It could have been the quarterback carousel for the last eight years. Or some of the drafts that fell flat in the vital middle rounds — which is often where Super Bowl foundations are laid. Surely, swapping out four different head coaches since the 2017 season did not help. Nor did a seismic trade for cornerback Sauce Gardner that is now struggling to land on the positive side of the ledger.
But in the end, all that really matters in the wake of the firing of Indianapolis Colts general manager Chris Ballard on Monday is the standard he set for himself in January of 2017, when he introduced himself to the franchise and its fans.
“My vision for the Colts is simple,” Ballard said at that introductory press conference. “We are going to work together as an organization to build a winning culture that is competing for championships year in and year out.”
“I’m probably not completely ready to be a GM. I’m going to screw some things up. I’m going to make some mistakes and I’ll own them. … One of my real strengths is when I make a mistake, I own it. It’s on me. I don’t ever put the blame off and I’ll never put the blame off.”
Nearly ten years later, with a 158-game tally that produced a 73-84-1 record, Ballard’s vision ended with an ugly 26-20 Colts loss to a Tennessee Titans team that had arguably been the NFL’s worst franchise through five weeks.
It brings to a close a tenure in which Ballard was once considered one of the best general managers in the league. He had the scouting pedigree. He had the respect of many peers in the personnel community. And over time, he had the patience of ownership, which is a commodity that is becoming increasingly rare in today’s NFL.
What he didn’t have, though, was the winning. And that was the guiding cultural principle he brought with him from a Kansas City Chiefs personnel staff that has produced four general managers since 2017. Two postseason appearances. One playoff win. Zero AFC South titles. And on Sunday, a familiar feeling of the season slipping away at 2-4, while the questions about the roster and quarterback only continue to grow.
In the past, there was a rationale to cover the futility. Andrew Luck’s unexpected retirement had scrambled the franchise’s timeline. Injuries tore apart promising seasons. Veterans needed time to adjust to scheme and coaching changes, or young players needed time to grow into their prime. And one after another, the starting quarterbacks came and went: Luck, Jacoby Brissett, Philip Rivers, Carson Wentz, Matt Ryan, Gardner Minshew, Anthony Richardson, Joe Flacco … and finally, Daniel Jones.
For years, the changes outnumbered the results. And over the last several seasons, the question about Ballard in the personnel community shifted from when he was going to fix the Colts to why he was still getting an opportunity to do it. Monday, Carlie Irsay-Gordon — who took control of the franchise in 2025 following the death of her father, Jim Irsay — gave the definitive answer. Ballard’s clock had run out. In what is her first major franchise-shaping decision, Irsay-Gordon decided enough was enough and reiterated a standard that came straight from Ballard nearly 10 years ago.
“Our standard is to compete for championships,” Irsay-Gordon said in a statement. “[A]nd I believe a change in leadership is necessary to meet that standard.”
For Ballard, it represented a definitive fall from once being considered one of the league’s best talent evaluators. For Irsay-Gordon and the Colts, it becomes something possibly more consequential: a pivot point to reimagine a personnel philosophy that survived far longer than the competitive results it produced.
What went wrong
As with all firings of general managers, there is never a shortage of specific events that come up in an autopsy of failure. But few start with the kind of shattering event that inarguably altered the future of the Colts under Ballard’s watch. This, of course, was the shocking and unexpected retirement of then-29-year-old franchise quarterback Andrew Luck in August of 2019. In that single moment, the Colts lost a franchise anchor with the talent and capability to play into his 40s. And a roster that appeared positioned to compete for future Super Bowls suddenly lacked its most important component.
Ballard never really recovered from that.
Certainly, it doesn’t explain everything that went wrong over the years. But it did set the stage for a deep well of failed replacements for Luck. An assembly line that included young veterans like Brissett, Wentz and Jones, past-their-prime veterans like Rivers and Ryan, and a titanic dice roll on an extremely raw but physically talented Anthony Richardson. In one way or another, each quarterback’s failure to entrench themselves opened the door to a reach for a meaningful replacement. Rivers did help the Colts reach the playoffs in 2020, and Jones did start 2025 at 8-2. But neither became a sustainable long-term solution.
But while the quarterback futility is the easiest and most obvious through-line to explain Ballard’s end, that frustration had company, too. There were draft successes like Jonathan Taylor, Quenton Nelson, Shaq Leonard and Braden Smith. But there were many costly early-round misses like Malik Hooker, Ben Banogu, Quincy Wilson, Kemoko Turay, Parris Campbell, Rock Ya-Sin and others. Ultimately, none was more devastating than Richardson, who was selected No. 4 overall in a loaded 2023 draft. Among those who went after Richardson? Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Devon Witherspoon, Bijan Robinson, Jalen Carter, Darnell Wright, Jahmyr Gibbs and multiple other high-end starters.
To be clear, Ballard wasn’t overwhelmingly wrong when it came to his personnel decisions or coaching hires. You could argue that only twice did the Colts look like an abject disaster — in the 2017 season, when Indianapolis lost Luck to a shoulder injury and went 4-12, and the 2022 discombobulation that went 4-12-1 and saw Frank Reich fired and Jeff Saturday shockingly plucked from television to be the team’s head coach with eight games remaining.
Outside of those two seasons, Ballard built rosters that always seemed on the edge of turning some kind of corner. Seemingly always close enough to a playoff window to keep Jim Irsay patiently leaning into personnel continuity rather than blowing up the front office and starting over. When people ask how Ballard lasted so long and got so many shots at different quarterbacks and head coaches, I think that is the answer. He never quite seized a window to compete for the playoffs consistently. But it was usually close enough to argue only a few tweaks or one more quarterback change was necessary.
The ownership change mattered
When Irsay-Gordon ascended to control of the team, there was a palpable sense amongst Ballard’s litany of friends in other personnel departments that he was on the clock heading into this season. He was simply tied to too many decisions that didn’t work, and a few that punched holes into the bottom of the franchise. Richardson’s failure was absolutely one of them. Leaning into a two-year $88-million deal for Jones coming off an Achilles injury was another. And the Sauce Gardner trade, which sent two valuable first-round picks to the New York Jets, began to look like a misstep that will only push the team’s quarterback issues out for years ahead.
While Gardner was an All-Pro cornerback, there were concerns that his style of play wouldn’t hold up well against officiating in the long term. Some on the Jets staff believed the game was moving away from his type of physicality at the position and that Gardner would eventually struggle to adjust. Injuries have also complicated his stint with the Colts.
As one personnel man familiar with the Jets, Ballard and Ballard’s scouting staff put it on Monday: “One phone call to any former New York Jets [coach or executive] would have kept them from doing that trade.”
That said, Gardner is still a young player capable of getting himself back on the right track. The league is filled with stories about cornerbacks who reclaimed their top-tier status after rough patches. But even if Gardner’s style evaluation wasn’t the mistake, the competitive window that Ballard believed he was trading into was. And counting on Jones to return this season and resume a high level of play from 2025 — which was an outlier in Jones’ career — proved to be too much.
Jim Irsay and his relentless confidence in Ballard were gone. Carlie Irsay-Gordon had also been aggressively involved in studying the team and its personnel and coaching ranks for years. Ballard had survived far more coach and quarterback changes than was normal. And there was the collapse from 8-2 to 8-9 last season to contend with.
Last January, when Irsay-Gordon made the decision to retain Ballard and head coach Shane Steichen after the 2025 collapse, she made her disappointment crystal clear in an end-of-season press conference.
“I’m pissed,” she told reporters. “We’re pissed.”
Nine months later, another disappointing start brought a different response. Carlie Irsay-Gordon was done. And so was Chris Ballard.