INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Letters and logos.

The Colts have tried to hammer that mantra home for almost a year, ever since Jonathan Taylor dropped the ball before he crossed the goal line in Denver a year ago.

After Taylor’s mistake, Indianapolis has preached “letters and logos” over and over again, meaning a player cannot let up on a play until he’s standing in the colorful painting that covers the end zone.

Adonai Mitchell forgot to take the ball to the letters and logos on Sunday, repeating Taylor’s gaffe by trying to switch hands in an apparent effort to celebrate, losing the ball on the way into the end zone for a fumble that erased what should have been the best play of Mitchell’s young career.

Mitchell still looked shell-shocked in the locker room after the game.

“It definitely stings,” Mitchell said. “The ball was put in my hand to make a play for the team. It was a matter of losing focus, and just a play that just can’t happen. Just unacceptable. I’ve got to be better for the team.”

The play should have been Mitchell’s breakout moment.

Mitchell made a sublime catch, fighting through the hands of Emmanuel Forbes Jr. to make the grab with his right hand without breaking stride, then suddenly stopping and spinning away from Forbes to create space down the sideline.

Forbes recovered for one last-ditch attempt at redemption, but Mitchell swatted away the cornerback’s dive and headed for the end zone.

Then the unthinkable happened.

Mitchell actually made the exchange cleanly. When he stretched out his right hand, the ball slipped out of his grasp and went bounding into the end zone.

“I just lost focus,” Mitchell said. “Made a play that can’t happen.”

The Colts tried to bring Mitchell back on the sideline. The team had no choice. Mitchell made his mistake with 11:32 left in the third quarter of a game the Colts were already playing without Alec Pierce, the normal starter in Mitchell’s spot.

Indianapolis needed Mitchell for the rest of the game.

“It’s hard to explain in that situation,” Steichen said. “But we’ve got a lot of faith in AD. This is a bump in the road for him, and he’s going to bounce back.”

But a gaffe like Mitchell’s is going to linger for a while. Taylor was the only one on the sideline who really knew what Mitchell was going through. While others tried to have in-depth conversations, Taylor hung back.

“Something like that happens, you need time to process,” Taylor said. “Everyone’s talking to you, and you’re receiving it, you’re receiving it, but you’ve got to internalize it and kind of come to terms with what happened.”

Taylor will sit down with Mitchell later this week.

The Colts emphasized their support for the second-year receiver in the moment, rather than rubbing Mitchell’s nose in the mistake he made.

“I would just tell him to lean in more to what the play was,” team captain Zaire Franklin said. “I don’t know how many people on our team are going to make that play. I would lean more into that, just clean up the small things. Crossing the ball over the goal line was the easiest part. Everything else you did was immaculate.”

Nobody on the Indianapolis roster wanted to address it right away.

But the difference between Mitchell and Taylor is that the 2024 second-round receiver out of Texas has a history of boneheaded moments in his short Colts career — an inexplicable cutback that cost him a touchdown against the Jets as a rookie, stepped out on the sideline with room to run in another game and fired an ill-advised trick play back to Anthony Richardson in the same Denver game last season, leading to a Broncos touchdown when Mitchell could have just held onto the ball and picked up some yardage.

The fumble against the Rams is going to leave a bigger scar.

“This play hurts,” Mitchell said. “Hurts a lot.”

The entire NFL world will remember this mistake.

And the entire Colts coaching staff has been repeating the mantra since Taylor’s mistake with the playoffs on the line last season.

“It’s a point of emphasis, and I’ve got to do a better job of emphasizing it more,” Steichen said. “It starts with me.”

Ultimately, the mistake sits with Mitchell, who was angry about how far he fell in the draft, promised he’d outplay the 10 wide receivers drafted ahead of him and hasn’t been able to carve out a larger role than the team’s No. 4 receiver to this point.

Sunday’s play was his chance to show the world what he can do.

“Couldn’t really process it in the moment,” Mitchell said. “I really still can’t process it, to be real.”

Joel A. Erickson covers the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Adonai Mitchell fumble: What Colts receiver said about his mistake