Nobody Is Actually Running This Football Team
Carlie Irsay-Gordon fired Chris Ballard and called it necessary. What she hasn't done yet is replace him with anyone who has the authority — or the job security — to make the decisions a 2-4 team approaching a trade deadline actually needs made. Ed Dodds is interim. Shane Steichen is auditioning. And the Colts are heading to Minneapolis with Tyler Warren out for a second consecutive game, Sauce Gardner out entirely, and a linebacker corps that has combined for 88 tackles, zero sacks, and zero interceptions through six weeks. That is the organizational portrait right now: two men in temporary roles managing a roster that requires permanent solutions.
What Dodds has done with his first week of authority is add a pair of veterans to the practice squad and sign Mecole Hardman to that same practice squad. Those are depth moves. Triage. They are not the moves of a front office that believes it is four wins from relevance — and yet the standings say the Colts are exactly that, two games out of the AFC South lead with eleven to play. The gap between what the roster needs and what the organization is capable of providing right now is the real story, and it's a gap that firing Ballard didn't close. It just made it easier to see.
The structural problem predates this week's transactions. I've been tracking this secondary collapse all season — Gardner is out, the cornerback depth behind him is thin, and the linebacker group that was supposed to generate pressure from the second level simply hasn't. Bryce Boettcher leads that corps with 32 tackles and nothing else. No sacks. No turnovers. In 2025, the Colts went 3-6 in games decided by seven points or fewer, and the same high-leverage execution failure is already embedded in this season's 2-4 record. Ballard didn't build a team that wins close games. Dodds and Steichen have inherited that problem without the standing to fix it at the root.
The cruelest part of the current moment is that Jonathan Taylor is doing his job. Seven rushing touchdowns in six games is the kind of production that should be carrying a contender. Daniel Jones is managing a difficult situation — four touchdowns, six interceptions, a receiving room that still doesn't have a reliable second option behind Josh Downs — but the offense isn't the reason this team loses. It loses because the secondary gives up leads and the linebackers don't create stops. Those are personnel failures that practice-squad signings don't address and that an interim GM can't fully fix before November.
My read is that the Dodds-Steichen pairing was always going to be a holding pattern, and the question Irsay-Gordon hasn't answered publicly is how long she lets it run. Steichen is, as has been reported, coaching for his job. But a coach coaching for his job while an interim GM stocks the practice squad is an organization in suspended animation — not rebuilding, not contending, just waiting to find out what it is. The Colts have eleven games left to answer that question themselves, on the field, because nobody in the front office has the standing to answer it anywhere else.