Carlie Irsay-Gordon has begun rebuilding the Colts in her second season as primary owner.
Irsay-Gordon fired Chris Ballard as the team’s general manager last week. On Tuesday, her fill-in top front-office football executive, assistant GM Ed Dodds, began selling off prominent veteran players.
Two weeks before the NFL trade deadline, Indianapolis sent eight-time Pro Bowl guard Quenton Nelson to the Seahawks and then shipped three-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle DeForest Buckner to the 49ers, his original NFL team. With the moves, the Colts shed a portion of the veterans’ salaries and collected draft picks to retool their roster.
With the GM move and Tuesday’s trades, Irsay-Gordon sent a clear message that the team’s on-field struggles in the second half of last season and early stages of this season had consequences.
“It’s a fire sale,” ESPN analyst and former Colts center Jeff Saturday, also the team’s former interim head coach, said on the network between Tuesday’s two trades. He added: “Massive pickup for the Seahawks. Obviously bummed for my Colts.”
Nelson is in the final season of a four-year, $80 million contract that includes a $16 million salary this season. The trade saves the Colts about $9.78 million in cash, unless they agree to pay a portion of the remaining salary. They also cleared a matching amount of salary cap space.
Buckner is in the final season of a two-year, $46 million deal that includes a $13 million salary for this season. There were conflicting reports as to whether Indianapolis will pay part of the remaining $7.94 million of Bucker’s salary, which would reduce the amounts of their cash and salary cap savings.
Both players are eligible for unrestricted free agency during the upcoming offseason.
The Colts received a third-round draft pick next year and a fifth-rounder in 2028 from the Seahawks for Nelson. They got a fourth-round choice in next year’s draft from the 49ers for Buckner.
And they may not be done. They could still part with players like running back Jonathan Taylor, wide receiver Josh Downs, and defensive tackle Grover Stewart.
The price tag for Taylor would be high, and some people within the league believe Irsay-Gordon would prefer he remain in Indianapolis. But the Colts clearly are open for business and receptive to trade offers.
“Ed Dodds is good,” one NFL agent told Front Office Sports. “[He] knows what he’s doing [and] will fire-sale everything.”
The league-wide trade deadline is 4 p.m. ET on Nov. 10. In 2024, the NFL moved back the deadline from the Tuesday after Week 8 to the Tuesday after Week 9. Other teams have proposed pushing the deadline back a week further, which would give teams even more time in the 18-week, 17-game season to decide whether they are legitimate contenders and should be trade-deadline sellers or buyers.
The NFL was once a virtual no-trade league, with coaches and GMs building rosters almost exclusively through the draft and free agency. But trades have become more commonplace in recent years. This is expected to be an active fall for trades, with talk of star players such as Taylor and Chargers pass rusher Khalil Mack potentially moving.
The Colts were buyers a year ago, trading for cornerback Sauce Gardner last November in a deal that sent a pair of first-round draft picks and wide receiver Adonai Mitchell to the Jets. Now, things are far different. Indianapolis lost eight of its final nine games last season following a 7–1 start and missed the playoffs. This season, the Colts are 2–5 and on a three-game losing streak.
Irsay-Gordon, who took over as the franchise’s principal owner and CEO last year following the death of her father Jim Irsay, retained Ballard and coach Shane Steichen following last season’s downward spiral. But she dismissed Ballard last week and named Dodds to head the player personnel department for the remainder of the season.
Steichen remains in place, at least for now.
Irsay-Gordon has drawn attention and, in some cases, criticism for her habit of taking notes on the sideline on game days.
“With our dad passing away and kind of now me, you know, the title changed a lot of what I was doing,” she told Bridget Condon of FOS Tonight earlier this month. “ … [But] what I’m still doing isn’t any different. So I think that’s been something … to be more mindful of, that now people might be paying more attention to what I’m doing.”
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