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NEW YORK — I’m at the NFL’s fall meeting, which is mostly the owners counting up all their money, and Week 6 is now in the rearview. Here are my Tuesday notes …
Indianapolis Colts
To me, the Colts’ decision to fire GM Chris Ballard, which was coming sooner or later, opens up two questions, one in the bigger picture, one in the smaller picture.
On the grander scale, new(-ish) controlling owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon needs to decide if this is a single move based on one man’s performance, or the start of a larger reimagination of the franchise she inherited from her late father. Last year, the Dolphins fired GM Chris Grier on Halloween, and the Falcons brought in the sports consulting firm Sportology in December, and those moves were simply harbingers for wholesale organizational change.
Both have potential parallels to the Colts. In Miami, it was a signal of the rising place owner Stephen Ross’s son-in-law, Danny Sillman, held within the team, and Sillman was a point man in bringing GM Jon-Eric Sullivan and coach Jeff Hafley in from the Packers to drill home a focus on drafting and developing players. In Atlanta, the team tapped a franchise icon, Matt Ryan, to set the team’s vision, with coach Kevin Stefanski and GM Ian Cunningham coming in to join him from Cleveland and Chicago, respectively.
So in the first case, Sillman’s larger voice in Miami could mirror Irsay-Gordon taking charge in this situation. In the second, Atlanta was following a trend (Jacksonville’s hire of Tony Boselli would be another example) of putting a whip-smart former player over the top, to set the tone for the football operation. Indianapolis, of course, has an ex-quarterback like that in its holster, and maybe two, if Andrew Luck would ever be interested in leaving Stanford.
Peyton Manning, known in both Denver and Indianapolis for picking front-office folks’ brains on roster-building, was very interested, for a time, in running a team. Whether he’s still interested, given all he’s got going on, remains to be seen.
Then, there’s the more immediate question of how the Colts handle the coming days, with the Nov. 10 trade deadline now three weeks away. Some of it could ride on how the team plays, and whether it stays in contention. That said, the Dolphins, at the deadline last year, looked to sell parts right after firing Grier, and wound up dealing Jaelan Phillips. Two years before that, the Commanders, under new ownership, conducted a similar fire sale, with edge rushers Chase Young and Montez Sweat dealt to the 49ers and Bears.
The Colts have a bunch of older vets who’d be of value to other teams, with DeForest Buckner, Jonathan Taylor and Quenton Nelson topping that list.
All of which is why the decision to pull the plug now on Ballard—who finished his nine-plus years in Indy with a 72-82-1 record, two playoff berths and one playoff win—is likely only the start of the changes coming to Indianapolis.
Shane Steichen
I’ve said this before, and I will say it again: I think Shane Steichen would wind up becoming this year’s version of Stefanski, a coach highly thought of league-wide who winds up a hot commodity should he get fired.
There is a decent chance Steichen will wind up as collateral damage in a larger reorganization of the Colts, the way Raheem Morris was last year in Atlanta. (Obviously, how the rest of the season goes could impact that.)
In the case that happens, my guess is teams will look under the hood and see a still-young coach (41) who built a championship-level offense for Jalen Hurts in Philadelphia, maximized Justin Herbert as a Chargers rookie (and if there are changes in Los Angeles, Steichen would totally be a name to watch there), and squeezed everything he could out of a wonky situation at the position in Indy. Despite the Colts’ issues at the position, they’ve been competitive through Steichen’s time there, always around .500.
That doesn’t mean Steichen is blameless for Indy’s failure to break out of its mediocrity. If the Colts miss the playoffs this year, that’ll make Steichen 0-for-4 in making the postseason with the Colts, and few coaches survive that.
But as was the case with Stefanski in Cleveland, there are reasons well beyond Steichen for the record being what it is. And I’d bet a lot of teams would pick up on that.
Jalen Hurts
On the Hurts situation, please first allow me the preamble you’ve heard from every other media person over the past couple of days: I am not a doctor.
All right, now that we have that covered. … There are some unanswered questions that I got from doctors I did talk to about the situation. The first regarded the issue of Hurts being told not to sleep, something multiple medical professionals told me would not be the course of action for a patient with a superficial clot. The second is what the ultrasound taken in London showed and whether it was misread by a radiologist over there. The third would be how he was handled on the plane ride back to Philly, and who cleared him to fly.
