Two weeks ago, Jeff Saturday was breaking down pancake video on ESPN. Not the breakfast food, but offensive line play. Now he’s 1-0 as an NFL head coach.

This is a pretty funny outcome after the hiring of the former Colts center was lambasted by every “football guy” still breathing, because they found it insulting and unfathomable that a person who never coached a single pro or college football game would go straight to the top of the line. In actuality, the truth is that a whackjob owner made a whimsical, impulse hire. Everything Jeff Saturday should be treated as a unique outlier.

But nevermind the fact that Saturday is a Super Bowl winner and 6x Pro Bowler, so I’m pretty sure the dude didn’t walk into the gig like Ted Lasso. Imagine Ronaldo retiring from soccer, but he has to do what, go get his coaching license first? It’s one of the dumbest concepts on the planet. Guys who played any game at the highest level know the game at the highest level and don’t need lessons. Sure, there are myriad complementary skills to learn, but when it comes to commanding the respect of a locker room, Jeff Saturday only had to show the Colts his Wikipedia page:

  • Super Bowl champion (XLI)
  • 2× First-team All-Pro (2005, 2007)
  • 2× Second-team All-Pro (2006, 2009)
  • 6× Pro Bowl (2005–2007, 2009, 2010, 2012)
  • NFL Alumni Offensive Lineman of the Year (2007)
  • Indianapolis Colts Ring of Honor (2015)
  • 2× First-team All-ACC (1996, 1997)

With that as the pretext, here’s one of my favorite 2022 quotes:


“Bro I spent 14 years in a locker room. I went to the playoffs 12 times.”

It’s funny how people got all bent out of shape over this hire, and trust me, I get where they’re coming from. If you’ve busted your ass for 20+ years and worked your way up the ranks, you’d be angry about this too, especially if you’re a minority candidate already swimming upstream. I repeat, however – this was not a traditional coaching hire. This was not a thorough search that ended with a joke hire. This was Jim Irsay flying by the seat of his pants, and with that context, nobody can be truly offended. It speaks more to the absurdity of this particular owner than anything else.

This is, however, only one half of a story that seems to draw very little logical and reasonable discourse.

The other half is that Jeff Saturday’s Colts beat a Raiders team that may be 2nd worst in the NFL, behind only the Texans. Nevertheless, if you go on Twitter, you’d think Saturday just went 17-0, with blue checks now working in the sports media itching to press publish on these:

Good snipes, but let’s slow it down here. If you wanna crown Jeff Saturday’s ass, then crown it. The Colts beat the Raiders, a Colts team, by the way, that had a lot of talent coming into this season. Matt Ryan probably should not have been benched. They’ve still got Jonathan Taylor and DeForest Buckner. This is not Hue Jackson’s 2017 Browns. This team was expected to contend for the AFC South, so it’s not like Saturday came in to resurrect the Bad News Bears.

That said, we’re not going on a Jeff Saturday victory tour. Words of wisdom from Doc Rivers. The Colts get the Eagles next week and still have to play at Dallas, Minnesota, and the Giants. Saturday could very well lose five of the next six, and then what? We’ll have to check Twitter, but don’t expect measured takes.