Former Colts center Jeff Saturday was officially introduced as the team’s interim head coach Monday night. There is a sentence I never dreamed I would write tonight. Something else Saturday probably didn’t dream he’d do tonight is find out the identity of the person who will call the offensive plays for the Colts on Sunday in Las Vegas in his head coaching debut. It’s a pretty critical job for the fate of a professional football team. During a sensational press conference that was either stupidly or brilliantly timed while a prime-time game was being nationally televised, Saturday explained that he will make a decision about the person who will call the offensive plays at some point tonight. “I met with the offensive staff,” he said Saturday, “and then already some guys. And I’ll go at it all night and come to a conclusion, and we’ll go from there. . . . There are guys in that offensive room that have made a lot of plays and a lot of plays, and there are a lot of guys that have put a lot of time into it. So I’m not afraid that I’ll choose the right guy and we’ll ride with him.” They certainly drive it. It can be a good ride. It can be a bad ride. But it will certainly be a ride to remember as Saturday enters a situation that was bad enough to effectively fire the starting quarterback one week, the offensive coordinator fired the next week and the head coach fired seven days after that. I’ll have other thoughts based on the 35-minute press conference dominated by owner Jim Irsay, who in just 20 days hasn’t been the toast of the league for daring to publicly say what needs to be said about Commanders owner Daniel O Snyder is a potential laughingstock for making one of the strangest in-season decisions the NFL has ever seen. And this is not an exaggeration. Of all the crazy things the league has seen between Week 1 and the Super Bowl, this is on the short list for weirdest of all time. On the one hand, I like to think outside the box. On the other hand, there is a fine line between “out-the-box” and “oyster”. Over the next nine weeks, we’ll find out where this goes.
