Inside a key team meeting and changes in the building: Football nerd Shane Steichen getting Colts to believe

INDIANAPOLIS — The new Colts head coach laid everything out.

Everything. Right out in the open, in the middle of a team meeting.

Player by player, coach by coach, Steichen went one-by-one through his first team in Indianapolis, telling every single person in a crowded room the role the Colts expect them to play this season.

The stars. The players on the practice squad. The coaching staff.

By the time Steichen was done, there was no wiggle room left, no space left for a player to wonder where he might stand in the team’s plans.

“Being honest, not hiding any secrets,” strong safety Julian Blackmon said. “I think that’s important. Everybody needs to know and understand where they stand.”

To a team still learning the personality of its new head coach, the meeting felt like vintage Steichen.

Earnest. Straightforward. Intense.

And understanding at the same time, capable of identifying each player’s skill set and knowing how he’d fit best in this Colts team, Steichen’s first as a head coach in the NFL.

Football, distilled down to its purest form.

Changes to the Colts

From the moment he arrived, Steichen began making changes.

The kind that are easy to see.

When the Colts new head coach walked into his office, he saw nothing on the walls. Steichen changed that immediately. Put up pictures of Indianapolis legends, players like Peyton Manning and Edgerrin James, instant reminders for anybody who enters the standard the franchise set in the first decade of this century.

The new head coach kept making changes to the building.

He had plenty of work to do — hiring his first coaching staff, identifying potential help in free agency, breaking down tape of the draft’s quarterbacks, knowing the player the Colts chose would ultimately play the biggest role in his success or failure in Indianapolis — but Steichen kept tinkering with the way the building looked.

Words appeared above the lockers. The main hallway, the one that leads through the building, to the locker room, weight room, and practice fields, changed completely, adding the words “Indianapolis Colts” in bold letters lit up by bright lights, new pictures of big performances, more words.

There are four end zones on the team’s two outdoor practice fields, the fields the Colts use every day, provided the weather allows.

Steichen had a different word painted in each end zone, and not because he’s the interior decorating or landscaping type.

Far from it.

Like almost everything Steichen has done as head coach of the Colts, the words have a football purpose.

“The pillars that I talked about when I got hired were character, preparation, consistency and being relentless,” Steichen said. “It can’t live on a wall. So when we’re watching practice (on film), guys are seeing that everywhere. It’s up in the meeting rooms, it’s on the field.”

He's not the first coach to make those kinds of changes.

But that doesn’t mean the effect is trite or overblown.

Steichen spent the months leading up to the season talking to head coaches past and present, stockpiling information on the best way to do the job. At the NFL’s annual owners’ meetings in March, Steichen spent time with Kansas City’s Andy Reid and Seattle’s Pete Carroll, among others.

“I think a big thing in this league is culture, and guys being on the same page, and believing what you’re putting down, but you’ve got to live it every single day,” Steichen said. “When you feel like something’s new, and it changed, and you keep growing and growing and growing, guys want to be a part of it.”

‘He wants this worse than anybody’

Culture can’t live on a wall.

A coach has to live it every single day.

“Not speaking for anybody other than myself. … I think the old adage, ‘consistency creates credibility,’ I think is important,” Indianapolis defensive coordinator Gus Bradley said. “That’s what Shane’s message is, it’s been very consistent, from Day 1 when he got here, all the way through.”

Bradley knows an NFL coach’s world better than most.

He spent four seasons as Jacksonville’s head coach, has 27 years of experience in the NFL, including four with Steichen as a Chargers assistant.

Bradley knows it’s harder than it sounds to be consistent on a daily basis in a league where there’s intense pressure to win, where a team’s momentum can turn on a key injury, where coaches get judged on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.

Steichen has only coached two games in a Colts baseball cap, but he’s already had to deal with his fair share of drama, most of it coming from the team’s contract dispute with superstar running back Jonathan Taylor, a storyline that dominated training camp and refuses to go away now that Indianapolis has entered the regular season.

“Win or loss, it’s really about making sure this team gets better from the last week,” Bradley said. “When you see a team get better, it makes the message even more powerful, because he is consistent and allows the players to kind of work in a consistent culture atmosphere, and really put their focus on game planning, execution, precision — things like that, rather than, ‘I’m up and down, and I don’t know what I’m getting when I walk into this building.’”

From the outside, it’s not easy to see everything the Colts players and coaching staff have been seeing from Steichen.

But the public figure Steichen cuts in Indianapolis has been consistent enough that there are patterns emerging.

For example, Steichen does not appear to be type of head coach who is going to put his players through the ringer publicly.

Quite the opposite. One training camp, two regular-season games, three preseason games and seven months into Steichen’s tenure, the Colts head coach appears to be a big believer in one of coaching’s oldest axioms, a tenet that goes back to Bear Bryant and maybe beyond.

Hand the credit to the players when things go well, take the blame when things go wrong.

When Steichen was asked about the feeling of winning his first NFL game as a head coach immediately after Sunday’s 31-20 victory over the Texans — a monumental milestone for a coaching lifer, a moment his players later said they could see made him emotional — he quickly deflected the praise to the players.

