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INDIANAPOLIS
The Colts 2022 trainwreck has started conversations to swirl about the fate of GM Chris Ballard. Zac Keefer of The Athletic with a deep dive:
Chris Ballard accepted the Colts’ general manager post in 2017 having not slept in two nights, his mind already churning ahead. There was work to do, a roster to mend, a team to resurrect. “It’ll never be about one guy,” he said in his introductory news conference, stressing it once, twice, even a third time to drive the point home.
His job then: build a team around his franchise quarterback, Andrew Luck.
Owner Jim Irsay sold the hire with typical hyperbole, saying that day, “I really feel, to me, that Chris is the best general manager candidate to come about in the 21st century.”
Unrealistic expectations or not, Ballard has not delivered on that front. The Colts are 45-49-1 under him and have not won the AFC South in his tenure. They’ve made the playoffs just twice in his six seasons and will finish the current one with their worst record since his first on the job.
Furthermore, this is a team in regression, the franchise’s long-term prospects as murky as they’ve been in years, perhaps longer. The Colts — on a four-game losing streak and 4-9-1 on the season — need answers at head coach and quarterback, for starters, but the issues stretch deeper. The flawed roster that Ballard built for 2022 has been routinely exposed this season, sabotaged by decisions he made in the months and years prior.
Saturday’s historic collapse in Minnesota only furthered the point. A team doesn’t blow a 33-point halftime lead unless something is seriously wrong.
To be clear, Irsay was behind the team’s bold midseason move at quarterback, benching veteran Matt Ryan for Sam Ehlinger. The owner made another gamble after two more losses, luring one of his favorite former players, Jeff Saturday, off an ESPN set and onto the Colts’ sideline to replace Frank Reich.
That has gone about as expected.
In other words: terribly.
Save the sugar high that was a win over a reeling Raiders team in early November, the Colts have continued to crumble. They’ve lost seven of eight. What was a bad team under Reich remains so under Saturday.
And this is the team Ballard put together.
The drastic midseason moves, driven by an increasingly impatient owner, speak to a growing lack of trust Irsay has in those around him. He didn’t trust anybody on his coaching staff — despite two former head coaches (Gus Bradley and John Fox) already in the building — to do the job. He instead hired Saturday, who was not Ballard’s top choice, and whose coaching experience consisted of a 20-16 record in three seasons at Hebron Christian Academy outside of Atlanta.
Irsay will have to answer another question central to his team’s future in the coming month.
Does he trust Ballard to fix what he broke?
In a recent conversation, before the team’s loss in Minnesota, the owner doubled down on comments he made in early November, defending his GM’s body of work and vowing that Ballard would return in 2023.
“I think a lot of Chris,” Irsay told The Athletic. “Young GMs make mistakes. He’s been up against it. The No. 1 component is he’s an outstanding talent evaluator. He has this (Bill) Polian-esque touch in the draft room.
“There have been some things … people don’t realize, you have to learn as a general manager. You just don’t get it overnight. I feel very confident in where we’re going.”
Where is that, exactly?
Start here: Come January, the franchise will begin its first head-coaching search in five years, and remember how the last one played out. Ballard’s choice to succeed Chuck Pagano in 2018, Josh McDaniels, reneged on a handshake agreement at the 11th hour, leaving the Colts scrambling long after the hiring cycle had wrapped. Irsay had a louder say in Reich’s hiring.
Assuming Irsay’s word is good — in this league, owners can change their minds quickly — and Ballard does stay, how much of a voice will he have in the coaching decision? The owner has long said it’s the GM’s job to pick the coach, not his. But Irsay has, on three notable occasions over the past year, stepped in and made a unilateral decision above his GM: He mandated the team move on from Carson Wentz last winter, initiated Ryan’s midseason benching and Ehlinger’s ascension into the starting lineup, then — in a move that stunned his coaching staff and everyone in the building — picked Saturday as Reich’s short-term successor.
