Inside Shane Steichen’s Plans to Build a Winning Culture With the Colts
The first-time head coach talks about everything he learned from the Chargers and Eagles as he now gets to build his own program.
Then Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen left the Super Bowl field at State Farm Stadium, with the wrong color confetti falling on his head, at around 10 p.m. ET. Within an hour, he was back at the team hotel. The next morning, he was on a flight to Indianapolis to finalize a deal to become the Colts’ new coach. He spent much of his time on the plane jotting down notes on whom he’d thank and what he’d say at the press conference.
And that gave him a little window between his hire being announced on Valentine’s Day, Tuesday of that week, and that press conference, around noon that day, to decompress a little. You might imagine how he used it.
“I had about an hour before the press conference, and that's when I flipped it on,” Steichen said, with a hint of pain still in his voice, on Saturday, driving home from work. “I turned on the Super Bowl about an hour before my press conference and I watched 33 plays. And then I just stopped. And then I was like, All right, and I went and did my press conference.”
Steichen never finished getting through the tape.
Part of it, for sure, is Steichen’s not wanting to relive the pain—through 33 plays, Philly had things well in hand, and watching the rest would, for a football coach, qualify as a form of self-flagellation. But the other part of it is far less complex than that.
Really, the 37-year-old simply hasn’t had time to get back to it.
It’s now been 55 days since he was officially announced and introduced as the new boss in Indy. In the interim, he’s hired a staff, worked with that staff to teach GM Chris Ballard and the scouts what they’ll look for in players at every position, started work on the draft, completed work in identifying and pursuing free-agent targets, and, over the last week, jumped headlong into figuring out which quarterback is worth taking with the fourth pick.
Monday, Steichen will hit another milestone, probably his most significant one yet. This week, he and the NFL’s other four new head coaches will open their offseason programs. That means this morning, Steichen will be in front of their players for the first time.
Not surprisingly, he’s got a pretty detailed plan for it, like he’s had for everything else over the last eight weeks. But that doesn’t mean his head isn’t still spinning a little, with all there’s been to digest since he left that field in Arizona back in February. Enough so that he never really got to digest all that came with the loss he and the Eagles suffered that night.
A day will come, he’s sure, when he’ll get time for that. That day isn’t today.
We can start with this—as thin as he may be stretched, Steichen doesn’t see what he’ll do Monday morning as a chore. That much was obvious in his voice over the weekend when I brought it up. Yes, he has a lot to do. But, no, there’s no question about what kind of priority he’s making the first impression he’ll have on his new players.
“I’m really excited,” he says. “I’m really excited for the opportunity, for that moment to be in front of the whole team. I’m just really excited about it, to be honest.”
Which is why, when I asked how much he’s thought about what he’d say, the answer couldn’t have come out of his mouth faster.
“A lot—a lot,” he continues. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while, really just how we’re going to build the culture and the vision I have for the team. And then really getting to know them and just kind of setting the standard of what we want it to look like and how we want it to be. That’s the biggest message I got going for these guys Monday, and then we’ll just lay out the next couple weeks of what it’s going to look like from a schedule standpoint.
“But again, it’s just setting a standard of what we want it to look like and the culture and how we’re going to build it.”
To get that across, Steichen will take from experiences with his last two bosses, Anthony Lynn with the Chargers and Nick Sirianni in Philadelphia, both of whom he saw as first-year, first-time head coaches. From that time in Los Angeles, Steichen will remember the presence Lynn had in front of the room and the vision he projected in wanting a tough, hard-nosed team. From early on in Philly, he’ll try to borrow Sirianni’s ability to communicate a clear picture of his vision and “how it needed to look and how it couldn’t look.”
That’ll come across, Steichen hopes, with clear communication of the four pillars of the new program to the players:
• Character: “I want to cultivate an organization with really good people in it.”
• Preparation: “I truly believe the separation in this league is in the preparation.”
• Consistency: “Here’s what we want it to look like, here’s what we can’t have it look like and then just holding guys accountable.”
• Relentlessness: “Just always working on their craft and trying to find that extra edge, whatever it is.”
And from there, the relationship building will start.
To that end, there’s already a sign up in the locker room that the players will find when they get to work: “When we are connected, we are committed.” It’s based, Steichen says, on the unmistakably close operation Sirianni worked to build in Philly over the last two years that put Steichen & Co. on that field in Arizona in the first place.
Two years ago, people on the outside poked fun at the Eagles’ playing rock-paper-scissors with draft prospects, while Sirianni was actually doing that sort of thing at every level of his organization. He staged a game called Who Am I? with players in the spring. He set up an MTV Cribs–themed competition as part of his first offseason program in Philly.
It’s fair to say, now at least, that it worked.
It’s also fair to say you may see similar ideas from Steichen, ones designed to build a rapport between the coaches and players in Indianapolis.
“The connection part of it is going to be huge,” he says. “I think when you’re connected to someone, you’re committed to the process. And not only that, you’re probably going to go a little harder for that person when you know them a little better. That’s just human nature to me. If you don’t know someone, you’re probably not going to go as hard as you would for your brother or your sister or your best friend. So you have the intention of creating those relationships, however we do it, connecting outside of the building, inside the building, competing in everything we do.
“Be more intentional about those relationships and get to know them on a personal level and not just the football side—get to know who they are as a person, because you may have something in common with them that you didn’t know. It’s the connection there … Creating those relationships, the best teams are really connected, and you can see it on Sunday.”