Clearly, if the doctors had found the embolism in London, they’d have kept him in England for a while, or at least should have. But even in the case that they hadn’t, and only knew about the superficial clot, there’d be extra care they’d have to take in flying him home. And if the team or the player’s camp is more concerned about Hurts’s image, in making clear this was out of his hands, and would sideline anyone, fine. There are other ways to illustrate that.
Also, as Conor Orr wrote Monday, the Eagles shouldn’t have put Nick Sirianni out there to answer for this. I can say after a day of digging into it, it’s not an easy topic to expound on.
Cam Ward
Ward didn’t blow up on Sunday, but he did enough to get the Titans to the winner’s circle for the first time in 2026. He helped Tennessee get more out of No. 4 pick Carnell Tate, and he protected the ball as his defense and special teams took command of the game late, with a long punt return and a pair of takeaways leading to a touchdown and two field goals for the offense, and a blocked punt getting returned for another touchdown.
Then, Ward led two drives to set up Joey Slye’s 49- and 44-yard field goals to win the game.
With those little things, Robert Saleh told me he hopes Ward gets a little more grace.
“It goes without saying that when there’s failure, the quarterback’s always going to take a beating,” Saleh said over the phone postgame. “It is what it is, the quarterback and the head coach. And I think the most important thing is to keep perspective, because if we close out against the Giants, or we close out against Philadelphia, we’re talking completely differently about this young man. He’s got a lot of talent. He’s doing a lot of different things well.
“I’m not going to hide behind the fact that he’s got things that he needs to improve on, but he also knows that. Just talking with Shane Steichen before the game, we were talking about college and just the development of quarterbacks, like he needs some grace. Give him a chance to grow. Give him a chance to get better. Give him a chance to understand a completely new offense with completely new players and completely new coaches.
“And let’s see where he can take it. He’s too talented. He works too hard. It means too much to him for him to fail. I believe that in my heart. And yes, while I acknowledge that he has a lot of things to get better at, he also does a lot of things very, very well that get lost in losing. And we’re going to continue to build him up. We’re going to continue to find things that he does really well. We’re going to continue to amplify those. And I think Cam’s going to be a really good quarterback in this league for a long time.”
Time will tell if Saleh’s right.
Los Angeles Rams
The loss of Davante Adams for the next couple of months is one that’s going to sting for a Rams offense that’s had to be creative to drum up big plays.
We’ve got some numbers on this. On the season, Los Angeles has 24 plays of 20-plus yards. Adams is responsible for seven of them. Puka Nacua, a run-after-catch monster, has six. But over the past three weeks, the Rams have had nine such plays, and four of them have come from the tight ends, with another being a throw to running back Blake Corum.
On Sunday, the team-speed question came to a head, with the offense generating one play of more than 16 yards (a 43-yard catch-and-run by Nacua), which allowed the Cardinals to play the Rams’ tough, productive run game more aggressively, and may explain Kyren Williams’s frustration postgame.
Now, the team is losing its top downfield threat. And as such, it’ll be interesting to see how Sean McVay, Dave Ragone and Nathan Scheelhaase work with what they’ve got.
Quick-hitters
• Mike Evans has become a pretty important piece for the 49ers’ offense, as everyone saw Monday night. So Kyle Shanahan being careful with his X receiver, now in Year 13, makes all the sense in the world. And we’ll see if they look for another vet at the position—though I’d be surprised if they take any sort of a huge swing (trying to pry their old friend Jauan Jennings from the Vikings would make some sense).
• It stunk seeing Terry McLaurin go down on Monday night, but this is why the addition of Stefon Diggs in the summer made all the sense in the world for the Commanders. Diggs is comfortable as a team’s primary option—and actually was the primary option for a Super Bowl team, in New England, last year. And the Commanders, for all their issues, are still in it, given all the issues that exist with the teams in their division.
• Finally, at the league meeting in New York today, NFL owners will vote to approve two ownership transactions. The first is Falcons owner Arthur Blank selling 7.5% of his team to the private equity firm Arctos (it’s the first tranche of a larger transaction, with another 2.5% set to go down the line). The second is 2.1% of the Dolphins going to Jean Salata. Of that total, 2% comes from Ross. The other 0.1%? That’s being sold by singer/actor Marc Anthony, who’s leaving after 17 years as part of the Dolphins’ ownership group.
Anthony came on in 2009 when Ross was new, as part of a larger effort to get celebrities in on the franchise to drum up excitement in South Florida.
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