Ballard’s thoughts on the matter were obvious the night Saturday was introduced. While Irsay beamed, convinced his bold move would galvanize a struggling team and a disgruntled fan base, the GM sat there stone-faced, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world.
Ballard, 53, is under contract through 2026, an extension Irsay handed both him and Reich before the 2021 season.
“We have as great a general manager-head coach combination as there is in the NFL,” the owner said then. “We have the ideal leaders in Chris and Frank.”
Reich lasted just 26 more games and was fired after a Week 9 loss in New England. If Ballard is indeed here for the next coach, assuming it’s not Saturday, that’ll be the fourth head coach he’s worked with in seven years in Indianapolis. Multiple league sources, with no ties to the Colts, are convinced Irsay will pursue Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh for the opening; Harbaugh is a former Colts quarterback who has been inducted into the team’s Ring of Honor and went 44-19-1 in four seasons as the 49ers head coach from 2011 to 2014, leading the team to the NFC Championship Game three times and the Super Bowl once.
“I think Jeff’s a candidate, but there’s a lot of great candidates out there,” Irsay told reporters at the league owners’ meetings last week in Dallas. “I think there’s a lot of great candidates in college. I think the pool needs to be broadened somewhat more. There’s some great college coaches that may be capable. There’s some unknown coaches that may be capable.”
Saturday said last week he intends to pursue the Colts’ opening after the season, undeterred by the team’s struggles since he took over. If anything, he said, it’s deepened his conviction. He wants to fix this franchise.
“I’m not wavering, man,” Saturday said. “I know I’m not the most popular guy in the room right now, right? (But) this has been fantastic. I knew what I was signing up for. I’ve loved this. I’ve had a great time. I love the unity in the locker room. I love the staff and working with guys and the strategy that goes in with this.”
On that front, Irsay isn’t ruling Saturday out as a permanent solution.
“Jeff’s competitive there,” Irsay said, referring to the coaching search. He added the team will undergo an extensive interview process that complies with the Rooney Rule.
There’s also the question of how much of a personnel voice the next coach — whether it’s Harbaugh, Saturday or someone else — will seek.
Irsay’s always thought highly of Ballard, often going out of his way to mention how many suitors Ballard had before pursuing the Colts’ job in 2017. Ballard, in fact, did turn down multiple opportunities to interview with teams for their vacant GM posts, heeding the advice of those around the league he trusts, staying patient, waiting for the right fit and the right situation. He didn’t want to land with a team — and more importantly, an owner — who wouldn’t buy into his vision.
And when he interviewed for this job, back in 2017, Ballard was direct with Irsay.
“No shortcuts,” he told him. “It’s going to take a while.”
The owner was on board.
Six years later, the returns aren’t there. Context is needed and important: By the end of his second season, Ballard had the Colts on the brink, primed to compete for Super Bowls. Then came Luck’s stunning retirement the following August, a body blow this team is, in a lot of ways, still reeling from. The GM’s yet to find the long-term answer at quarterback.
“Lots of teams would’ve fallen into the abyss with our problems,” Ballard said, looking back on his first four years on the job. “We didn’t.”
Until now.
And he’s right, plenty of teams would have cratered in the immediate aftermath of such an unprecedented retirement. The Colts didn’t, not at first. Ballard signed Philip Rivers in free agency the following spring and, in 2020, the 39-year-old QB pulled the Colts to an 11-5 record and a playoff berth.
They have slowly crumbled since, hindered, in part, by Ballard’s misses in the draft and his frugal approach to free agency. Reich is not absolved of blame, either; his offense was an abject failure this season.
Most damning on Ballard’s résumé to this point is he’s failed to find solutions at three of the most essential positions in modern-day football — quarterback, left tackle and edge rusher — and that’s chief among the reasons this team has regressed so substantially in 2022. The Colts are in far worse shape now than they were two years ago.
While Ballard has aced several draft picks in his run, a la Polian, the architect of the franchise’s glory years that Irsay referenced above, some of his misses — especially at notable positions — have cost this team dearly. Start with Ballard drafting six edge rushers since 2017. Not one has finished a season with six sacks or more.