Steichen’s already talked to some of the guys he’ll address Monday. Others will be looking at their coach in person for the first time. The challenge, between now and June, will be to bring all those folks together as one, so all can hit the ground running in the summer.
Of course, that process has been underway for eight weeks at other levels of the team.
One key for Steichen in keeping everything straight over seven weeks—from his hire (Feb. 14) to the combine (Feb. 27 to March 5) to the start of free agency (March 15) to the owners’ meetings (March 26 to 28) to the Colts’ jet-setting QB workout tour (all of last week)—has been to have a sketch of the whole offseason in mind and have a detailed plan that’s always scripted fully at least two weeks out.
That started in mid-February with Steichen first meeting with the coaches and staff already in place. One thing short-cutting that process for him was knowing he’d retain Gus Bradley as defensive coordinator, and, having worked with Bradley, linebackers coach Richard Smith and DBs coach Ron Milus for four years with Lynn’s Chargers.
But that was just the starting point as Steichen sought out the rest of his first staff, a process that simultaneously seemed like it needed to be rushed and, as the coach saw it, couldn’t be rushed.
“One-hundred percent,” he says. “It was like, Let’s try to make sure we get this thing right and not rush it and go, Oh shoot, I’m hiring this guy cause he’s the first guy I interviewed and I think he’s pretty good, and that’s it. I didn’t want to go that route.”
He also knew he needed a mix of different types—a players’ coach, potentially, for one position, and a taskmaster at another—and, to get there, with each potential hire he’d dig into a central question, which was, simply, “Does he fit what I’m looking for in regards to the daily process and how we’re going to work together?” He did Zoom interviews with some and talked to others in person (having the combine in Indy did help, in that regard).
In some cases, he hired guys he knew (OC Jim Bob Cooter was with him in Philly), and in others, there were guys he hadn’t worked with (special teams coach Brian Mason came from Notre Dame, having been a career college coach). But all were deemed personality fits, which would be vital with the next steps, in tying the staff together to show the scouts what they were all looking for in different players at different positions.
The staff was still being pieced together as the combine approached, and Steichen had his new coaches present for the personnel department. He’d wrap each of those presentations with his own thoughts, to tie it together for Ballard’s crew, and would bring new coaches through the process as they were hired and, eventually, out to present for the scouts, too.
“The defense had been in place,” Steichen says. “So on offense, we sat down as a staff and we went through every position, the qualities, the critical factors that we were looking for, that we need offensively.”
Meanwhile, Steichen was working on schedules for the offseason program—and the OTAs and the two full-squad minicamps that highlight it—and had his coaches split their work days essentially in half. In the mornings, they’d work on what Steichen calls “football stuff,” building the team’s systems on offense, defense and special teams, and learning the players they had. Later in the day, each day, they’d be responsible for draft work.
Free agency quietly came and went. The Colts let Bobby Okereke (among others) go, traded Stephon Gilmore, cut Matt Ryan, re-signed E.J. Speed and Tyquan Lewis, and imported Gardner Minshew, who played for Steichen in Philly. And after that, Steichen could get to work on one of the big things he’d been hired to do.
Find a starting quarterback.
From the time Jim Irsay fired Frank Reich in the fall, there’s been an assumption that the Colts’ owner would be hellbent on solving the team’s four-year quarterback issue—which dates back to Andrew Luck’s 2019 retirement—this offseason, once and for all.
Steichen and Ballard are certainly doing the homework now to accomplish that. Last week, those two, Cooter, quarterbacks coach Cam Turner, assistant GM Ed Dodds and college scouting director Matt Terpening literally went coast to coast to study signal-callers. On Monday, they were in California with Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud and Alabama’s Bryce Young. Tuesday, they were in Utah with BYU’s Jaren Hall. Wednesday, they were in Gainesville with Florida’s Anthony Richardson. Thursday, it was to Lexington for Kentucky’s Will Levis.
During the visits, there were classroom sessions, then on-field workouts, to see what each guy knows and then see how he could carry what the Colts were teaching them out onto the grass. There’ll also be 30 visits with each of them, to get to know the prospects as people. As you might expect, and as Steichen’s core principles indicate, both Ballard and Steichen are prioritizing finding a good guy to fill the most important position on the field.
There’s a side benefit to all of that time spent, too, as Steichen and Ballard enter what’ll be another hectic period through which they’ll juggle the start of the offseason program and those 30 visits the next two weeks, then minicamp and the draft the week after. As a byproduct of all those hours on the road, a few top scouts got to know a few top coaches better, which can only help, as Steichen sees it, with all that’s still in front of the Colts.
“It’s huge,” he says. “You’re in these classrooms, you’re asking questions, you’re feeling out the questions that they’re asking, they’re feeling out the questions that I’m asking and then we’re having those conversations after the workouts, of what did we think.”
Which, really, is just a microcosm of how Steichen wants all of it to come together—intentionally but organically—at every level of the organization.
For the players, it starts Monday, and, if Steichen’s goal for the morning is met, they’ll have that message crystal clear before they so much as go to the cafeteria for lunch. And if it all comes together as quickly as he envisions it will?
Maybe then, so long as he can stomach it, Steichen can finish that tape of the Super Bowl.
“At some point,” he says, “I might find the time to watch it.”
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04-11-2023, 02:06 AM
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