Shane Steichen, the Colts coach still standing after his general manager fell

Shane Steichen

Photo: All-Pro Reels / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 11, 1985 Sacramento
Occupation	Footballer

Six games into the worst start of his tenure, the Indianapolis Colts fired the general manager who had hired Shane Steichen and kept the coach. He went to the podium and pulled the blame back onto himself: “I don’t think it falls completely on Chris. I’m the head football coach.” The man who chose him is gone, the crowd at Lucas Oil Stadium has started booing, and the coach left in the building is the one who now has to explain the record.

The irony is hard to miss. Steichen arrived in Indianapolis with a quarterback developer’s reputation, the assistant who had shaped Philip Rivers’ late prime, Justin Herbert’s rookie year and Jalen Hurts‘ rise. In Indianapolis the position has turned against him. He has cycled through a rookie whose shoulder gave out, a veteran stopgap, a veteran in his mid-forties called back from retirement and a starter returning from a torn Achilles, and the Colts have yet to play a playoff game under him.

He grew up around Sacramento, where he was born on May 11, 1985, and played quarterback at Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado Hills well enough to be named area MVP by The Sacramento Bee after a sectional title run. At UNLV he was a four-year letterman who started only 13 games. His best afternoon came off the bench against New Mexico in October 2006, when he threw five touchdown passes to tie a school record in a 39-36 overtime loss. He left Las Vegas with a degree in journalism and media studies.

The coaching path was long and unglamorous. He stayed at UNLV as a graduate assistant, spent 2010 as an offensive assistant at Louisville and reached the NFL in 2011 as a defensive assistant with the San Diego Chargers under Norv Turner, whose son Scott had been his college teammate. When Turner was fired, Steichen joined him again in Cleveland for 2013 as a quality control coach, and that staff was cleared out after one year too.

San Diego brought him back in 2014, and his reputation was built there. As quarterbacks coach from 2016 to 2019 he worked every day with Rivers, who made three straight Pro Bowls in that stretch. When the Chargers fired offensive coordinator Ken Whisenhunt in October 2019, Steichen took over the play calls. A year later, as full-time coordinator, he was handed Herbert, the sixth overall pick, who set NFL rookie records for completions and touchdown passes and was named the AP Offensive Rookie of the Year.

Philadelphia made him Nick Sirianni’s offensive coordinator in 2021, and the Eagles years are the strongest case for him. With Hurts in his first season as the full-time starter, Steichen built the offense around his quarterback’s legs, and the Eagles led the league with a franchise-record 2,715 rushing yards. In 2022 they went 14-3, scored 28.1 points a game and reached Super Bowl LVII, where they lost 38-35 to Kansas City. Two days later, on February 14, 2023, the Colts named him head coach, on a six-year contract according to NFL Network.

The first Indianapolis season set the pattern. Anthony Richardson, the first-round quarterback the club drafted that spring, was lost to a shoulder injury in Week 5, Gardner Minshew finished the year, and a 9-8 team missed the playoffs by losing the finale to Houston. In 2024 the Colts went 8-9 amid more quarterback controversy, and owner Jim Irsay kept both Steichen and general manager Chris Ballard. Irsay died in May 2025, and his daughter Carlie Irsay-Gordon took over as CEO.

Then came the season that will follow Steichen around. Daniel Jones beat out Richardson for the job and the Colts started 8-2, their best opening since 2009. Jones tore his Achilles in December in Jacksonville, and with his backups injured Steichen phoned Rivers, his old Chargers quarterback, who was 44 and five years retired. Rivers lost all three of his starts. The Colts finished on a seven-game losing streak at 8-9 and became the first team in NFL history to open 8-2 and end with a losing record. Irsay-Gordon kept the coach anyway, and said later that the sense of urgency for him and Ballard “to deliver and perform has never been higher.”

The quarterback-developer label deserves a harder look than it usually gets. Rivers was an established star when Steichen met him, Herbert arrived as an elite prospect, and Hurts remains the clearest proof of his work. The one raw quarterback handed to him as a head coach, Richardson, never got past backup and asked for a trade this year. Jones, re-signed in March on a two-year, $88 million deal, has completed a career-low 59.6 percent of his passes and ranks 30th in the league in QBR. The play calling has drawn its own criticism. In overtime at Arrowhead in Week 2, trailing by three at the Kansas City 17, Steichen handed the ball to Jonathan Taylor twice for lost yardage, settled for a tying field goal and watched the Chiefs win it with one of their own. He said he wanted Taylor to score. Injuries have wrecked his quarterback plans more than once, and seven of the nine defeats in 2025 came by eight points or fewer, but close games are where head coaches get judged.

This season the Colts lost to Baltimore and Kansas City, beat Houston and then Washington in London, and lost at Pittsburgh before a 26-20 home defeat to a Tennessee team that had not won all year, after leading 13-0 at halftime. “We’ve got to give them something to cheer about,” Steichen said of the fans. “I don’t blame them for booing one freaking bit.” The next day Ballard was fired. Irsay-Gordon said a change in leadership was “necessary” to meet a standard of competing for championships, assistant general manager Ed Dodds took over the personnel department for the rest of the season, and Steichen and his staff now report to ownership. His regular-season record stands at 27-30.

He and his wife, Nina, have two children, Hudson and Stella, and his older brother Sean was a punter at Boise State. His best-known personal story is a near miss: shortly after finishing high school he sat on contestants’ row on The Price Is Right in 2003 and never made it to the stage, outbid by a single dollar, a tale he once told Jason Kelce.

The next test is in Minneapolis against the Vikings on October 25, with Jones still under center and Steichen insisting he is “grateful for every day that I’m in this building.” Whoever wins the general manager search will inherit one decision already waiting: whether the coach Ballard hired is the coach the Colts keep.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, American football, Jalen Hurts, Indianapolis Colts, Chris Ballard, Shane Steichen, Daniel Jones