Among the many questions one could have about the surprising 8-2 Colts, some observers have zeroed in on one particular interrogatory. That is: What’s up with the lady on the sideline in the headset?
The lady in question is Carlie Irsay-Gordon, the late Jim Irsay’s eldest daughter, who assumed her current position as owner and CEO of the Colts following his death this past May after spending years as a team vice president. Irsay-Gordon tends to watch games from the sideline, where she listens to the play calls and coach communications via headset and sometimes takes notes. This is unusual among NFL owners, who tend to watch their teams from their luxury suites, thereby ensuring greater proximity to shrimp cocktails and finger sandwiches.
Because it is unorthodox, because it’s a choice that makes her particularly visible, and almost certainly because she is a woman, Irsay-Gordon has become a bit of a fascination, a recurring character in this season, an unofficial mascot for a team that is having its best season in a long time. Her outfits and facial expressions are scrutinized, the team social media accounts hype her up, and debate shows run segments on whether she’s too involved. With every passing week, her lore grows:
Outside of Dallas, it’s a much more conspicuous image of ownership than most fans are accustomed to, even though Irsay-Gordon—who, unlike Jerry Jones, is declining interviews the rest of the season—does not seem to covet the attention. So what is she doing that’s so fascinating?
Irsay-Gordon has gotten a new spotlight this season because of her ascension and the team’s success. But she has actually been watching games this way for a long time.
In 2012, when the Colts went through the process of hiring Chuck Pagano as coach and Ryan Grigson as general manager, Irsay-Gordon felt under-equipped to evaluate candidates and started seeking a deeper understanding of the game. “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 told The Indianapolis Star. “I need to at least be able to learn, be able to identify stupid. Not to be crass, but is this person even good?”
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That quest started on the personnel side, where she’d watch film with former pro scouting director Andrew Berry, and it eventually progressed to coaching. It was during Frank Reich’s tenure as head coach that Irsay-Gordon asked if she could start wearing a headset during games. This is the first season it’s been broadly noticed but actually the fifth year that Irsay-Gordon has done so.
There’s no rule against an NFL owner listening to coaches’ communications via headset, but it’s rare. The only other current owner who’s been spotted in a headset this season is Raiders minority owner Tom Brady. On the one hand, it seems like a totally reasonable level of engagement for someone to take with their multibillion-dollar business. On the other, history says the best sports team owners are the ones who write checks and then get out of the way. That was never her father’s style—Jim Irsay was an outspoken, present owner, though his most colorful qualities and side quests could sometimes be distracting.
Standing on the sideline, Irsay-Gordon projects practicality with a touch of flash. She favors heavy gold jewelry, sneakers, and streetwear in Colts colors, much closer to normal fan attire than the business wear typically seen in the front rows of many owner suites. She sometimes keeps pencils and a notepad in her fanny pack, taking them out to scribble something down.
Until there’s something to celebrate, her expressions are usually serious, but she doesn’t hide her reactions.
In the final minutes of the Colts’ Week 2 game against the Broncos, for example, Irsay-Gordon widened her eyes and raised her dark brows after head coach Shane Steichen called an inside run on third down. Jonathan Taylor got stuffed for a 2-yard loss on the play, setting up a 60-yard field goal attempt as the Colts’ only chance to win the game. To most observers, Steichen’s call seemed foolishly conservative, given that an extra few yards would have made Spencer Shrader’s kick markedly easier and that the inside runs Steichen had called for Taylor on first and second down in that series had also gone nowhere. If we’re going by facial expression, Irsay-Gordon seemed to agree.
Shrader missed the kick from 60 yards, but a penalty on the Broncos meant he got to try again from 45. He made the shorter kick, and the Colts won the game, 29-28. But the next day, Steichen admitted he’d made the wrong decision to run the ball on that third down.
“Going back through it, I probably should have been more aggressive,” Steichen said.
There’s no clear reason to think Irsay-Gordon’s reaction specifically made Steichen rethink his call. It’s also pretty hard to draw any sort of causal relationship between her taking over as the primary owner and the Colts being good this year. Most of the staff and roster decisions that created this year’s team took place with Irsay-Gordon in her old role, which was already a powerful one, but one she held during plenty of down years, too. Some of the former staff members whom Irsay-Gordon cites as mentors, especially Grigson, are not exactly beloved for their tenures in Indianapolis. And while I think her emphasis on making sure she’s able to sidestep buzzwords and call out BS is exactly what I’d want an owner to focus on, her sign-off on the exorbitant cost of trading for Sauce Gardner and her OK of the Colts’ reported interest in giving Daniel Jones a hefty, long-term contract make me wonder whether this regime will be clear-eyed in the long term. We just don’t really know yet.
In general, I’d caution against expecting the children of billionaires to do more good than harm—past NFLPA surveys have revealed lower average player satisfaction scores for teams whose owners inherited them compared to teams whose owners purchased them with their own money.
But for now, Irsay-Gordon has managed to represent the fantasy, at least, of the normal-person sports owner. Who wears team colors and doesn’t wear a tie or a pair of pumps on game days. Who actually looks like they enjoy the sport enough to take advantage of their means to put themselves in the thick of the action.
An owner’s incentives, at least in theory, should be the same as the fans’—to win games and do so sustainably. But more often than not, team owners are disconnected from how fans see the team, through some mix of being sheltered, elderly, and constantly told what they want to hear. And as more and more teams allow private equity investors to buy in, even having an identifiable person as the team owner may become scarcer.
I’m not sure I like the idea of a team owner becoming a cult figure, but if Carlie Irsay-Gordon is on her way, it’s because she relates to her team more as a normal fan than as a business zombie. What fan, given the option to hear every play call live from the field, wouldn’t jump at the chance, shrimp cocktail be damned?
