Jonathan Taylor Situation Is a Mess of Jim Irsay’s Making

Alienating the team’s star running back creates a cascade of problems that will ripple through the Colts’ locker room

One can only hope the Colts will have an addendum to their media schedule at some point this week featuring another press conference by owner Jim Irsay. One can only assume that Irsay will continue to let the people who work for him clean up this mess.

As predicted, the Colts failed to find a trade partner for Jonathan Taylor by their self-imposed Tuesday deadline, and he has reverted to the physically unable to perform list. While this was the anticipated outcome, it highlights the absolute ridiculous series of events that have brought us here, and the unnecessary burden the Colts have placed on a new staff.

Irsay committed one unforced error after another, displaying a wanton disregard for the mood of a locker room that first-year, first-time head coach Shane Steichen is trying to break in. This is a critical culture-setting period in which everything a staff does is eyed by the skeptical players who have already been through a pinball machine of absurdity. At least this coach, they’ll tell themselves, was not hired in the middle of the season off some television show.

Taylor was given permission to seek a trade, and then the team didn’t make one :: Douglas DeFelice/USA TODAY Sports

How do you make sure players know that they’re cared for when the owner says: “If I die tonight and Jonathan Taylor is out of the league, no one’s gonna miss us.” How do you dangle the carrot for any other player in the locker room who hopes to one day take care of his family and future generations when your most valuable offensive player is sitting on ice? How do you extend another player without then offending a hive of players inevitably close to Taylor? All of these “firsts” are a critical shifting point for a franchise hoping to rebound. All of them seem to have been steamrolled through carelessness.

While this result is a classic case of both sides expecting too much—Taylor expecting the Colts to budge on a stubborn running back market and Irsay expecting people not to actually parse his hot word salad—allowing a running back to gauge his trade value and then failing to consummate a trade despite some reported degree of interest now leaves Taylor even more jaded than he was in the past given that he knows what another team might pay him. It leaves Steichen with the need to perform emotional gymnastics all through that locker room. It leaves Chris Ballard, the team’s general manager, between a rock and a hard place; a baseline disposition that Ballard will have to carry with him into future negotiations.

I imagine, too, that the team’s rookie quarterback, Anthony Richardson, would like to have an All-Pro running back to take the workload off his shoulders and prevent him from scrambling while the game slows down. I imagine the defense would like the kind of running game that would keep it off the field for more than half the game. All of that will have to wait, even as the Raiders, Giants and Chargers have found amenable solutions for their respective unhappy running backs, setting the financial parameters for a slightly longer deal for Taylor.

No one was expecting the Colts to fork over the money for Taylor, but one might hope for a modicum of decency from up high in the owner’s suite. While there are many different kinds of NFL owners, they are usually divided into two categories: those who make problems easier, and those who make already difficult problems steeped in human dynamics, finances, emotions, wants, needs, expectations and personality traits inherited, much worse. Irsay used to be the former. Over the last few years, he has trended hard toward the latter.

Google Jonathan Taylor + community service and look at all the Colts’ social media posts about Taylor feeding the hungry,raising money for Black student athletes, hosting a youth football camp or supporting an educational nonprofit through one of his side businesses.

I’d bet there are other players there wondering what the heck they’d have to do to squeeze some extra cash out of this short-term career if Taylor can’t.

I’d bet the coach, who will be up on that podium taking questions about the reason why Zack Moss, Deon Jackson and Evan Hull are trending to be his opening day backs (as of the publishing of this article, the Colts have not made a corresponding move) would love to be doing anything else.

I’d bet the owner doesn’t really care, or get why it’s a problem or else we wouldn’t have gotten into this mess in the first place.