his nights staring up at the stars. Hope lied in those thoughts, for the universe was a vast space and time was a race to explore it, to some day go to college and find a wife and chase a passion and to try to have it all. Some day...

It became clear, in that moment, why the two can’t see eye to eye and maybe never will. For Irsay, this is business. For Taylor, this is personal. Irsay lives in the past and Taylor is obsessed with the future. The more they converse, the further they recede, to a distance where the four decades of age between them give no image to how endless and dark the space feels.

They can share a bus for an hour and still feel a stratosphere apart.

...

By the time Taylor stepped down from the bus, their battle lines had seared in the grass. Within the next hour, his trade request would become public through NFL Network and Irsay would make clear that he doesn't plan to honor it.

When Irsay emerged, he spoke to local media for 14 minutes in what felt like a postgame interview.

“If I die tonight and Jonathan Taylor's out of the league, nobody's going to miss us,” Irsay said. “The league goes on. We all know that. The National Football (League) rolls on. It doesn't matter who comes and who goes, and it's a privilege to be a part of it.”

He speaks like a man who knows he's holding the cards. The Colts don't have to extend Taylor or trade him if they don't want to, and they currently don't want to. They know they need him to take hits off of Richardson and to rip off the explosive runs to end drives early, though they hope only for so long. Thanks to the current rules, they can play this year-to-year until Taylor turns 27.

Jonathan Taylor's options in contract standoff

That's why Taylor has flipped his axis on the Colts. He's a man obsessed with the science and potential in his own body as it enters its athletic prime, and he fears what it will look like when his time here is through.

He has two leverage points, potentially. One is to walk away, as Luck once did for health reasons, though Taylor's would come having made $6.3 million in his career, some of which he might have to pay back in a signing bonus. He did get accepted into Harvard and told Bleacher Report that he plans to go there for graduate school.

If he tried, the Colts could just call a bluff. But given that Luck walked away just four summers ago, it might not be their most comfortable conversation.

Taylor can also wait and see what the rising conflict does to the Colts' willingness to trade him. They have a first-year coach trying to build a culture and an offense for a 21-year-old rookie quarterback and a team trying to find its way after a 4-12-1 season.

Two Colts captains have come to Taylor's side.

“You definitely feel it," center Ryan Kelly said. "He’s obviously our guy, a great running back and he’s been that way the last couple years. It is weird. … They always say it’s a plug-and-play business, but when you’re missing a star player like that, it is tough.”

Linebacker Zaire Franklin said on social media, "Why do fans think it's okay to attack your favorite player for trying to provide for his family? That makes you a bad person?"

Before Taylor exited the field that night, he glanced back over to the stands full of fans wearing his No. 28 jersey, which is currently selling in the team shop for $174.99. Many of them will take him in the first round of their fantasy football draft if he comes back.

Irsay rode by in a golf cart and handed out $100 bills to fans he'd never met before.

"Woo!" yelled one man who received the cash. "Mr. Irsay, you're the man!"

Then Taylor flipped his head back to the East and disappeared beneath the trees, alone.

...

If Taylor comes back, it won't be a joyous return, but that doesn't mean joy can't eventually be found.

If there's one thing Taylor and the Colts can still agree on, it's that football can bring out the best in who they are. They used to toast each other's victories, and though the purity of that connection might only exist in the past, it can still be a game they dominate in the present, if Taylor can come back and if Richardson can hit his ceiling and if the offensive line can bounce back and if Steichen can pull the right strings.

They'll need a moment like that game in Buffalo, or maybe a few. A moment where worries about the outside world slip away like defenders off Taylor's jersey and what's left is the root of the love and the anger -- which is, ultimately, just a game.

Contact Colts insider Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: How Jonathan Taylor and Indianapolis lost trust in one another