The last two weeks have produced the most tumultuous head coaching cycle the NFL has ever experienced. The names that have been fired (or in some cases, that have “agreed to step away”) represent a whole lot of winning.
Any one of these departures may have been seen as standard operating procedure, but en masse, they have rocked the very landscape of the league. Except in Indianapolis, where all remains as it was before.
In the wake of all this turnover, is Indianapolis Colts’ owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon’s decision to retain both GM Chris Ballard and head coach Shane Steichen an example of prudent patience or the sign of a franchise beset by institutional paralysis? 2026 should answer that question.
Will the Indianapolis Colts regret standing by Chris Ballard and Shane Steichen?
One thing seems certain today. NFL coaches are on exceedingly short leashes. If they do not win quickly, they won’t have a job for very long. The rapid turn-arounds in New England, Carolina, and Chicago this season, and by Houston, Denver, and Washington in the past few seasons, have made most NFL owners far less patient than Irsay-Gordon is proving to be with the leaders of her football team.
Think of the coaches who have lost their jobs in the past two weeks. Mike Tomlin, John Harbaugh, and Sean McDermott alone have almost 500 career victories. They have won 63% of their regular season games and have had 30 seasons in which they reached double digits in wins.
For the record, Steichen, in just three seasons, has a career losing record and has yet to get to ten wins, despite starting 8-2 in 2025.
Those three veteran coaches have been to the playoffs 33 times. In those appearances, they have won at least a single game 19 times. Tomlin won a Super Bowl in his second year, Harbaugh in his fifth. McDermott has been to the playoffs in eight of his nine seasons in Buffalo.
Again, just so the record is clear… Steichen has yet to take the Colts to the playoffs.
And this does not even consider two-time coach-of-the-year Kevin Stefanski and Mike McDaniel, both of whom took their teams to the playoffs twice in a combined ten years of service. They each made the playoffs in their first season as head coaches.
Some of these coaches have struggled lately, but none exactly fell off the table. If I included the coaches who absolutely deserved to be axed this offseason, I could have thrown Pete Carroll into the mix, which would have made the fired coaches’ number look even more impressive.
The fact is, since Chris Ballard hired Shane Steichen to be the Colts’ head coach, 23 of the NFL’s 32 teams – or 71% -- have made it to the postseason. Steichen’s Colts are not in that group. Of the eight teams joining Indianapolis on this inauspicious list, seven of them have fired their coach within the last two seasons.
Only Cincinnati has stuck with its coach through three straight years of zero playoff appearances. And it might be notable that the Bengals’ coach, Zac Taylor, did take them to the Super Bowl five years ago, in just his third season, and to the conference finals the year after that.
So the question for Colts fans is simple. Is Carlie Irsay-Gordon showing maturity and patience by standing by Ballard and Steichen despite mediocre results? Or is she too uncertain of how to proceed to make a bold move?
There is something to be said for giving Steichen time to build the team he wants. He seemed to be on track in the first half of 2025. Injuries derailed that, but was it really all injury-related? The Colts were showing signs of slipping before they lost QB Danial Jones, and their schedule was getting more challenging.
Would Irsay-Gordon have made the same moves had she known how many quality coaches would soon be flooding the market? Would Harbaugh or McDermott have looked good on the Colts’ sidelines next year? Stefanski has already landed a job with another team, and McDaniel still might.
But it will not be with the Colts.
Time will answer these questions. The Colts’ owner may have been talking about player personnel decisions related to the quarterback position when she told the media she intended to “stay in her lane” earlier this month. That’s a smart philosophy for any owner to employ.
But it comes down to what she sees as her lane. The rest of the NFL seems inclined to shake things up after three years of stagnation. Perhaps holding a contrarian view will pay off in Indianapolis.
Or perhaps it will come to represent a team that is stuck in place while other franchises make brave moves and find success.