Indianapolis Colts owner Carlie Irsay-Gordon was on the sideline during her team’s overtime loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday evening.
The Colts fell to the Chiefs, 33-30, on Sunday night, dropping to 0-2 on the season. Indianapolis has now lost nine straight games. Irsay-Gordon, who took over the franchise when her father, Jim Irsay, passed away, is clearly not happy.
But should she be strutting up and down the sideline during the middle of a game? Longtime ESPN reporter Michele Steele called her out on social media. And it sounds like she is not alone.
“Still don’t understand how the owner of the team hovering up and down the sideline helps in critical situations,” she wrote.
Former Green Bay Packers vice president Andrew Brandt agrees, admitting that Irsay-Gordon’s sideline behavior is hurtful and a distraction to Colts players and coaches during games.
“Answer: It does not,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Irsay-Gordon defends her sideline behavior
Irsay-Gordon says that it’s valuable.
“I think one of the things that I learned in going through, even as back as when we hired Chuck Pagano (in 2012), is that sort of accelerated my, ‘I need to learn more about this,'” Irsay-Gordon told the Colts’ official website in June of 2025. “‘I need to be able to say, is this person full of BS? Do they even know what they’re talking about? And I think one of the things that being on the headset has really helped me learn is to the question earlier, it’s such a complex organism of football team and how it operates.”
She believes that it’s beneficial to her assessments.
“You could say, ‘Oh, that person ran that route wrong,'” Irsay-Gordon said in that aforementioned story on the Colts’ website. “When you learn to find, ‘Oh, someone tagged the wrong wide receiver, and it wasn’t really the player’s fault – it was the person that called it.’ I think that’s been very valuable, because it also helps us be able to know where do we need to make tweaks, what resources do we need, what do we need to fix. So much of it comes down to just how we operate and how things work and the headsets – I would suggest it for anyone else that has to pay coaches and GMs millions and millions of dollars. It helps you make a less expensive mistake potentially.”
But does it help or hurt the team during games?
