The NFL comes back to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday 4 October at 2:30pm, and the fixture it has picked is one hardly anybody in north London will have watched before. Indianapolis against Washington is the 33rd meeting between the two franchises since the series began in 1953, and the first ever staged outside the United States. Anyone studying the Indianapolis Colts @ Washington Commanders Odds is working from a very thin file.
A fixture on a four-year clock
The NFL’s 2002 realignment put the Colts in the AFC South and Washington in the NFC East, and the scheduling formula pairs those two divisions once every four years. The meetings since then run 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, 2022 and now 2026, with no exceptions and no extras. Four NFL drafts have come and gone since the last one, so the fixture will be new to most of both rosters.
The series lead is a Baltimore inheritance
Pro Football Reference has the Colts ahead 21-11 across 32 games, with no playoff meeting in 73 years. That looks lopsided until you check the postmark. Of those, 20 were played by the Baltimore Colts, who went 15-5 against Washington and won nine in a row between September 1960 and November 1969. Since the moving vans left for Indianapolis in March 1984, the record is 6-6.
The 12 games Indianapolis has played
The Indianapolis half of the series opened badly, a 35-7 defeat at the Hoosier Dome on 7 October 1984 in front of 60,012. Washington arrived that afternoon as back-to-back NFC champions, having won Super Bowl XVII and lost Super Bowl XVIII, and the gap showed.
Peyton Manning met Washington four times and won three. The pick of them was 22 October 2006, when he threw for 345 yards and four touchdowns in a 36-22 win that took the Colts to 6-0 in a season that ended with the Super Bowl XLI trophy. He also won the 2010 meeting at FedEx Field, 27-24, with 307 yards and two touchdowns.
The heaviest win belongs to Andrew Luck. On 30 November 2014 he threw five touchdown passes, four of them covering 30 yards or more, in a 49-27 result. Luck settled the 2018 meeting too, a 21-9 victory in Washington on his return from a year out of the game, with rookie linebacker Darius Leonard making 18 tackles behind him.
Washington won the last one with 22 seconds left
The most recent meeting, on 30 October 2022, was the first played under the Commanders name and it turned in the final minute. Taylor Heinicke found Terry McLaurin for 33 yards down to the 1-yard line, then ran in the winning score himself with 22 seconds showing, for a 17-16 result. Sam Ehlinger, making his first NFL start for Indianapolis, had thrown for 201 yards and no touchdowns.
It is the sort of finish that explains why NFL odds on a fixture this rare lean on current form rather than on the head-to-head.
London makes it stranger still
Washington are the designated home team at a ground more than 3,600 miles from their own. Their only previous London appearance ended 27-27 against Cincinnati at Wembley on 30 October 2016, the first International Series game to reach overtime, watched by a crowd of 84,488. The Colts have been once too, also to Wembley in 2016, against Jacksonville.
Two franchises, 73 years, 32 games, not one of them in the postseason and not one of them on neutral ground. The 33rd fixes half of that.
Frankie Wilde – is a content writer at various gambling sites. Also, he is a passionate traveler and a great cook. Frankie shares informative articles with the world.
