Midnight Mumble: Irsay’s getting the band back together and it confuses the hell out of everyone.

One of the nicer things about being an armchair "sports writer" (more accurately: some rando on the internet with a blog and a domain name) are the lowered expectations of being consistent or even timely with the updates, posts and hot takes.

I never promised to be any of those things, but I did give you my word I would at least try to be interesting.

Which is how I would describe the last 24 hours of being an Indianapolis Colts fan. Frank Reich is out as head coach, and for reasons we'll get into very shortly, the sports landscape has no clue how to process a fucking bit of it. None of us do, in fact.

For the fifth season in a row since Andrew Luck walked away from football the Colts have a new starting Quarterback, lost a game in Jacksonville, and an offense that has so far only been able to generate a 3-5-1 record. One wonders if that tie were instead a W if Frank Reich would still have a job, or if it were an L would he have been gone a week sooner. It's been a slow death by a thousand cuts this season, turnovers, sacks and tackles for loss all helped by an offensive line that has massively regressed saw the conclusion of Reich's time in Indy bookended with a complete offensive meltdown to New England.

Obviously this is a team that's still shook from getting absolutely embarassed by Jacksonville in what should have been an easy "win-and-in" situation to end the 201 season, but this is also a team that came into 2022 season once again a quarterback away from making a post-season run so the expectations were high, especially once Matt Ryan entered the building. Eight weeks into the season, Matt Ryan is benched in favor of a second year QB, previous season rushing champion Jonathan Taylor is injured and The Colts are in free fall, kept alive only by solid, if sometimes leaky defense and bouyed by the Jaguars and Texans fighting for last place in the AFC South.

Life comes at you fast.

It especially came fast for Frank Reich who couldn't have even been a mile away from the Colts facility on his drive home to tell his family before Ian Rapaport, who at the time was live on the Pat McAfee show is announcing to the world that an interim coach had been chosen: former Colts center, Super Bowl Champion Pro Bowler, and up until Monday morning, ESPN analyst Jeff Saturday (other superlatives include: member of the NFL Player's Association executive committee, and football consultant to...the Colts).

This all happened within an hour: Reich: out, Saturday in, all of us: confused as fuck.

Aside from a three year stint at a high school northeast of Atlanta, Jeff Saturday had no coaching experience. Aside from one Monday night in 2005, he's never called a play in the NFL. Apparently, aside from Frank Reich, and recently (as of last week) fired offensive coordinator Marcus Brady, nobody has.

Which is where this whole ordeal begins to get interesting.

"and not just the minorities".

We interrupt your Certified 2022 Cardiac Colts moment and generally insane-in-the-membrane 2022 NFL season (where Kirk Cousins is leading his division) for the semi-annual league-wide conversation on The Rooney Rule. If you don't know what it is, look it up, I've done enough exposition dumping to set the stage for what I really want to talk about and it's this:

Attempts-so far at least, at the time of me lying in bed half-stoned-to tie Jim Irsay's feet to the Rooney-stone seem a bit incomplete, at least with respects to one other person who has been near-instantaneously attached to Colts interim coaching conversation: current Receivers Coach and former Colts player Reggie Wayne. Along with Cato June, he's one of two former Colts hired by the team to a direct coaching position in 2022.

As we all tried to digest the news and decipher whatever the hell Jim Irsay was saying at that press conference, the thinkpieces were being published critiquing the Saturday hiring decision as another manifestation of black coaches not getting the chances they deserve-and critiquing Saturday's lack of head coaching experience at anything higher than a high school level. Here's what I mean, from The Comeback:

the Colts didn’t just pass up on better-qualified coaches around the league, they also passed up on a more-qualified coach on their own coaching staff who was also in the Indianapolis Colts Ring of Honor along with Jeff Saturday: legendary wide receiver Reggie Wayne.

or this one from Stampede Blue:

This isn’t Jeff Saturday pulling a “Kevin Mawae”, as a former NFL All-Pro center himself, who’s Indy’s current assistant offensive line coach and working his way up the coaching ranks. It’s not even Reggie Wayne as the Colts wide receivers coach—as a beloved assistant and always a fan favorite, aiding young receivers like Alec Pierce’s development.

