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The Indianapolis Colts are retaining general manager Chris Ballard and coach Shane Steichen, the team announced hours after the Colts lost their season finale against the Houston Texans on Sunday.

Ballard will now be brought back for a 10th season after going 70-78-1 through his first nine, with no AFC South titles and just two playoff appearances. Steichen, meanwhile, will return for a fourth season after going 25-26 in his first three years, none of which included a playoff appearance.

“That’s not for me to decide,” Steichen said after Sunday’s loss when asked if he was worried about his future. “What I will say is that I love this team, I love this organization. I love this city. Love the fans.”

Colts principal owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon, in her first full offseason since the death of her father, former team owner Jim Irsay, will address the media Monday afternoon.

Steichen is under contract through the 2028 season, while Ballard is only under contract through the 2026 campaign. They’ll be paired together for a fourth straight season, as Indianapolis tries to reclaim the glory days that continue to get further and further away in this franchise’s rearview mirror.

The Colts failed to make the playoffs for the fifth straight season. They started 8-2 before losing their final seven games. Indianapolis is the first team in the Super Bowl era to at one point sit six games above .500 and end the season with a losing record, per ESPN. The Colts also became just the sixth team since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 to miss the playoffs after starting 7-1, and the most recent team to do it since the 2012 Chicago Bears.

Ballard will get another shot to revitalize the middling Colts, whose last playoff appearance was in 2020 and last postseason victory was in 2018.

Early on this season, however, it appeared as if Ballard had built a team that would finally break through to real contention. Indianapolis won its first season opener since 2013, moved to 2-0 for the first time since 2009 and averaged 3.46 points per drive through its 7-1 start — the second-highest mark of any team this century, trailing only the 2007 New England Patriots that finished the regular season undefeated.

The Colts showed enough promise early on that, combined with some slippage from the AFC’s traditional powers (Kansas City, Buffalo, Baltimore), Ballard felt confident enough to mortgage the team’s future and send its 2026 and 2027 first-round picks, as well as wide receiver AD Mitchell, to the New York Jets in exchange for two-time, first-team All-Pro cornerback Sauce Gardner at the NFL trade deadline.

Almost nothing has gone right since.

Quarterback Daniel Jones, who was released by the New York Giants last year and signed with the Colts in free agency, played at a Pro Bowl level through the first two months of the season. However, he started to regress after he popped up on the injury report in Week 12 due to a fractured left fibula and ultimately tore his right Achilles tendon in Indy’s Week 14 loss in Jacksonville.

The Gardner trade didn’t end up helping the Colts much either, as he only played in two full games for his new team due to a left calf injury.

Ballard and Steichen tried to salvage the season by turning to the last quarterback who led Indy to the playoffs: 44-year-old Philip Rivers. Despite Rivers having last taken an NFL snap in the Colts’ wild-card loss to the Buffalo Bills in January 2021, the hope was that his intimate knowledge of Steichen’s offense would help the Colts bounce back after losing Jones. Rivers fared well enough for a quarterback who was nearly five years into retirement, though his efforts weren’t enough to save the Colts’ season.

Staring down another early start to the offseason, Irsay-Gordon opted to stay the course, at least leadership-wise, instead of hitting a hard reset.

“As my dad said before he passed, Chris and Shane know that they have things they need to fix,” Irsay-Gordon said in June. “We talked about not micromanaging people, but also, we have a standard here, and it hasn’t been good enough.”

This season wasn’t good enough, either, but it also wasn’t bad enough for Irsay-Gordon to make wholesale changes. Steichen fell to 2-10 against the Houston Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars, who are the last two teams to win the AFC South. Meanwhile, the Colts have never won the AFC South during Ballard’s nine-year stewardship. Every other team in the division — the Texans (four times), Jaguars (three) and Tennessee Titans (twice) — has claimed an AFC South title multiple times during that span.

For Ballard’s Colts, the 2025 late-season meltdown was nothing new. Last season, the Colts were in the hunt for a wild-card spot, needing wins against the Denver Broncos (Week 15) and New York Giants (Week 17) to keep their playoff hopes alive. They lost both.

In 2023, the Colts just needed to win their regular-season finale against the Texans to clinch an AFC South title, but they came up short, falling 23-19 to the Houston Texans after backup running back Tyler Goodson dropped a late fourth-down pass from backup QB Gardner Minshew.

In 2021, the Colts just needed to beat the three-win Jaguars in the season finale, but instead they were blown out, 26-11.

Just as late-season meltdowns have been part of the Ballard experience, so has playing musical chairs at quarterback. After Andrew Luck was sidelined for all of 2017 with a shoulder injury, he returned in 2018 to guide the Colts to a 10-win season and Indy’s lone playoff win of the Ballard era. However, Luck’s surprise retirement weeks before the 2019 season left the team scrambling.

Since then, they have churned through starters in hopes of landing on a long-term solution. The Colts relied on Jacoby Brissett, Rivers (Part I), Carson Wentz, Matt Ryan, Gardner Minshew and Anthony Richardson, among others, before landing on Jones. The move to scoop up Jones in free agency looked prescient until Jones’ Achilles injury.

Now, however, Jones is poised to re-sign with the Colts in free agency since Ballard and Steichen are staying put. Steichen, before he knew he would be retained, expressed confidence in the team he saw just two months ago that stood atop the AFC at 8-2.

“We showed signs early in the season that were pretty darn good, and we had some unfortunate circumstances, but that’s part of the league,” Steichen said Sunday. “You have to overcome those circumstances. That’s where you have to learn from and grow from (so) when you get in those situations, again, you learn from them, and you’re like, ‘Hey, here’s how we have to win now with the circumstances that we have.’”