Insider: Why Jeff Saturday's CEO-style approach bucks NFL's head coaching trend

INDIANAPOLIS — The path Jeff Saturday’s trying to take to become a full-time NFL head coach remains as narrow as it gets, and it’s not only because he took over the Colts in November without any experience at the NFL or college levels.

The way Saturday plans to approach the job is increasingly rare.

Saturday indicated he would continue to be a CEO-type head coach, focusing on leadership, structure, scheduling and in-game management, rather than taking an active role in X’s and O’s, scheme, play design or play-calling.

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“I will hire an offensive coordinator, I will hire a defensive coordinator, I will hire a special teams coordinator,” Saturday said. “I am not one who wants to do one of those jobs. I have a very clear, distinct way of what that would look like.”

Saturday’s approach makes sense, given his lack of background in the details of developing an NFL offense, outside of his 14 years as a player.

But it’s an approach that’s become rare.

The NFL’s hiring trends over the past couple of seasons have increasingly leaned towards coaches who are experts on one side of the ball, mostly the offensive side of the ball, and the trend has been reflected in the league’s Super Bowl winners.

Four of the last five Super Bowl-winning head coaches — Los Angeles’s Sean McVay, Tampa Bay’s Bruce Arians, Kansas City’s Andy Reid and Philadelphia’s Doug Pederson — have reputations as offensive innovators, even if they didn’t all call the plays in their Super Bowl wins. The fifth coach, New England’s Bill Belichick, is a “CEO-style” coach in name, but he’s also widely recognized as arguably the greatest defensive mind in NFL history.

The “guru” approach isn’t the only way to coach.

Two of the league’s longest-tenured head coaches, Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin and Baltimore’s John Harbaugh, are considered to be CEO types.

But that type of coach puts pressure on the staff, and Saturday himself admitted several times this season that it left Indianapolis shorthanded on the offensive staff, repeatedly citing the loss of “three coaches” on that side of the ball.

One of those coaches was Reich, the team’s offensive architect and the man Saturday replaced. From a manpower standpoint, the Colts staff was down only two coaches, but from the standpoint of offensive innovation, Indianapolis was down three.

“When you’re undermanned from a coaching staff perspective, then it’s showing up on offense,” Saturday said. “Being able to find different ways, being able to attack defenses in different ways. Again, when you think about all the different phases of an NFL game, whether that’s four-minute, backed-up, two-minute, red zone, tight red … there’s a lot of different pieces and parts as you’re putting a game plan together.”

Fitting all those pieces together is tough, and it’s an ongoing process.

When Saturday made the move to bench Matt Ryan and start Nick Foles at quarterback, the Colts interim coach was asked if the staff planned to tailor the offense to Foles, who has played his best football in the NFL for offensive coordinators who did that.

“I’ve made this very clear, we’re down offensive coaching-wise, so not a lot of time to reconstruct anything since I’ve been here,” Saturday said at the time. “We’re where we are right now. You’re running what you know, what you do.”

An offense has to be able to adjust on the fly to be successful in today’s NFL.

Especially if the quarterback is young. A Colts team that is likely going to draft a quarterback with its first-round pick is going to have to be excellent at tailoring the offense to the rookie in order to aid his development.

Saturday’s solution sits with the prospective coaching staff he’d assemble.

“I have a very distinct person, or people, in mind that I think would be excellent at the job and thrive in the job,” Saturday said. “My job, at that point, becomes: How can I empower them to be their best, and what do I need to do to frame that?”

Saturday is not the only Colts coaching candidate who would need an excellent hire at offensive coordinator.

In-house candidate Bubba Ventrone is a special teams coordinator, and three known external candidates are defensive coordinators: Ejiro Evero, Aaron Glenn and Raheem Morris, although Morris does have extensive experience as an assistant coach on offense.

Colts general manager Chris Ballard vowed that he wasn’t looking for a head coach of either specialty.

“We’ve got a very detailed process put together on the traits and attributes we’re looking for in the head coach,” Ballard said. “Don’t care which side of the ball.”

What sets Saturday apart is that he doesn’t have extensive experience on either side of the ball.

When a team has a head coach with a specialty, he can often provide a unique perspective to the coordinator on the other side, helping iron out weaknesses in his scheme.

If Saturday gets the Colts head coaching job, he’d be asking his assistants to test each other, all while trying to support them in any way he can.

That's an approach that can be, and has been, done before.

But an approach that bucks the NFL trend.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts: Jeff Saturday's CEO-style approach bucks NFL's coaching trend