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Rukkr Original NFL · IND By The Beat Guy Oct 21, 2026

Dodds Is Signing Bodies. Steichen Is Running Out of Time.

Ed Dodds has been interim GM for what feels like a week and a half, and he's already doing what interim GMs do: filling the practice squad, working out fringe players, keeping the roster from going completely bare while the organization figures out what comes next. That's the job right now, and by all accounts he's moving through it efficiently.

The backdrop is messier. Shane Steichen is coaching through the wreckage of a front office transition mid-season, with a roster that went 2-8 over its final ten games last year and hasn't shown much reason for optimism since. The secondary remains thin — Sauce Gardner is listed as Doubtful, and the cornerback depth behind him is largely untested. Anthony Gould is Questionable. The receiving room that was already fragile before Pierce went down hasn't gotten healthier. Steichen is managing a lot of moving parts with not enough pieces.

What Dodds can do in the short term is limited. Practice squad additions buy insurance; they don't fix structural problems. The secondary issues and the receiving room gaps that defined the offseason conversation are still there, and no transaction in the last two weeks has addressed them in any meaningful way. Dodds knows that. His job right now is triage, not reconstruction.

The harder question — whether Steichen survives long enough to see a real roster built around him — doesn't get answered by practice squad moves. It gets answered by what happens on the field over the next several weeks.

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