The moment general manager Chris Ballard was given Fredo's kiss by the Indianapolis Colts' HR department Monday morning, the rumor mill started to churn up replacements. This is bleak work, but consider that the alternative was analyzing how the Colts managed to lose at home against a previously winless Titans team on Sunday. The first name on that list, per Dan Patrick, was Peyton Manning. It's a perfectly silly, superficial, and absolutely in-play choice for the job: the only person who does insurance commercials more often than Flo from Progressive.
That's because Manning is the preeminent former Indianapolis Colt, a quarterback who won a Super Bowl ring for the team and had the best seasons of his Hall of Fame career in that town. It's in play because Manning is an omnipresent medioid who ably plays the affable goober, but is in real life anything but. It's also in play because the Colts are owned by the daughter of the late Jim Irsay, Carlie Irsay-Gordon, an owner who takes notes on the sidelines in a constant quest to avoid just being seen as another fail-offspring in a league that's lousy with them. After the team's final loss of last season, she asked Ballard if he believed he still had "his juju." Given that he got canned with a career record in the job of 72-82-1 and the Colts haven't reached the playoffs since the 2020 season, it puts a serious strain on the concept of "juju."
Somewhere in that notebook, at some point during Sunday's grim and lifeless 26-20 loss to the Tennessee Titans, for god's sake, Irsay-Gordon presumably wrote "this juju sucks," if not in so many words then decisively enough to punch Ballard's ticket. Irsay-Gordon explained her sideline note-taking thusly two weeks ago to Front Office Sports:
“I like to say on a good day I have like a fifth-grade reading level understanding of the game and just the basic concepts of what we’re trying to do, depending on the week and depending on our opponent and depending on the situation,” Irsay-Gordon told Bridget Condon of Front Office Sports Tonight on Monday in London.
“But I think, then, it just helps to understand and to ask questions because I think one of the things, in my opinion, like being a good leader is about listening, really to understand. And I think that’s what the best teams do.”
Bringing in Manning would be a move done out of convenience, firmly at the nexus of neophyte owner and newbie general manager. Again, we must make it clear that General Managin' Manning is a rumor, and as a rumor is still more or less at the talk-radio-for-insomniacs level. But so was the talk about Troy Aikman's mysterious consulting gig with the Miami Dolphins and Matt Ryan's actual executive role with the Atlanta Falcons, before those came to pass. The same could be said for Drew Brees, whose name has been mentioned as a possible new GM for the New Orleans Saints whenever Mickey Loomis is relieved of that job. In the NFL, preposterous notions gain credibility not despite but because of preposterous people saying preposterous things about them. By that standard, Manning is exactly the fit for a bad team that believes its principal shortcoming lies not in making bad football choices—which is why Ballard got the security escort to his car—but in not having The Right Guy in the job.
The Colts and many other organizations in its tranche of mediocrity really would believe that the solution to their issues would be having someone popular in the front office to replace the departed blame magnet. They would believe this because "getting the fan base off everyone's arse" is more or less what they understand that job to be. By this standard, Manning should be the default hire for every high-profile job vacancy that comes up in an organization that doesn't know what it's doing, even if that job hasn't come up yet. See Aikman's recent turn in "Dead Microphone Walking" for another example here.
This phenomenon is not all that recent. Otto Graham was the head coach and general manager in Washington years after his Hall of Fame career in Cleveland ended, and that was in the early 1960s. Bart Starr was the coach and general manager of the Packers in the '70s, to no discernible effect. Norm Van Brocklin was coach and GM in Atlanta after a glorious career with the Los Angeles Rams, and he is most famous for having tried to draft "John Wayne from Fort Apache State" in the 17th round in 1972 as a statement of the toughness he was trying to instill in the moribund Falcons. (Yeah, that John Wayne.) Pete Rozelle, humorless schoolmarm that he was, disallowed the pick. This was presumably because Wayne was 64 at the time, although Wayne had actually played a football coach in Trouble Along The Way 19 years earlier.
Let's not get distracted by John Wayne when we should be getting distracted by Peyton Manning. Hiring Manning to run football operations, or even just as some sort of consultant, would be a publicity grab by a team that should right now want fewer people noticing it, not more. But this is the team that once installed Jeff Saturday as interim head coach, straight from the ESPN studio. When you don't know what you're doing anyway, a quick leafing through the media guide for a big name with no experience can serve the same purpose as a job search. Ask the San Francisco Giants how that worked out with Buster Posey, but if you want to ask Buster himself, you'll still have to address him as President of Baseball Operations.
This rumor does raise an interesting question, though: If Manning could parlay this interest into getting Aikman's TV job, even at its present $18 million per year, why would he take a Colts' job at roughly half the price? ESPN might even let him do both, since it'll do pretty much anything to anything to remain in the favor of the NFL and any of its constituent units. It isn't like Manning needs the money. There's no real reason for him to do any of these things, but this might be missing the point—none of this necessarily needs to happen for "a real reason." In the near term, which is all most owners consider, something happening at all is enough.
Given the standards and practices of the modern billionaire offspring with little inherent knowledge of the family business—in other words, almost all of them—the prospect of Football President Peyton Manning is better than just a hot rumor. He is the magician's scarf, designed to take your eye off the steamer trunk with the legs sticking out of one end and a head from the other. Finally, Manning taking the Colts' gig would open a new line of inquiry for football insiders, namely, "What does this mean for Joe Buck?" In the current climate, there are always going to be dumber questions, and dumber answers to those questions. Not many, granted, but a few.
