‘Smelling blood in the water’: How Shane Steichen has led Colts to brink of playoffs
INDIANAPOLIS — There was an edge to Shane Steichen’s postgame speech in the locker room on Sunday.
A hard edge, steely-eyed focus the Colts are used to seeing from Steichen. For their first-year head coach, that’s his default setting.
But this was different.
Famously focused on football from the moment he gets out of bed until long after the sun sets, if there’s one time Steichen relaxes in front of his team, it’s in the middle of a winning locker room.
“Normally, he’ll joke around, laugh,” Colts tight end Mo Alie-Cox said. “But this week, it was pretty much, ‘On to the next’ immediately. Even in that moment, you could tell he was already locked in on Houston.”
His mind had already moved to the immediate future. To the next task, the next game, to the problems posed by the Texans and the answers he’d spend the week finding in the film, the tendencies, the preparation.
Shane Steichen is almost never in the moment.
He’s almost always thinking ahead.
“Yeah, I believe that, just because in this league, it’s kind of, ‘What have you done for me lately?’” Steichen said. “You’ve got a big win, and shoot, it doesn’t matter what we did now. That game is over. What are we going to do this week?”
Exceeding expectations despite gambling scandals, mysterious suspensions and an arrest
This Colts season was supposed to be about the future, about a new direction for the franchise, about a rookie quarterback who looked better than just about anybody expected.
Anthony Richardson flashed brilliance in the first 18 plays against Houston, then got ripped away from the Colts for a game and a half. When he came back, Richardson hinted at true greatness in an improbable comeback against the Rams, only to be lost for the season a week later.
Four games and two quarters into Steichen’s first season in Indianapolis, the player who was supposed to be the focal point of the season was gone.
And it was far from the only adversity the Colts have faced.
The team’s contract dispute with superstar running back Jonathan Taylor dominated the headlines during training camp. Taylor missed four games early, then another three late due to injury.
The team’s veteran center, Ryan Kelly, missed two games early. Then the Colts lost their promising second-year left tackle, Bernhard Raimann, for two before getting him back, only to lose stalwart right tackle Braden Smith twice, first for four games, then for three more. The team’s most talented tight end, Jelani Woods, never played.
The defense’s best playmaker for a half decade, Shaquille Leonard, never regained his form. The fulcrum of the run defense, Grover Stewart, was suspended for six games. The team’s projected top two outside cornerbacks played together for just two games and have played only a combined 12 games in total — four for Dallis Flowers, eight for second-round pick JuJu Brents. There have been gambling scandals, mysterious suspensions and an arrest.
A list of injuries and distractions that could have understandably derailed any head coach, much less a 38-year-old in his first season running an NFL franchise.
But only if that head coach ever took the time to look around at what he lost.
“Sometimes you have meetings where you get coached up by the head coach: ‘Hey, we all understand we have injuries, but we have to be like the players, and it’s next man up, and how we go, the players will go,’” said Colts defensive coordinator Gus Bradley, a veteran of six coaching staffs and nearly two decades in the NFL. “We don’t have those discussions. … (Steichen) doesn’t really have those types of conversations.”
The way Steichen’s mind works does not allow him to reflect on what’s missing.
Only on the task at hand.
“From my perspective being near him on the sideline, being part of those discussions, it’s kind of one of those things — it’s maybe not the thing you’re the most proud of — but in this league, when somebody goes down, mentally as a coach you have to sort of move your brain forward,” offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said. “How do we solve the next problem?”
A lot of coaches in the NFL know that, at least on a conceptual level. A lot of them probably believe they have it mastered.
But the toll the absences take always ends up trickling out at some point, typically in post-game press conferences after a loss, when the coach finally acknowledges the elephant missing from the room.
Unless the coach is Steichen, whose mind sees only the game plan.
When Steichen gets the injury report every day, instead of lamenting who he’s lost, his brain immediately begins racing through the possibilities — the backup’s talents, the plays that fit him best, how the Colts can tailor the game plan to him.
“It’s always forward-looking,” backup quarterback Sam Ehlinger said. “The things that are uncontrollable are never discussed.”
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‘He goes over every little situation that could ever happen’
Maybe Steichen’s mind is able to move forward so quickly because he’s already thought about the worst-case scenario.
And the best-case scenario. And everything in-between.
The Colts head coach is always thinking ahead, his mind whirring through possible futures like a supercomputer trying to beat a grandmaster at the game of chess.
