Grading Colts Grigson: “Just Win Baby!”
In the NFL, and in most professional sports, a team’s General Manager is typically evaluated on three things for their performance (with the first obviously being the most important):
- Winning
- Drafting
- Signings
Say what you want about Indianapolis Colts’ GM Ryan Grigson, but he’s consistently done just that throughout his first 2+ seasons with the team, win. As the 1st of our 3 part series, we will take a closer look at specifically just how much the Indianapolis Colts’ young GM has won.
Impressively, Ryan Grigson was exactly 39 years, 10 months, and 19 days old, when he was named Indianapolis Colts’ GM on January 11, 2012. Now age at 42, he is the 3rd youngest active GM in the NFL behind the Philadelphia Eagles’ Howie Roseman (39) and the Jacksonville Jaguars’ David Caldwell (40).
Among active GM’s in their 1st two seasons in the NFL, Ryan Grigson is among the Top 5 winningest with a 0.657 WPCT. In his first two seasons with the Indianapolis Colts, his team has won the AFC South division once and had 2 playoff appearances, including a Wildcard round win against the Kansas City Chiefs last season:
It’s worth noting that not only is Grigson the youngest of the Top 5 winningest active GM’s through their 1st 2 NFL seasons respectively, he’s also the only one to have been 40 years old or younger starting out.
Digging even further, if you were to compare Ryan Grigson’s winning percentage over the past 2+ seasons (season-to-date) to the last 4 GM’s who have been in the Super Bowl, Ryan Grigson comes in 4th, ahead of Baltimore Ravens’ GM Ozzie Newsome:
It’s a pretty impressive feat, no matter how you look at it. Grigson hasn’t just won, he’s won a lot. His winning percentage puts him in elite company, among some of the best and most highly regarded GM’s in the NFL.
While he doesn’t have the Super Bowl hardware to show for it quite yet, he’s built a young team that’s still growing and learning together.
His critics will argue, “Big deal. He drafted Andrew Luck, anyone else would’ve.” While that’s true to a point, he’s also made other significant draft selections and moves, as well as a complete defensive personnel overhaul, but we’ll get to those in a later segment. In the mean time, as former Oakland Raiders’ owner Al Davis once so eloquently put it, Ryan Grigson –“Just win, baby!”