As we’re discussing the fine line NFL owners have to toe between discipline and adaptability, Irsay-Gordon brings up another story. This one, comparatively, is a little more recent than the Ship of Theseus.

Late in 1911, two explorers set out in an attempt to become the first human to reach the South Pole: Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, and Robert Falcon Scott, a Brit. Each had a team, but they took different routes and had different strategies.

The Scott team, Irsay-Gordon explains, had a budget six times larger than Amundsen’s. He had more technology. And he kept on pushing and pushing in an attempt to reach the South Pole first – hey, let’s go a few extra miles today, stuff like that.

Amundsen, meanwhile, stuck to a deeply-researched process.

“Even when the weather was good and there was a temptation, let’s just go 15 more miles today,” Irsay-Gordon says, “They said, nope, this is how we mapped it out. Versus the other guy — he had no discipline and he was just some lord from Britain gave me all this money to be able to say we got here first.”

Scott was one of five members of his team to die on the expedition. Amundsen reached the South Pole first, and his entire team made it back from Antarctica alive.

“He stayed disciplined to his plan,” Irsay-Gordon says.

You might read that as an allegory to how spending on an NFL roster does not always equal success. That wasn’t the context with which Irsay-Gordon brought up Amundsen and Scott – and, earlier in our conversation, she did make it clear that the Colts won’t have to choose between drafting/developing and free agency.

“It’s not an either/or,” Irsay-Gordon says. “We have to do both.”

No, this is more about staying disciplined amid the NFL’s hyper-focused urgency to win. There have been teams that, so to speak, arrived early – they won a division or had success sooner into a process than expected. Sometimes those teams stay disciplined to their plan. One recent example I, personally, think about here: The Buffalo Bills, in 2017, made the playoffs in the first year of Brandon Beane’s tenure as general manager. Instead of pushing all their chips in on that version of their roster, Beane maneuvered around the draft to select quarterback Josh Allen in the top 10; the Bills cratered in 2018, but began a sustainable run of success a year later in 2019.

Other teams have a plan, and the moment it fails, they blow it up. Knowing what’s a speed bump and what’s a roadblock is an important skill for an ownership group to possess.

“You can’t be so rigid,” Irsay-Gordon says. “You have to make a compromise, but then you also have to be able to be disciplined.”

Amundsen’s journey to the South Pole wasn’t all smooth and didn’t all go according to plan. He fell behind early, too, with the Scott team pushing beyond their limits for more miles per day. But he adapted instead of panicking – and, for some context, there was plenty of urgency for him to win the race against Scott, with national pride and personal glory on the line.

“Players and coaches (have the most) urgency in the short term,” Irsay-Gordon says. “And then personnel and your GM are kind of in the middle. And then for us as owners, we just — our horizon is so long.”

In football terms, Irsay-Gordon pointed to some recent examples of players not becoming fully-formed versions of themselves until three or four years into their career. She mentions Grover Stewart, a 2017 fourth-round pick who became a starter in Year 3 of his career and is now among the NFL’s top smothering run defenders; she also brings up Nick Cross, the 2022 third-round pick who started the first two games of his career, got benched for nearly two years, then re-emerged as a rock-solid starting safety in 2024.

And that brings us to Anthony Richardson, the 2023 No. 4 overall pick who in training camp will have to compete to hang on to his starting job.

“Where he is in his career and in his deal as a rookie, we still have time,” Irsay-Gordon says. “He still has time to prove it.”

Having said that, Irsay-Gordon continues: “Bring a sense of urgency. And nothing brings a sense of urgency more than competition.”

Irsay-Gordon, though, can not only speak authoritatively on her vision for the Colts and the process it’ll take for it to come to life. She can speak authoritatively on football, just like her father could, whether it’s about the starting quarterback or the developmental trajectory of a defensive tackle or safety.

“When you talk football with her,” head coach Shane Steichen said a few weeks ago, “she gets it. She understands it.”