In fact, it was only a couple of hours after the news was announced that this segment aired on FS1 where Joy Taylor and Emmanuel Acho specifically point out Jeff Saturday's lack of even college-level head coaching experience (more on that point later) while holding up Reggie Wayne as the better, more Rooney-aligned choice:

If I have somewhere missed out on the coaching career of Reggie Wayne, I want you to stop reading and email me immediately and clue me in. My memory recalls that Reggie had only a passing interest in coaching, despite the now excommunicated Frank Reich calling and asking him for four straight years to come coach, and for four straight years being told "No."

The obvious counter to the Irsay/Rooney conversation that's slowly building up is to point out that the Colts were the first team to win a Super Bowl with a black head coach, and when that guy decided it was time to retire, Irsay tapped another black man to be his replacement. As a fan, I take these accomplishments with a genuine sense of pride, but in the context of staff decisions among the backdrop of Rooney: does one half season's worth of positional coaching make Reggie Wayne instantly more qualified to be a head coach than Jeff Saturday? Is it any better to elevate Reggie to interim HC over other potential candidates?

Maybe. I don't know. What I do know is the obvious response to this question is that Reggie Wayne's name  carries a similar amount, if not a bit more weight in the hearts of your average Colts fan than Jeff Saturday's. He stuck with the team after Ryan Grigson blew up roster Bill Polian built. He was a familiar face carrying us into the threshhold of the unfamiliar. He helped Andrew Luck and TY Hilton. He was Mr. Automatic on third-down. He made that insane one handed catch against Green Bay in the orange cleats as former head coach Chuck Pagano lie in a hospital bed undergoing treatment for Leukemia. He's a Colt for life. Period.

I write all of this because I wonder if there's really anything unique about Reggie Wayne that there is this much noise about him being 'snubbed' for the interim head coaching job as a vehicle for a conversation on the Rooney rule as a proxy-criticism for Jeff Saturday's lack of head coaching experience at higher levels of football.

And I'm not entirely defending Jeff Saturday. I'm trying to find a smooth transition into my next point which is ultimately me going out on the campaign trail for the other guy who has yet to enter the story outside of getting namedropped for simply being in the same room, but otherwise hasn't had anyone carrying water for him yet for the reasons buckets are being hauled for #87:

I'm talking about this guy

This is where we come back to Saturday's lack of head coaching experience, I told you we'd come back to this. See,  Acho and  Taylor and the rest of the Speak crew on FS1 made some accurate and valid points in re: Saturday's credentials and black coaches climbing the ladder at large. I welcome the conversation on elevating more black men and women in coaching positions in the NFL and the dialogue to be had about the potential being missed by excluding these coaching candidates.

It can't happen at the expense of completely erasing Scotty Montgomery ( Who actually has head coaching experience at East Carolina. Don't look up his record, it was bad.) from the conversation, though.   Montgomery could be a great NFL coach, he might completely suck. Who knows? The Colts certainly wont, at least not if they decide to interview Scotty at the end of the season.

It feels at best, incomplete to set Reggie Wayne up as the ultimate "what if" candidate to replace Frank Reich in Indianapolis as an offset to Jeff Saturday's credentials as a white man without carrying water for someone on the coaching staff who does possess said credentials-that happens to be black. Especially if the conversation hinges on a larger conversation on increasing the number of minority head coaches in the league (insert rebuttal here about how the Rooney Rule doesn't apply to interim coaches-I wont' disagree, but I'm not going to call those chips either).

Yet that's what happened on FS1 this morning, that's the angle other sports writers with less reach but no less captive audiences are taking, I see the term "leap-frogging other candidates" and other thoughts expressed and may of them boil down to critiques of Saturday's experience, elevating Reggie as the alternative. Fan favorite though he may be, and aligned though I may be with the larger conversation that wants to see more black coaches, I hope more of the discussion involves Scotty, for whatever it's worth.

Next week: Ranking Quarterbacks. Probably.