Insider: How Colts coaching staff rallied around Jeff Saturday

INDIANAPOLIS — The news hit the Colts coaching staff hard last week.

Frank Reich, the man who’d hired them, convinced them to come to Indianapolis, was gone.

Fired. A situation that seemed so stable last offseason was suddenly filled with uncertainty.

“Everybody was kind of in a daze,” wide receivers coach Reggie Wayne said.

Wayne kept trying to figure out what to text Reich, finally settling on an apology, saying he wished he’d done more. Quarterbacks coach Scott Milanovich felt a second punch to the gut; Milanovich has known Reich for 15 years, but he’d also been close with former offensive coordinator Marcus Brady, who’d been fired the week before.

Defensive coordinator Gus Bradley felt the same sting.

“Frank means a great deal to me,” Bradley said. “He taught me multiple things in a short period of time, not only leadership, but just the discussions we had, offensively and defensively. … Your heart was heavy because of that, not really (thinking), ‘Now what’s going to take place?’ I think it all kind of stung us for a day or so.”

Bradley, who’d served as a head coach in the NFL before and leads a top-10 Colts defense this season, said he didn’t think much about whether he should have been named interim.

For one thing, the coaching staff found out their new leader was Jeff Saturday almost immediately.

For another, the Colts had a game coming up against the Raiders in six days. They had work to do.

“I don’t really think we blinked,” Milanovich said. “There’s nothing else you can do but go back to work.”

‘Let’s go’

Work was hardest for the Colts offensive staff.

Reich was the team’s offensive architect, its play-caller, its strongest voice. While the Indianapolis assistants prepared to play Las Vegas, they also went through an interview process with Saturday, who was trying to find his new play-caller.

Milanovich turned down the opportunity, thinking it wasn’t really the right fit — the NFL Network also reported last week that the Colts didn’t agree to raise his salary to fit the new position.

Saturday turned to Parks Frazier, the 30-year-old pass game specialist who’d been on Reich’s staff since 2018 and knew the offense intimately.

“When I told the offense that Parks was going to do this, I think it was Reggie slapped the table: ‘Let’s go!’” Saturday said. “He got excited. … These guys like each other, they treasure each other and they’re helping each other.”

By necessity and by experience, Saturday threw himself into work with the offensive staff, spending an estimated 85% of his time with the shorthanded offensive staff. The Colts’ interim coach met with Bradley and special-teams coordinator Bubba Ventrone and told them he had confidence in them to run their ships, then turned his attention to an Indianapolis offense that had been one of the league’s worst, hamstrung by its underperforming offensive line.

“That was probably the hardest thing of last week,” Milanovich said. “By the time everything got sorted out, we would already have been a good day into the preparation.”

The offensive staff’s first order of business was to pare down the playbook, both to help the offense and to help navigate Saturday’s first big decision, going back to Matt Ryan at quarterback, a decision that became final later in the week.

“We talked last week about wanting to simplify,” Frazier said. “That’s something we definitely did.”

The Colts offensive staff knew Saturday from the work he’d done consulting with the offensive line.

The rest of the staff didn’t know the new coach that well.

And Bradley knew that Saturday’s first meeting with the entire team would set the tone. Bradley, defensive backs coach Ron Milus and linebackers coach Richard Smith were part of the Raiders staff that shifted from Jon Gruden to Rich Bisaccia at midseason last year and improbably made the playoffs.

“That’s a tough situation, to come into a team meeting and address the team, and Jeff loves Frank,” Bradley said. “Here, some players are wondering what’s going on. … You could feel his enthusiasm, feel his strength.”

Saturday met the team’s uncertainty head-on.

He told the Colts that he knew how they felt, how much they loved their former coach, how he knew he’d have to earn their respect.

Milanovich grabbed the team’s interim coach after the meeting.

“I can’t think of a harder situation, for a guy that hasn’t been in the building every day, to come in and grab the team from a leadership standpoint,” Milanovich said. “I think that first meeting is really important, and I thought he crushed it.”

‘That play, you suck.’

For Saturday, the locker room felt familiar. The practice field felt familiar.

Any time he was working with the players, Saturday felt right at home. He met with the offensive line, challenged them to be better than they’ve been in a forgettable first half of the season.

Wayne knew Saturday wouldn’t be afraid to get in player’s faces.

“His leadership, that’s huge, holding guys accountable,” Wayne said. “Not saying Frank didn’t have none of those things, because Frank had them also, they just do them in different ways. Jeff’s not afraid to go in your face and tell you: ‘That play, you suck.’”

The logistical stuff — the team’s daily schedule, the process once the Colts got into the hotel — that was the hard stuff for Saturday.

“How involved the scheduling and the process is, to get it kind of aligned with where you want,” Saturday said. “If you want to move this or change this, how does it affect the next period of practice, or whether it’s post-practice, recovery, all of the different points. When you’re kind of thrown in, there are things that I know I have conviction about, that I want to get fixed, but is this the right time?”

The Colts coaching staff helped.

Saturday’s posture helped. He approached the staff by saying he wanted to help free them up to do what they need; when he wanted to make a change that would affect a half-dozen other parts of the day, they let him know it might take a little bit more time.

Back to work

Before Sunday arrived, Bradley and Ventrone offered their help with game management.

“I kept them abreast of some of the things we were looking for, how were going to go about things, just to get his input,” Bradley said. “We had good conversations, and really, it was pretty smooth throughout the game.”

Frazier’s prior experience didn’t hurt, either.

From a play-calling standpoint, Frazier had been groomed for the game’s most important situations. Reich used to script the Colts’ first 15 plays, a task that Frazier often helped put together, giving him experience in the role.

Frazier has also spent a lot of time working on the Colts’ two-minute drill, and at the end of the first half, he dialed up back-to-back running plays to Jonathan Taylor that got Chase McLaughlin into range for a field goal on a drive that handled the clock perfectly.

“That’s one section of the game plan that I’ve been heavily involved in, really the last couple of years,” Frazier said. “When we got the two-minute drive at the end of the half, I felt pretty confident in the communication from me to Matt, from the staff to myself, and then obviously, Jeff.”

Saturday rewarded the staff’s hard work by spreading a lot of the praise for his first win to the coaching staff.

And rightfully so.

In a week that began in sadness and tumult, the Colts coaching staff rallied around Saturday in an effort to keep things as normal as possible.

“To get a win, really, for the guys in this building, for the staff, man, it meant the world,” Saturday said. “All the effort and energy that went in, the physical and mental fatigue. … Long trip back home, but man, so appreciative of the effort. I think that, to me, was what I appreciated the most.”

The Colts have been through a lot this season.

All the staff can do is go right back to work.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: How coaching staff rallied around Jeff Saturday