The same thing he’d done in the locker room, focusing on the team hitting its goals, rather than any mention of himself. The façade cracked slightly, but only when defensive tackle DeForest Buckner handed Steichen the game ball.

“He was trying to play it all cool,” quarterback Gardner Minshew said. “But then when we gave him the team ball, his voice was cracking a little bit. We see everything that Shane puts in. He works so hard. He wants this worse than anybody.”

If something goes wrong, though, Steichen always takes the blame.

Always.

Without fail.

Even when he’s about to hit them hard on a mistake in the team meeting, as several Colts have said Steichen has done this season.

“I think you’ve got to take accountability for everything,” Steichen said. “It starts with myself, and then it’s the players holding the players accountable, it’s coach to player, it’s player to coach, and everyone has to be on the same page.”

A page that’s easier to keep reading when the head coach is taking the blame on the front cover of the book.

‘He’s a nerd … and I think it’s cool’

Steichen’s defining trait, the remarkably bright offensive mind that is always whirring, searching for ideas like a computer trying to break a code, is a characteristic that is both impossible to miss and a part of him the public only gets to see in pieces, by Steichen’s own design.

The Indianapolis head coach does not like to talk about his philosophy, his offensive scheme or anything related to its details, fearful an opponent might find an innocuous quote and use the intel to cripple the Colts on game day.

He’ll talk about a particular play after it’s on tape, break it down to individual parts that can already be seen, but Steichen is careful to avoid giving away too much.

“He’s a nerd,” Indianapolis wide receiver Isaiah McKenzie said. “The nerdiest coach I’ve ever been around. … And I think it’s cool. All he knows is football, and I love that.”

Steichen’s love of the game oozes out of him.

Especially when he’s found a play he knows will work. When Steichen installed the quarterback sweep that produced an 18-yard touchdown for rookie quarterback Anthony Richardson last week, a symphony of misdirection, protection and timing, his enthusiasm was so impossible to miss that Michael Pittman Jr. spent the entire week fixated on his role in the play, a critical crackback block.

“All week, I’d just been trying not to mess that play up,” Pittman Jr. said. “If I mess up one play in the game, it better not be that play, because it’s his baby.”

Always a stickler for the details, Steichen harped on the play all week, his passion for the play evident. The Colts coaching staff thought it would work against a couple of different looks the Texans use on defense; Indianapolis just needed the execution.

“It looked terrible all week, and we kept it in, so you know it’s the head coach’s play,” Minshew said. “And then, of course, on game day, it worked.”

To this point in his career, Steichen’s defining characteristic as an offensive mind has been his flexibility.

He can, and has, designed an offense for just about any style of quarterback, and a wide range of skill sets among the offensive weapons to boot. When the Colts talk about Steichen’s offensive acumen — and the players are careful to avoid violating their coach’s code of silence — they rave about his ability to bend and mold his system to his players.

“He’s got a really creative mind of how to use the pieces,” Indianapolis general manager Chris Ballard said. “Whatever a player’s strengths are, he’s going to do everything he can to put him in position to do that.”

Steichen’s flexibility, and his history of developing young quarterbacks, is one of the primary reasons he has the job.

And he’s already put it to use on Richardson, diving into his history with offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter and the rest of the staff months ago to find concepts from Richardson’s past that fit the offense.

Two games into his career, Richardson has been better than most expected, completing 63.8% of his passes and getting the ball out of his hand quickly — the 10th-fastest of any quarterback in the NFL — a sign of the rookie’s comfort with the concepts he’s been given.

Steichen deserves credit for designing the offense to help Richardson.

Even if he won’t take it.

“I think it just shows (Richardson’s) preparation, going through his progressions, spending time in the meeting rooms,” Steichen said. “Jim Bob does a heck of a job with him, along with (quarterbacks coach Cam Turner).”

Richardson isn’t the only Colt who benefits.

“Without giving up too much, I would say he has a young offensive coach’s mind,” Pittman Jr. said. “When you think about young offensive coaches, you think about (Sean) McVay, (Kyle) Shanahan, those guys, and how creative they are with moving guys around, getting guys in their best position.”

Every single day

When Steichen outlined every player’s role in front of the team, the approach could have ruffled some feathers.

For a lot of Colts, though, it was refreshing.

“A lot of times, when I’ve felt like, both personally and on the team, where guys may be disgruntled, not understand what’s going on, it’s because their roles — what’s expected from them, what’s needed of them from the team — it’s not as clear,” Indianapolis middle linebacker Zaire Franklin said. “I feel like that type of accountability and that type of leadership means a lot to everybody in the building.”

Ultimately, the Colts can feel Steichen’s competitive nature, his desire to win.

The way the new Indianapolis head coach will do whatever he has to do to reach that goal. When Steichen laid out each player’s role in that team meeting, he made it clear how he saw his team, and how he wanted his team to improve.

“I feel like a lot of guys in this league, that’s all they want: honesty,” McKenzie said. “He was as honest as possible. He was very up front.”

Steichen knows the precedent he’s set. He has to hold the tone he’s set in Indianapolis.

Every single day.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: How football nerd Shane Steichen is getting his team to believe