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The Indianapolis Colts head coach search is over. The team is hiring Philadelphia Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen. It’s an excellent hire for Colts owner Jim Irsay (although maybe too similar to his last one). For a while, it looked like Irsay was angling to keep 1-7 interim head coach Jeff Saturday. However, the unpredictable owner called an audible and landed a solid choice for the headset. That’s all great, right up until the point the news broke in the most clownish way possible.

Shane Steichen as Colts head coach came out on Super Bowl Sunday

Indianapolis Colts, Colts head coach, Jim Irsay, Shane Steichen
(L-R) Shane Steichen, Jim Irsay | Andy Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Dylan Buell/Getty Images

When Jim Irsay fired Chuck Pagano after the 2017 season, the Colts owner searched for a replacement and landed on Eagles offensive coordinator Frank Reich. When Reich’s tenure came to an end in 2022, the franchise once again looked to the Super Bowl team and took an Eagles OC.

In between, Irsay made one of the weirdest and most controversial hires of all time. The owner named club legend Jeff Saturday, who was an ESPN analyst at the time, as the boss on the sideline. The inexperience was one issue, and passing up more qualified minority candidates already on staff was another.

However, Irsay marches to the beat of his own drummer and was undeterred.

Saturday won his first game, then promptly dropped seven in a row. During those games, the Colts gave up the third-most points in one quarter in NFL history during a 54-19 loss to the Cowboys. Two weeks later, the Colts jumped out to a 33-0 lead against the Minnesota Vikings and promptly allowed the biggest comeback in NFL history.

Initial rumors during the Colts’ head coach search were that Jim Irsay wanted to find a way to keep Saturday. Eventually, though, common sense gave way, and the owner went in a better direction.

Shane Steichen is an excellent hire. He led the No. 2 scoring offense in the league this season and helped turn quarterback Jalen Hurts from a dicey second-rounder into a legitimate MVP candidate and a Super Bowl signal-caller.

With the Colts drafting fourth in the 2023 NFL Draft, a new QB is on the menu, and Steichen is a perfect coach to develop Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud, or Will Levis.

And if we could just stop there, it would have been awesome. But we can’t.

While the Arizona Cardinals — the only other team without a coach right now — put their coaching search on pause for a weekend while the NFL hosted its flagship event, the Super Bowl, in Arizona, Jim Irsay and the Colts couldn’t do that.

The loose cannon owner either sloppily allowed the news to leak on Super Bowl Sunday or purposefully leaked it to steal some of the spotlight. Either way, it was a clownish move that detracts from the organization and from Steichen, who is about to coach the most important game of his life right now.

But what else do you expect these days from Jim Irsay and the Colts?

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Staff Writer, Producer - NFL

Tim Crean

Tim Crean started writing about sports in 2016 and joined Sportscasting in 2021. He excels with his versatile coverage of the NFL and soccer landscape, as well as his expertise breaking down sports media, which stems from his many years downloading podcasts before they were even cool and countless hours spent listening to Mike & The Mad Dog and The Dan Patrick Show, among other programs.

As a longtime self-professed sports junkie who even played DII lacrosse at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York, Tim loves reading about all the latest sports news every day and considers it a dream to write about sports professionally. He’s a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan from Western New York who mistakenly thought, back in the early ’90s, that his team would be in the Super Bowl every year. He started following European soccer — with a Manchester City focus — in the early 2000s after spending far too much time playing FIFA.

When he’s not enjoying a round of golf or coaching youth soccer and flag football, Tim likes reading the work of Bill Simmons, Tony Kornheiser, Chuck Klosterman, and Tom Wolfe.