INDIANAPOLIS — Carlie Irsay-Gordon’s instincts led her to the sideline.
The team’s new principle owner has been a fixture on the Indianapolis sideline for years, wearing a headset and holding a call sheet. Irsay-Gordon’s presence on the sidelines has been widely theorized on, sometimes criticized and picked apart by outsiders.
But her reasons are simple.
Irsay-Gordon has known for a long time that she’d take over as principal owner, the person ultimately in charge of hiring the general manager and head coach, then providing them with the support they need to achieve a vision.
She realized she needed to understand the game better than most.
“It was the hiring cycle where we hired Chuck (Pagano) and Ryan (Grigson), and I just realized that through that interview process, I couldn’t really sit there and be able to say, What does this person have to be able to know how to do? You can ask them a ton of questions, but I mean, they could have just given me a bunch of buzzwordy things,” Irsay-Gordon said. “I need to at least be able to learn, be able to identify, stupid. Not to be crass, but is this person even good?”
Irsay-Gordon began by sitting in the film room with former pro scouting coordinator Andrew Berry, now the general manager of the Cleveland Browns. Berry began teaching her the difference in positions, offensive and defensive schemes, the personnel groupings.
From there, Irsay-Gordon became involved in the draft process, then coaching meetings.
“When we hired Frank (Reich), he was a huge mentor to me,” Irsay-Gordon said. “That was when I first said, ‘Do you care if I start learning from the install process? … Do you care if I just start wearing a headset so I can understand charting and how things work?’”
Reich did not care.
The more Irsay-Gordon learned, the more she wanted to learn the reasons behind a play call, an installation, a decision made in free agency or the draft. Once Irsay-Gordon understood the game, she started deconstructing it, thinking about the way the Colts handle football from every angle.
Questions followed.
“She will ask 500 questions about why, and a lot of times, it’ll halfway piss me off, but I’ll go and I’ll think, and I’m thinking, ‘Freak, she’s right,’” Colts general manager Chris Ballard said in 2019. “She asks the question from a different perspective and makes you think about why you do what you’re doing.”
Joel A. Erickson covers the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter.