Jeff Saturday is, by all accounts, a really nice guy. The kind of guy you’d like to have a beer and share stories with…a good friend. These qualities got him hired as the Colts’ interim head coach, and note that none of them include “a good football coach.” Five games into his tenure, it’s safe to say Saturday is on track to be the NFL’s worst coach of all time.
Every criticism of Colts owner Jim Irsay still stands. He hired a friend instead of making a good football decision. Irsay wanted praise for thinking ‘outside the box’, hiring someone woefully unqualified to run his football team – which is tantamount to missing the toilet and pooping on the floor, then wanting a gift not to dirty his pants.
Hell, Irsay was all over Twitter after Indianapolis won its first game under Saturday – celebrating early. You never party early.
All of you critics…you all criticize us in the NFL for losing…When we make moves to win…you act so right! “Who you Crappin’…”. Just win, baby!! ✌️
-Jim Irsay (@JimIrsay) November 14, 2022
Irsay wanted to “prove the experts wrong,” but since then the Colts have lost five games in a row. It’s a small sample, but Saturday’s record .166 wins should avoid being cemented as the worst ever. With each passing week, Saturday continues to make incompetence history, now holding the record for the worst slump in NFL history by giving up 39 second-half points to the Vikings, and more subjectively the one of the most hilarious training failures of all time by putting Matt Ryan ahead Monday night football in favor of Nick Foles, who then played so horribly that Joe Buck had jokes.
Jeff Saturday is so out of his depth it’s painful to watch, and it was so obviously avoided. When the Panthers fired Matt Rhule, they handed the team over to Steve Wilks, who had head coaching experience. The Broncos just named Jerry Rosburg as an interim, and he has more than 20 years of coaching in the NFL under his belt. Saturday was 20-16 at training at Hebron Christian Academy in suburban Atlanta. Irsay didn’t look far for an interim coach because he didn’t want to look far.
The joy is not so much in mocking Saturday for being bad, but in bragging that Irsay’s nepotism failed so horribly. Believe it or not, there are good reasons there are traditions in the NFL, and that includes “having a head coach who knows how to coach.” Reinventing the wheel just isn’t something that happens overnight in professional football, especially when it comes to something like basic coaching principles.
We needed this stupid experiment to blow up for the sake of football, not because it’s fun to make fun of the Colts – but because it would have given a blank check to every NFL owner who would much rather give his friend rather than giving him the opportunity to rise-upcoming coordinator, who are increasingly people of color. Every vacancy would have included at least one random friend or hanger, under the auspices of “it worked with Jeff Saturday at Indy”, subjecting fans to mediocrity and suffering from unqualified coaches until this trend goes out as each team developing a wildcat package after it worked for the dolphins In 2008.
Irsay will waltz away from this. He’ll hire a proper head coach in the offseason and return Saturday to be his off-court buddy. The Colts owner will tweet classic rock lyrics as a metaphor for his poor decision-making, and the world will keep spinning. Meanwhile, Saturday will become the final image in a “worst NFL coaches of all time” slideshow, where we’ll forever remember the time an owner poked fun at the game in service of his pride.
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