Steichen Is Auditioning for a Job That May Already Be Gone

The linebacker corps has combined for 88 tackles this season and zero sacks, zero interceptions. That's the number that keeps pulling me back. Not as a condemnation of three individual players, but as a portrait of a defense that generates volume without consequence — a unit that shows up in the box score and disappears from the game.

That context matters now because of what Ed Dodds did in his first week as interim GM: he added a pair of veterans to the practice squad, with Mecole Hardman among those brought in. Practice squad moves. That's the opening statement from the man now running personnel in Indianapolis. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with the moves themselves — you plug holes, you add bodies, you keep the roster functional. But the signal underneath them is worth reading carefully. When a new decision-maker inherits a 2-4 team with an elimination number of 10 and 11 games left, and his first act is practice squad maintenance rather than anything that reshapes the competitive picture, he is not behaving like a man who believes this group can run the table. He is behaving like a man who is cataloguing the inventory before the real decisions get made.

Shane Steichen, meanwhile, is reportedly coaching for his job. That framing — first reported after Ballard's firing — is doing a lot of work. It means that Dodds is not simply managing the present; he is evaluating it. Every loss tightens the calculus. The Colts lost to a Titans team that came in winless. They have dropped four of their last six. Their point differential has held at -3.3 per game all season, which means nothing has actually changed — not the offense's inability to close, not the defense's structural softness, not the special teams instability that has lingered since Brian Mason's injury in August.

Jonathan Taylor's production — 492 rushing yards and seven touchdowns — is the one undeniable asset on this roster, which is precisely why the calls to trade him are getting louder. My read is that the trade conversation is the clearest evidence of where the organization's head is. You don't float moving your best player to build future capital if you think you're eight wins away from a playoff run. You do it when you've decided the current window is closed and the next one needs to be built from scratch. Dodds doesn't have to say that out loud. The practice squad signings and the trade speculation say it for him.

What makes this genuinely complicated is that the Colts are not mathematically dead. They're two games out of the division lead, two out of a wild card. Daniel Jones has been erratic — four touchdowns against six interceptions is not a winning formula — but Taylor's dual-threat production keeps drives alive, and the wins over Houston and Washington proved this roster can execute when things break right. The problem is that "when things break right" is not a playoff strategy. Last season's 3-6 record in close games told us that. The seven-game collapse that ended 2025 told us that. The same patterns are running again in 2026, and no amount of practice squad depth changes the underlying wiring.

Steichen may win Sunday in Minnesota. He may go 5-5 the rest of the way and force a harder conversation. But right now, the structure of this week — an interim GM adding fringe veterans while the head coach fights for his survival — reads less like a team trying to win a division and more like an organization quietly preparing for what comes after it doesn't.