Colts’ Jim Irsay was the NFL’s fallible and touchable owner, and his bold voice spelled the end of Dan Snyder

More than two years ago, when reports were flying that embattled Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder was threatening a knives out approach inside the league’s fraternity of billionaires, some troubling questions emerged for some of the most powerful decision makers in football.

What dirt had Snyder dug up on his fellow owners?

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If he lost his bid to hold onto the Commanders, who would he use it on?

And with this threat hanging overhead, who among the owners could take him on publicly?

Then came a day in October of 2022, when Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay strode across the lobby of the Conrad hotel in downtown New York like a man with purpose. Taking a path straight into a throng of microphones and recorders, he peered into several cameras. And in a moment that would prove both weighty and unprecedented, he broke ranks with the fraternity and became the league’s “young Turk”, effectively sending a message that it was about time for Snyder to gather his things and head for the exit.

“I believe there is merit to removing him as owner of the team,” Irsay said, immediately sending shockwaves through the NFL community. “There’s consideration that he should be removed.”

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More than any other moment before those two sentences — and the word “merit”, which felt like a lightning bolt — it was suddenly clear that Snyder’s NFL reign was coming to an end. After the congressional hearings and multiple league investigations and punishments, the penultimate public blow to Snyder was delivered by the pitch perfect messenger: The one owner who didn’t have to fear whatever dirt Snyder had, because Irsay’s mess was seemingly always out in the open anyway. Sometimes it was aired out intentionally by Irsay himself … and sometimes aired out unintentionally by Irsay himself.

This is the moment I thought of when the news spread on Wednesday that Irsay had died in his sleep at age 65. That one of his last major acts as an NFL owner was to prove that inside the fraternity, the untouchables could be made to be touchable. And at the very least, Irsay was that: fallible and flawed, colorful if not occasionally temperamental.

And of course, successful, too. His critics will grumble at that point, remembering the last decade of Colts football as largely a middling struggle to recover from the unexpected retirement of Andrew Luck. But those who have long known Irsay will tell you that he was as frustrated as anyone else with the inability to put it all back together again. He was long haunted by not winning more Super Bowls with Peyton Manning and remained sad about the painful retirement decision that Luck was forced to make. Irsay did right by both players when the end came — releasing Manning so he could find his best late-career fit in the Denver Broncos, and declining to claw back nearly $25 million in signing bonus money that he could have chased down after Luck’s career came to an abrupt end.

But it’s worth remembering that before those events pushed the Colts into the football wilderness, there was a 16-year run of success from 1999 to 2014 that remade Indianapolis into a football city — after a previous 15-year expanse when it had been largely been personified by the Indiana Pacers and Indianapolis 500. While a great deal of that credit will always go to Manning, it can’t be forgotten that Irsay hired Bill Polian to build the Colts, and then Polian did exactly that, drafting and molding one of the most exciting offensive teams that the NFL had ever seen.

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Yes, he inherited the team from his father, Robert Irsay. Yes, he was put to work inside the organization — even becoming the team’s general manager at 24 — in a bid of nepotism that exists in literally every single NFL franchise in the league. Go into a team headquarters and throw a couple rocks. Eventually, you’ll hit one of the owner’s kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews. It’s just how the league works.

But Irsay deserves the respect of having taken the controls and then listening to the advice of some of the smartest people who have shaped the league, bedrock owners like the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Dan Rooney and New York Giants’ Wellington Mara. Then he took those lessons and hired football people to make football decisions, while also taking the guidance of Rooney and Mara and declaring that his team would be a family affair.

That’s why after his passing, the question didn’t immediately turn to whether the Colts would be put up for sale. Instead, the wheel now goes into the hands of the three daughters he’s been preparing to take over for years. That includes the eldest, Carlie Irsay-Gordon, who is expected to take over control of the team, and her two younger sisters, Casey Foyt and Kalen Jackson. All three have held roles in the franchise for years.

It’s that kind of legacy plan that will keep the Colts grounded in Indianapolis, without fear of new ownership coming in and shaking things up or possibly even attempting to move entirely decades down the road. And for those who would laugh that off as implausible, there was a time when fans in Baltimore thought that, too. Before Irsay’s father left town in one of the ugliest moves in league history.

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That’s part of the imperfect lineage, too. As Irsay would point out over the expanse of his life, he was born out of a family shaped by an alcoholic grandfather and then an alcoholic father — then into the hands of Irsay and his long struggle with substance abuse and coping with the deaths of two siblings at a young age. Much of that has been well documented since he was arrested in 2014 for driving under the influence and found with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and prescription drugs, a turning point that led to Irsay getting suspended by the NFL for six games and checking himself into a rehab facility. All of which highlighted a continual challenge that he often talked about openly, shaping his image in a way that called for a wide variety of titles.

He could be a colorful, wandering hippy, or sometimes seem broken and struggling with mental health. That included his physical well-being, which had declined in recent years and included a hospitalization in 2024 that the Colts described as “respiratory” related. But wherever Irsay was at in life, he was often open about it in a way that is uncommon amongst NFL owners. In a fraternity that commonly avoids emotional and mental nakedness, Irsay often had no clothes. And that made him appealing, so long as you could separate that part of him from his football failures over the last 10 years of his life.

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Like most of us, he was a mixed bag. There were wins and losses, successes and failures. He was surely the best of himself and the worst of himself and also something in between. Different people will remember him different ways. And everyone will likely be right in their assessment at least some of the time. Personally, I’ll remember him as the flawed, touchable owner who took on Dan Snyder publicly and sent a powerful NFL message when others inside the league’s circle of power wouldn’t.

To borrow from Irsay’s fighting stance in 2022, there’s merit in that.