If anyone can get the most out of Daniel Jones with the Colts, it's Shane Steichen. Just ask Jalen Hurts.

Daniel Jones has made 70 regular-season starts in the NFL. Sixty-nine came with the Giants, the team that selected him No. 6 overall in 2019, On Sunday, he made his first start for the Colts. 

I'm not sure how it could have gone much better; Jones finished 22 of 29 (75.9%) for 272 yards and a touchdown, he ran two more in from a yard out, and the Colts, who had previously lost 11 straight season openers, cruised to a 33-8 win over a Dolphins outfit that played like all 53 players on the active roster met for the first time 10 minutes before kickoff.

There's more: Jones had seven previous starts in which he completed better than 75.9% of his throws, but he never threw for more than 203 yards in any of those games. That changed on Sunday, as did opinions about Jones' fit in Shane Steichen's offense -- and what that means for both the quarterback and a team that had a preseason win total of 7.5.

It's so easy to overreact -- it's Week 1, we've been without football for seven months and we're desperate for something -- anything -- but it's also easy to see why Jones could be this year's Sam Darnold.

Or to put a finer point on it: Can Jones be the Jalen Hurts that Shane Steichen never managed to coax out of Anthony Richardson?

There's some nuance to the question above, for sure. Jones, who is criminally underrated as an athlete -- he ran for 186 yards (!!) against UNC in 2018, and he hit 21 mph against the Eagles on that memorable-for-all-the-wrong-reasons run early in his NFL career -- also isn't Hurts the runner.

That said, Jones can run (how that clip above ended notwithstanding); he rushed for 708 yards and seven touchdowns in 2022, his first year with Brian Daboll, when the Giants exceeded everyone's expectations and not only went to the playoffs but beat the Vikings in the wild card round. His 17-game average is 528 rushing yards per season, according to Pro-Football-Reference. Hurts' 17-game average is 696 rushing yards.

But Jones is a better processor in the passing game right now than Hurts was in 2021 and 2022, the two years he had Steichen as his offensive coordinator in Philadelphia. In those two years, Hurts improved his touchdown-to-interception ratio (16-to-9 in 2021 to 22-6 in 2022), his completion percentage (61.3% to 66.5%) and his passer rating (87.2 to 101.5).

If Jones is further along than 2021 or 2022 hurts, it stands to reason that he's also an improvement over Richardson. The Colts coaching staff agrees because they named him the starter in the preseason.

Former Titans general manager Ran Carthon, who is also my co-host on the "With the First Pick" NFL Draft podcast, said back in early May that even though the Colts were having an open competition, their actions spoke louder than anything they might have said publicly.

"I think a decision has low-key kind of been made already by signing Daniel Jones," Carthon said at the time. "And you can say, 'Hey, we're creating competition' ... but you bring in a veteran who has something to prove and then now you're already admitting that, 'Hey, it may be time for us to move on.'

"The hard thing for anyone, especially having sat in the chair, is to admit a 'mistake' when you're drafting someone. And that's why I always give Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch credit after they drafted Trey Lance No. 3 overall. Once it was known that Brock Purdy was the guy, they were willing to move on and say, 'Hey, it's time for us to cut ties with [Lance], no matter what it cost us and no matter what you got back in return.'"

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is real when you're talking about high-round picks, especially quarterbacks because, in the back of your mind, there's always that chance they work out. In the case of the Colts, that could be in reference to Richardson or Jones, but the difference is that Jones is best suited to run Steichen's offense right now.

The offense Richardson ran the last two seasons was pared down, mostly because he hasn't played a lot of football. Jones, meanwhile, started 36 games at Duke and another 70 in the NFL. And when you talk to people in the Giants' building, you hear that Jones is a fantastic teammate, an even better person, he works incredibly hard and he's pretty good at doing what's asked of him within the offense. But when you ask him to deviate from that -- that's when he gets into trouble.

A league source explained it this way: Jones is really good when what he sees from a defense before the snap is what he gets after the snap. He'll struggle, however, if that picture changes.

And in the NFL, the picture changes a lot. Think about all the two-high looks a defense will show before the snap only to get to Cover 1 or Cover 3, or a blitz after the ball is snapped. This help explains why Jones can be locked in at times, and then he can look completely and wholly lost. I mention this, though, because in watching Jones' 33 dropbacks on Sunday, Miami's defense rarely showed one defense before the snap and another afterwards -- what Jones saw is what he got and he feasted.

The Dolphins showed two-high safeties on the Tyler Warren reception -- and they played Cover 4 after the snap. They showed a post safety on the Adonai Mitchell reception -- and they played Cover 1 after the snap.

The Colts didn't run up the score like it was homecoming just because of these two examples. Like I mentioned above, Miami looked like they didn't want to be on the field -- on both sides of the ball. The offense was anemic and the defense was invisible. It was so bad that Indy scored on all eight possessions, every single time they got the ball, the first team to do it in the Super Bowl era.

But two things can be true: the Dolphins can be a hot mess and Jones, who is now in his seventh NFL season, can also put up the best numbers of his career this season.

The Colts offensive line is underrated, the running back room is led by Jonathan Taylor and the wideouts include Michael Pittman, Mitchell, Alec Pierce and Josh Downs. And there's Warren, their 2025 first-rounder who was a big part of the team's Week 1 game plan; he was targeted nine times, had seven catches for 76 yards, and you could argue should have been the beneficiary of a defensive pass interference call in the end zone that wasn't flagged. Warren was the second-leading receiver for the Colts, behind only Pittman.

Steichen consistently dialed up plays that made life easier for Jones; he had man-beaters vs. Cover 1, zone-beaters vs. Cover 4, and on the rare occasion that Jones was confused by what he saw downfield, he got the ball to his checkdown on time. And he did it all while facing little pressure; according to TruMedia, Jones was pressured on just 24% of his dropbacks, which was third-best in the league in Week 1.

Then there's Indy's run game, which was good for 156 yards. And while Taylor and rookie DJ Giddens each averaged under 4.0 yards per carry, they were gashing the Dolphins for much of the afternoon. In fact, the team ranked fourth in rush EPA among all Week 1 offenses behind only the Ravens, Commanders and Jaguars.

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Look, this could all crash and burn next week -- remember Jones' first NFL start in 2019, a win versus the Bucs in Week 3? He was 22 of 36 for 339 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions, two rushing touchdowns ... as well as five sacks and two lost fumbles. Giants fans were stoked, Dave Gettleman no doubt felt some level of vindication, and it looked like the Giants had indeed found their franchise quarterback.

Jones and the Giants won the next week, too, before he lost his next eight starts and the team finished 4-12. The Colts under Steichen have gone 9-8 and 8-9 with some combination of Richardson, Gardner Minshew and Joe Flacco under center.

But this feels different. In part because this is the best team Jones has played for going back to high school. In part because if Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan and Andy Reid are consistently the NFL's best play-callers, when you talk to people around the league, Steichen as 1a.

And this is best-case scenario for Daniel Jones.