Chris Ballard’s Firing Marks Carlie Irsay-Gordon’s First Real Chance to Reshape the Colts

Chris Ballard has been let go, before he could take another massive swing in an attempt to reverse the Colts’ fortunes at the Nov. 10 trade deadline. The NFL’s firing season began Monday, with the first major change being a general manager and not a head coach.

Like the Dolphins’ firing of Chris Grier around this time last year, there are both optical reasons and practical reasons to make the decision now. Ballard got a decade to try to put his stamp on the organization, which included multiple attempts to replace Andrew Luck at quarterback. His lack of success in that department, specifically, and the subsequent attempts to make up for that decision, turned out to be his ultimate undoing. After a loss to the basement-dwelling Titans on Sunday, a move to pacify the fan base was necessary to prevent apathy and unrest. Ballard’s résumé, when compared to other general managers that have lasted for upwards of a decade or longer, should have set off alarm bells a long time ago. The Packers’ Brian Gutekunst and Bills’ Brandon Beane have both reached the conference title game twice in their tenures of comparable length. Ballard finished with a sub-.500 record (72-82-1), no division titles, two playoff appearances and no trips to the AFC championship game. Letting him go was, at this point, a no-brainer.

However, it’s important to consider that Indianapolis cannot behave irresponsibly at the trade deadline again and will need a more long-term view if and when the team is approached about dealing stalwarts on the roster, another reason Ballard could no longer have access to the controls. Only ownership knows if Shane Steichen will be a candidate to remain under a new general manager and if the team plans to build around him in the future. That decision needs to be finalized before the Colts decide whether recouping their draft picks from the failed Sauce Gardner trade or cleaning up the salary cap situation are priorities. That decision needs to be finalized before a contending team offers a first-round pick for Quenton Nelson.

Now, let us don our nuclear-resistent protective gear, because I would like to talk about the woman making those decisions, Carlie Irsay-Gordon. And I would like to talk about her donning a headset on the sidelines.

To be clear: I am pro headset. I am pro owners being on the sidelines, taking notes and observing the operation from the ground up. As my friend Sheil Kapadia at The Ringer noted last week, if Irsay-Gordon was the owner of the Commanders, we’d have already seen someone held responsible for their embarrassing end-of-game clock fiasco. Irsay-Gordon was attempting to b.s.-proof the process that she is now about to undergo—the partial, or perhaps complete rebuilding, of Indianapolis’s football operations.

In many other locations, this would be about the time an owner would phone a consulting firm—or multiple consulting firms—and pay a quarter million dollars for someone to sift through a handful of top GM and coaches lists (here are some good GM candidates and future head coaches if they need a head start). The Colts may eventually lean on additional help (as my colleague Albert Breer mentioned on the MMQB Podcast, a certain Nationwide Insurance spokesperson may be getting a phone call), but Irsay-Gordon is armed with a database of information and more pinpointed questions based on how she has witnessed the breakdown from the inside out. I find it absolutely ridiculous that people are criticizing the idea of the process itself.

I don’t mean to be hyperbolic about this situation, but Irsay-Gordon’s success in this moment is a major deal for all 32 teams. If the owner hustling on the sidelines smashes the next hire or hires out of the park, we can all collectively ask more of our respective teams’ owners, who range from just as involved (with a little less of the performance art) to more concerned about the stockpile of Screaming Eagle in the luxury suite. We’ve watched what the NBA is starting to become as corpo-zombies start to chip away at the kind of emotional spending that is supposed to make an owner an integral part of a city’s fabric. Private equity is turning owners from fans into the kind of dead-inside actuaries that will one day suggest replacing a backup quarterback with an AI-infused JUGS machine for the sake of efficiency.

Irsay-Gordon represents the NFL as it was and as it should be: a person—a family—shouldering the hopes and dreams of millions of people. A steward who can approve emotional spending at the trade deadline for a chance at sniffing the playoffs and a carnival dunk tank to absorb all the baseballs being chucked at the red button when it doesn’t work out. A human in the trenches in a world where increasing separation between the top and the bottom makes all aspects of society insufferable (and not just in a football stadium).

The next general manager could wear any number of prebaked personality traits. We could call him or her the cap fixer, the draft guru or the dreaded icebreaker-wielding, Jon Gordon–reading, retreat-planning cultural fixer. This person could be successful or not. They could bring a Super Bowl or could draft the franchise into oblivion. That is the risk in hiring for one of the most consequential positions in sports, where long- and short-term planning collide in a tapestry of decisions that either work or do not.

Regardless, the hire will not be a used car salesman, the likes of whom have slipped by owners in the past who haven’t spent the energy to mosey down to the field every once and a while.

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