At the root of so many of the Colts’ issues the past two seasons are the decisions made at quarterback. The team swung on Wentz in 2021, missed, then swung on Ryan in 2022 and missed again. (They’ll owe Ryan $18 million even if he’s not on the roster in 2023; he’ll count $35 million against the salary cap if he is.) It was Reich who pushed for the Wentz trade back in the spring of 2021, but it’s the GM who makes the final call. Ballard bears responsibility.
Rookie Bernhard Raimann could grow into an answer at left tackle, but he’s had a rocky first season, and the position routinely buried the Colts’ offense in 2022. Believing Matt Pryor could be a viable starter at that spot remains one of Ballard’s most indefensible decisions over the last several years.
Defensive end Kwity Paye, Ballard’s lone first-round draft pick since 2018, has progressed in Year 2 but has been hampered by injuries. Dayo Odeyingbo, another hope on the edge, has four career sacks.
The Colts seem like a team stuck in the mud, not good enough to win a mediocre division, not bad enough to find its way into a top-three pick. Luckily, for their sake, their late-season collapse has dramatically improved their draft position. Two weeks ago, the Colts were on pace to pick 14th.
They now have the sixth pick after Sunday’s games.
What’s become evident over the past two seasons is the Colts’ reluctance to draft a young quarterback has backfired. In a league where aggressiveness pays, their ambivalence has cost them. Wentz faded badly down the stretch in 2021, and his play — among other issues — cost the Colts a 98 percent shot at the playoffs. Ryan’s arrival convinced the Colts the problem had been fixed. They were wrong.
Things got worse. Quickly.
Ryan leads the league through 14 games in both fumbles (15) and interceptions (13).
“You can’t rush it,” Irsay said of the QB position two years ago. “If you try and solve the quarterback issue in a year, and don’t do it right, you can set your franchise back 10 years.”
The alternative is if you keep kicking the can down the road and scooping up what other teams have discarded, you never really solve the problem.
There’s also this, something Irsay will have to weigh heavily in his decision-making over the coming months: Ballard promised from Day 1 he’d build this roster from the inside out, so this team could own the trenches when it mattered most, in December and January. After remaking one of the league’s worst offensive lines into one of the best, the Colts’ unit regressed to a staggering degree in 2022, limiting everything they wanted to do on that side of the ball.
Two notable decisions by the GM — banking on Pryor at left tackle, then allowing Mark Glowinski and Chris Reed to leave in free agency so the team could start Danny Pinter at right guard — loom large in that regression. The Colts have yielded 199 pressures on the QB, fifth most in the league, and the 49 sacks they’ve allowed are more than any other team.
Ballard’s also been stubborn in free agency, letting proven players walk (defensive lineman Denico Autry comes to mind) while often eschewing obvious needs that turned into glaring roster holes late in the season (wide receiver).
“I mean, the guy is a winner, and he’s been immensely successful,” Irsay said of Ballard in November, the night Saturday was introduced as interim coach. “No one is perfect in this game. We all lose a lot in this league. You know how many shots Michael Jordan missed? You know how many games Michael Jordan lost? This league is tough, and sometimes you don’t understand how fortunate you are when you’re around success because you think that’s the norm.
“But it’s not. And he fits right into (our) culture.”
As disappointing as this season has been, there is still talent on this roster, talent Ballard drafted and acquired, and Irsay sees that. Moving on from his top executive would leave the owner in a spot he hasn’t found himself in a decade: starting over from scratch, looking for a new GM and a new coach in the same year.
It doesn’t seem, at this juncture, that’s a path Irsay wants to go down.
But things change quickly in this league. Irsay fired Reich 15 months after giving him a lengthy extension. The owner has long resisted making decisions driven on emotion, mindful of the mistakes his father made and how it crippled the franchise for years. But his team is getting worse, and his patience is growing thin.
The coming months will reveal how Jim Irsay intends on addressing it. Did what happened Saturday in Minnesota change his mind?
Words are one thing. Actions say a whole lot more.
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