Carlie Irsay-Gordon saw progress from Chris Ballard, Shane Steichen in 2025, but expects Colts to better overcome adversity in 2026
Colts Owner and CEO Carlie Irsay-Gordon opened her end-of-season press conference on Monday at the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center by speaking directly to her team’s fans in the aftermath of an 8-9 season.
“You’re right to be frustrated with the latter part of how our season went,” Irsay-Gordon said. “I’m pissed. We’re all pissed.”
In 2025, the Colts experienced the remarkable heights of being 8-2 with the NFL’s top offense and the crushing lows of losing their starting quarterback, several key defensive players and their final seven games. As Irsay-Gordon evaluated the entire Colts’ 2025 season, she decided to have general manager Chris Ballard and head coach Shane Steichen return for their 10th and fourth seasons in those positions, respectively.
But with that continuity, Irsay-Gordon stressed Monday, comes with an extremely high sense of urgency to not only replicate the Colts’ early-season success, but to fix the issues that led to the team’s late-season crash.
“We have been very clear with Chris and Shane that giving them another opportunity means that the sense of urgency for them to deliver and perform has never been higher,” Irsay-Gordon said. “Chris and Shane are both capable of facing this challenge head-on and finding a way to achieve the results that our fans deserve, which is winning games, getting to the postseason and ultimately winning championships.”
For Irsay-Gordon, injuries to quarterback Daniel Jones, defensive tackle DeForest Buckner and cornerbacks Charvarius Ward Sr. and Sauce Gardner – among others – were not enough to explain the Colts’ seven-game losing streak to end the season. She emphasized Ballard and Steichen’s “first priority” is to figure out how to get this team to consistently finish games; she also emphasized those solutions need to include solutions for better handling the sort of adversity every NFL team faces in some manner during a season.
“We’ve got to be able to handle adversity better and still find a way to win, because injuries are never an excuse,” Irsay-Gordon said. “Not in this league.”
But those charges also came with an acknowledgement that Ballard and Steichen did build an 8-2 team that didn’t have a fluky foundation. Heading into Week 12, the Colts had an NFL-best point differential of +105; even despite losing their final seven games, the Colts ended their season with a +54 point differential, better than five playoff teams and the same as the NFC East champion Philadelphia Eagles.
Within that success, Steichen and quarterback Daniel Jones worked well together, with Jones finishing 2025 with the NFL’s third-best yards per attempt average (8.1), fourth-best completion percentage (68 percent) and sixth-best passer rating (100.2).
“We were all encouraged by our first half,” Irsay-Gordon said. “We experienced a lot of progress, which gives us optimism for the future and the direction we are heading as a team.”
Irsay-Gordon also saw Ballard adapt his approach to building the Colts, with splash free agent contracts for Ward and safety Cam Bynum landing in the spring before a blockbuster trade for Gardner hit a few hours before the NFL trade deadline in November.
“You have to look at where Chris improved and that we believe that he’s going to be able to replicate what we were on our way to doing before we went through that losing streak,” Irsay-Gordon said.
Coming to the decision to retain Ballard and Steichen was not something Irsay-Gordon and her sisters, Owner & Executive Vice President Casey Foyt and Owner & Chief Brand Officer and President of the Indianapolis Colts Foundation Kalen Jackson, came to lightly. The 2025 season was not to the Colts’ standard, Irsay-Gordon said.
But this decision was made because Irsay-Gordon believes Ballard and Steichen can re-capture the success they had in the first 10 weeks of 2025, while fixing the issues that plagued the Colts over the final eight weeks of the season.
“We’re going to have to look at how things go through the whole season,” Irsay-Gordon said. “But we really believe this decision is based on – we wouldn’t make it if we didn’t think Chris and Shane were capable of replicating what we saw in the first half of our season and being able to finish through the entire season next year.”
