INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The Indianapolis Colts retained one of their key young players on Tuesday by signing fourth-year defensive tackle Adetomiwa Adebawore to a two-year contract, the team announced.
The two-year deal is worth $35 million and includes $22.5 million in guaranteed money and a $13 million signing bonus, a person with knowledge of the deal told The Associated Press. The person requested anonymity because the Colts didn't make the contract terms public.
The move is a stark contrast to what's been happening lately in Indy (2-6). With the playoffs looking like more of a longshot after losing four straight and 13 of 15 going back to last season, team co-owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon has started looking beyond the 2026 season.
Two weeks ago, she fired general manager Chris Ballard.
Last week, she traded two longtime locker room stalwarts — Pro Bowl guard Quenton Nelson and Pro Bowl defensive tackle DeForest Buckner — to NFC West teams to add draft picks as the team embarks on a major overhaul without a first-round selection next season. That pick belongs to the New York Jets as part of last year's deal for All-Pro cornerback Sauce Gardner.
This week, trade speculation has centered around receiver Josh Downs, who has requested to be dealt, and Pro Bowl running back Jonathan Taylor, who has not. Taylor is considered the top running back on the market before next Tuesday's trade deadline.
But amid the debate over so much midseason wheeling and dealing, Adebawore has cashed in on a perfectly timed breakout season.
He has made two starts and appeared in all eight games this season and has already matched his career with four sacks. The 25-year-old also has 19 tackles and four tackles for loss.
And with Buckner back in San Francisco, where he started his NFL career, Adebawore's stats — and playing time — are expected to increase.
The deal means Indy has retained a key interior defensive lineman for two more seasons.
“Tomi (Adebawore) is like a lot of guys on our defense right now, doing a good job with all the extra work we’re putting in and it’s showing,” defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo said Tuesday before the deal was confirmed. "Tomi has always been a high-motor guy. He’s been a great player on special teams and has certainly taken the next step at defensive tackle. He’s such a great human, a great football player. We're going to continue to use him even more.”
The 6-foot, 282-pound Adebawore was a fourth-round pick, No. 110 overall, out of Northwestern in 2023. He appeared in 26 games during his first two seasons in the league but had only 12 total tackles, four of those for loss and 2 1/2 sacks during that time.
Last season, he started seven games while appearing in all 17. He finished with 36 tackles and four sacks.
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Indianapolis Colts defensive tackle Adetomiwa Adebawore (95) reacts after sacking Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kyler Murray, bottom, during the second half of an NFL football game in Minneapolis, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)
Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kyler Murray, foreground, is sacked by Indianapolis Colts defensive tackle Adetomiwa Adebawore during the second half of an NFL football game in Minneapolis, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Trump speaks at White House on ballroom construction after GOP midterm losses where voters said he didn't focus on them.
THIS IS AN APNewsAlert. Check back for updates. AP's earlier story is below.
After a flurry of rallies where he implored supporters to pretend that he was on the ballot, President Donald Trump led his Republican Party to a stunningly complete wipeout in the midterm elections.
Now he may work just as tirelessly to insist it wasn’t his fault.
Republican losses swept Democrats into control of Congress with a wave of Senate victories that once seemed far-fetched in GOP strongholds. There were wins in South Carolina and Kansas, which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1932. In Texas, Democrats had been shut out of every statewide race for more than three decades, until Tuesday.
Trump was already backpedaling even before the full extent of his party's defeat was known. On election night, he sounded more humble than usual, pledging to work with Democrats and to accept the election results. But he was still seeking to deflect responsibility.
“I don’t like to consider it a defeat for me. I wasn’t on the ballot," he told Fox News. Voters, he said, just “didn't like the candidates” on the ballot.
In fact, The AP Voter Poll suggests that Trump was a drag on GOP candidates. Only 4 in 10 voters nationwide approved of how Trump was handling the presidency. In losing Ohio, Iowa, Maine and North Carolina, majorities said the Republican Senate candidates were “too supportive” of the unpopular president.
Going further, on his social media site, the president nonetheless insisted that if he had been running, "We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Trump has a long history of passing the buck, on issues large and small, but especially when there are ballot-box failures.
After Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms during Trump's first term, he blamed defeated members of his own party.
Utah Rep. Mia Love, who had tried to distance herself from him, “gave me no love, but then she lost. Too bad," the president said.