“You can go into the game knowing: ‘OK, we’ve seen this, we know what to expect here,’” defensive tackle DeForest Buckner said. “I feel like he goes over every little situation that could ever happen.”
The shift from Richardson to backup quarterback Gardner Minshew might be the most obvious example.
When the Colts evaluated the top quarterbacks before the draft last year, the coaching staff did preliminary work on the ways they would tailor the offense to each player, then intensified those efforts on Richardson’s unique combination of talents after Indianapolis took the Florida star with the No. 4 pick.
Steichen also built an offense for Minshew inside the Colts’ playbook, knowing Indianapolis might have to turn to the veteran backup at some point.
“We’re always trying to engineer the offense to the strengths of our players; Anthony Richardson and Gardner Minshew, they have some different strengths,” Cooter said. “We’d be foolish not to lean into Gardner’s strengths.”
But preparing for the possibility of a quarterback change is something just about anybody can see coming, a fact proven by the rash of injuries to starting quarterbacks around the NFL this season, although few teams have handled the shift as well as the Colts.
Steichen’s built the possibility that Indianapolis might lose just about anybody into his weekly plan.
“After practice, they have a developmental period; they’re running the same stuff we have in the game plan,” Alie-Cox said of the reserves and practice squad. “If their opportunity ever gets called, they can be ready to play. You’ve seen, different guys have stepped up at different times this year.”
The list of names offensively goes far beyond Minshew.
Zack Moss, Trey Sermon and Tyler Goodson. D.J. Montgomery. Alie-Cox and Will Mallory. Blake Freeland and Wesley French. All have stepped up in an unlikely spot for Indianapolis at one time or another and exceeded expectations.
“I think Shane has done an incredible job of, every single week, reminding us: ‘Leave no doubt in your mind, we’re going to win this game,’” Taylor said. “It has to start with that. It doesn’t start with: ‘Let’s prepare, and let’s hope we win. It’s: ‘We’re going to win the game because of how we prepare.’”
The unlikely heroes are easy to remember.
But there’s also plenty of problems that Steichen has solved this season that are about the X’s and O’s, about his belief that there is always an answer to every problem. Indianapolis heads into the season finale ranked 10th in the NFL in scoring despite ranking outside the top 10 in almost every major category.
“I think that just goes as far back as camp,” Alie-Cox said. “In years past, we were getting killed by the defense (because) we were running our stuff, and we weren’t really scheming our defense up so we could beat them. I think Shane set the tone in this camp: ‘We’re changing this, changing that, because we’re trying to win every day.”
Answers are valuable to Steichen.
Far more important than obstacles.
“It’s demanded we find a way,” Bradley said. “You remember at Cincinnati, the running back kind of hurt us on some screens. Well, (Steichen’s message was) that needs to be corrected, that needs to be taken care of immediately. There are things like that, that you feel his presence and what direction he’d like to see his team go.”
‘He’s smelling blood in the water’
Even when Steichen’s smiling or laughing after a game, even in the moments that have been caught on-camera in the locker room this season, his mind is moments away from moving on to the next problem, the next game.
“I mean, I might enjoy it for an hour or so,” Steichen said. “But that’s about it.”
His team noticed Steichen’s mentality right away.
Then he backed it up. The more the Colts won, shedding the embarrassment of the 2022 season and surging to the brink of the playoffs, the more it drove home how many times Steichen had the right game plan to attack a good defense, how many times he’d schemed a receiver wide-open, how many times a play the Colts put in exactly for that defense came through at exactly the right time.
“From a player’s perspective, it goes to show the level of preparation it takes to operate at an extremely high level,” Ehlinger said. “I think a lot of guys in the locker room really respect his play-calling, his scheme, the way he sees the game. When your leader — who is elite at play-calling and seeing defenses and just football intelligence — when you see your leader operating that way, you want to be like that as well.”
The Colts have been asked to overcome plenty this season.
From the lingering disrespect and disappointment of 2022 to a string of off-the-field distractions to a rash of injuries that still feels like it hasn’t let up, Indianapolis has felt like the underdog all season long.
Not that Steichen’s dwelling on any of those obstacles.
Or mentioning the adversity at all.
“No matter if it’s a win or a loss, he’s laser-focused on the next moment,” Taylor said. “He’s smelling the blood in the water.”
And he’s been exactly what this Colts team needed.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: How Shane Steichen's problem solving has led team to playoff brink
