Shane Steichen can't get the words out without getting choked up. It's his first day as the Colts' new head coach, and the name of a high school coach has gotten stuck in his throat.
For a moment, he's stuck in 2002 again.
There he is in an Oak Ridge High School navy blue and gold uniform in El Dorado Hills, Calif. He takes on a five-step drop into a pocket that suddenly has a defensive end barging in, so he spins left and resets his feet and ropes a dart between a linebacker and a safety for a first down.
There he is near the goal line, running a play-action fake with both arms into the belly of the running back and rolling right, eyes locked into the middle of the field, where he fires to a receiver in the middle of the end zone and lets his momentum break him free.
"He was always in total control," said Marcus Spain, the receiver on the end of those throws.
So much so that when Saturday nights rolled around and his friends threw parties, Steichen was on the grass field of a stadium, lit by lights but with no one else around. He'd either arranged to have a gate cracked open, or he'd stuff his coach's keys in his pocket. That coach, Chris Jones, knew if he ever couldn't find them, he could swing by the stadium and see if the lights were on.
If they were, it meant Steichen was in the lab again, following the path laid before him by his older brother, Sean, who became a scholarship quarterback at rising powerhouse Boise State. The younger Steichen was throwing routes with Austin Collie, a high school teammate who would later catch passes from Peyton Manning on the Colts. They were trying to create a connection, to see the depth and angle of every throw through each other's eyes.
Their head coach gave them the keys to that dream, too. He ran a single-back offense with three or four receivers on the field at all times. He'd start a new series by asking what play they wanted to run. Steichen always had one ready. He loved play-action, especially if they had been setting it up with the run. He adored isolating the tight end to the corner of the field that way.
The euphoria was in making the defense go one way while he torqued to the other, as if operating in his own time and space, like in an empty stadium. To see the perfect play design meet perfect execution meant watching a dig route go 70 yards to the house in seven seconds. He learned why they call them explosive plays.
"He didn't have any fear," said Jones, the Oak Ridge coach at the time. "With a guy like him, we weren’t afraid to throw it and throw it often. What we stressed was a high completion percentage. If you could have a completion percentage that was 60% or higher, which he was, throwing the ball 28-30 times a game, there’s a lot of movement and a lot of stress you can place on the defense that way.
"We grew confident to where we could throw it in any down, in any situation, in any spot on the field.”
It isn't how many high schools played in northern California at the time. Located near the foothills of Sacramento, Oak Ridge would face teams playing with two or three running backs at all times, running on more than three-fourths of their plays. Throwing across the middle seemed risky. It relied on too many moving parts.
In Indianapolis, an NFL quarterback in his fifth season was starting to turn those types of fears inside out. Peyton Manning was knocking on the door of his first MVP season, growing more in control of the parts by reading defenses and deciding what to do in the time it took a play clock to count down.
So when Jones realized how his team was constructed, with Collie and a host of talented receivers and a quarterback as practiced as Steichen, he leaned into the pass more and more. The Trojans dressed it up before the snap by sending receivers in motion or flipping the formation.
"Most people thought we threw it all over the place," Jones said. "The reality of it was that we were doing the same things out of multiple formations and trying to get our best players’ hands on the ball.”
Hitches, fades, slants and screen passes made up the majority of the Oak Ridge playbook. But they added some wrinkles, like option routes and audibles to them based on the defense. Each player had to learn a couple different reads. Except for the quarterback, who had to learn them all.
"For Shane to process everything – the D-Line, the O-Line, who’s coming, is there pressure, all the other receivers on the route – to be able to process that and still see me running the correct route and to hit that, that was super impressive for a 17-year-old quarterback," Spain said.
Oak Ridge went 9-2 during Steichen's junior year and 12-1 the next, finishing out on a sectional title. He hit enough explosive plays to convince UNLV to offer him a scholarship despite his sub-170-pound frame.
Steichen threw 22 touchdowns to 20 interceptions in four years with the Running Rebels in what amounted to a football apprenticeship. A pocket passer with a lanky frame got caught in an offense with a heavy quarterback run element, 18 years before he'd be running one of his own.
Steichen was the offensive coordinator of the Eagles when the Colts coaching search began. He was designing plays for a developing third-year quarterback in Jalen Hurts. That meant using lots of play-action, rolling pockets and motions – and plays where the quarterback takes off and runs. With 22 touchdowns passing and 13 rushing, Hurts became the runner-up for the MVP award behind Patrick Mahomes, the quarterback he lost to in the Super Bowl in a 38-35 shootout.
"You either win or you learn," Hurts said after the loss.
The next day in Indianapolis, Steichen would thank Hurts in the same speech where he got choked up talking about his high school coach. Through work and creation, they took each other further than either knew was possible.
"The players that I’ve been around – Jalen Hurts, Justin Herbert and Philip Rivers – they all have one thing in common: They’re obsessed with their craft," Steichen said. "If you can find that in a quarterback, you’ll probably have some success.”
Though the Colts are widely expected to draft a quarterback in the top 10, and though the 37-year-old Steichen will have to connect with and build that player like he did with Hurts, he'll be more than that in Indianapolis, too. Steichen'll be a face of not just a football team but also a franchise now. He's gone from sneaking into empty stadiums to running the building, at the highest level of it all.
“He just has this personality and this persona that is so charismatic, that people are drawn to," Jones said. "The people around him on a daily basis will literally just fall in love with that personality: serious when it needs to be serious, fiery when it needs to be fiery and light and funny when it needs to be light and funny.”
In Indianapolis, he'll need to be them all. He has much work ahead, from hiring a coaching staff to scouting and drafting a quarterback to building him an offense to creating the habits and culture that can sustain through the idea of starting over, like last year's 4-12-1 team could not. It'll take a million small steps in unison, flowing one direction, to create something explosive again.
The Colts are a blank playbook, waiting to be opened.
“It’s not like, ‘He’s a head coach now, so now he can relax.’ Not even close," said Spain, his high school receiver. "This is where it all gets started.
"He seems like he was born for this. It’s what he was made to do, and he’s doing it.”
Contact Colts insider Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMihQFodHRwczovL3d3dy5pbmR5c3Rhci5jb20vc3Rvcnkvc3BvcnRzL25mbC9jb2x0cy8yMDIzLzAyLzI0L2NvbHRzLWhvdy1uZXctY29hY2gtc2hhbmUtc3RlaWNoZW4tZm91bmQtaGlzLWxvdmUtb2YtZm9vdGJhbGwvNjk5MzQyNzMwMDcv0gEA?oc=5
2023-02-24 09:53:58Z
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