Sometimes A Team Just Wants To Hire A Famous Guy

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:

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