He mocked other losing lawmakers for not embracing him — Florida's Carlos Curbelo, Colorado's Mike Coffman, Virginia's Barbara Comstock, and Illinois' Peter Roskam — with the same words he would use eight years later: “My name wasn’t on the ballot."
Now he's trying to deflect blame once more, despite having urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”
An Associated Press analysis of the 39 Trump speeches and rallies Trump staged since Sept. 1 showed the president used a version of the phrase in 30 of them. In some addresses he returned to the subject more than once, though, meaning there were at least 40 instances where he appealed to voters to engage in that bit of make-believe.
After their parties take hits in midterm elections, most White Houses engage in some soul-searching, with the president publicly shouldering at least part of the responsibility.
A day after big Republican congressional gains in 2010, Democrat Barack Obama said he took “a shellacking." Republican George W. Bush described Democratic victories in the 2006 midterms as “a thumping.”
But Trump, known for defying all kinds of presidential norms, began laying the groundwork for avoiding blame this cycle well before balloting began.
He told Punchbowl News in August that voters were angry at Republicans “but they’re not angry at me.”
Trump posted on his social media site last month that should Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton lose — and he did — "it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove.” That's despite Trump's risky endorsement of scandal-marred Paxton in the primary over incumbent Cornyn, who first got to the Senate in 2002 and was considered the safer bet. Rove is a political strategist who helped Bush win the White House.
Also losing was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Trump ally. Trump posted on social media that if Abbott “hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost,” suggesting the governor had backed away from his staunchly conservative credentials and become "Republican in Name Only."
One thing Trump didn't do in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's results, however, was level accusations of widespread election fraud. Trump has done that after past defeats.
After he lost in 2020, Trump falsely claimed that his opponents had cheated, even though a parade of recounts, audits and scores of lawsuits on his behalf were tossed, confirming Democrat Joe Biden's victory. Trump's own attorney general said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
This year, Trump showed restraint despite calling, before voting even began, for the criminal prosecution of Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola in Alaska. That followed revelations that Peltola's campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting a candidate with the same name as Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. Peltola denies involvement.
Trump's focus went beyond Alaska.
At a recent rally in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump said “the only way” Democrats "can win elections is to rig the election." Democrats won races for governor and Senate in the state. Similarly, he posted on social media that “the only way” Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya “can lose is if they cheat by playing games with the Ballots." She lost.
Trump has sought to avoid responsibility for a long list of negative outcomes during his time in politics.
“The buck stops with everybody,” Trump said in 2019, during a lengthy government shutdown. Trump had first bragged that he would be proud to own the shutdown as he unsuccessfully sought to pressure congressional Democrats to approve additional border security money.
The following year, on the same day he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, the president said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for a lack of COVID-19 testing.
Since returning to the White House, it's been more of the same.
In February, when bipartisan backlash forced him to delete a racist social media post featuring Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as primates, Trump refused to apologize. “I didn’t make a mistake,” he said.
As the midterms approached, Trump faulted Biden, who by that time had been out of office for more than 18 months, for Americans' concerns about inflation. Trump also kept insisting that the delayed, costly and problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was marred by vandalism when the office of the federal prosecutor he put in the job blamed the damage on shoddy workmanship.
Trump has even faulted other presidents for the war in Iran that he started with Israel in February, saying he was making up for earlier administrations squandering nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
That view marked even a break with his own Vice President, JD Vance, who wrote on Wednesday, “The reason we lost is the war.”
None of those justifications helped Republicans much on Tuesday. That was an outcome even Trump seemed to foresee last month, while shifting blame to voters who hadn't yet cast ballots.
“If we don’t win the midterms, they’re going to blame me,” he warned during a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, on Oct. 10, before adding, “You better get out there and vote.”
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Aaron Kessler contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump speaks during a tour of construction of the White House ballroom, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
President Donald Trump speaks during a tour of the White House Ballroom construction at the White House, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2026, in Washington, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum listens at right. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks to supporters at an election night event in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/ David J. Phillip)
President Donald Trump talks with Senate candidate Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton at a campaign rally at Lubbock Memorial Civic Center, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2026, in Lubbock, Texas. (AP Photo/Annie Rice)
President Donald Trump stands on stage after speaking at a campaign rally at the Salina Regional Airport, Sunday, Nov. 1, 2026, in Salina Kan. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
