The making of Chris Ballard

On a midsummer afternoon the new boss strides coolly through the hallways of his new domain, confident, casual – he’s wearing flip-flops, for goodness sakes – ambling with the ease of a man who knew all along he’d end up exactly where he is. From junior high history teacher to NFL general manager? That’s how he drew it up? No. Not even close. Chris Ballard never drew anything up.

“Never told myself general manager,” he stresses. “Not once.”

OK. Fine. Maybe this wasn’t the plan, then, maybe the plan was just football – coaching, scouting, picking up jockstraps, something. He knows he’s lucky. “Think if I had to get a real job?” he says, letting the thought hang in the air for a moment. “That would suck.”

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In any case, the plan/non-plan has led him here, to this hallway, in this building, flip-flops on his feet, franchise on his shoulders, defense to fix, quarterback to help, o-line to worry over, fanbase to appease, title-hungry owner to satisfy. Chris Ballard is the new general manager of the Indianapolis Colts. In other words: He’s the guy who can’t screw up Andrew Luck’s prime.

“Are we good enough?” he asks himself once, twice, a dozen times a day. “Are we?”

His answer, always: “No.”

And yet, for all before him, Ballard never seems to show it. The flip-flops aren’t an accident; they’re a metaphor. This man is loose. Those who’ve worked with him before vow it’s no act – he’s genuine, they’ll say, a man remarkably comfortable in his own skin. This building is learning that. Ballard’s been a breath of fresh air around the Colts’ West 56th Street facility in recent months, in many ways everything the man who previously sat in his seat wasn’t. There’s a swagger to those sandals. He moves with a surety to him, a moxie that screams, Don’t worry, I’ve got this.

Be who you are. Nothing more. That’s all Ballard muttered to himself as he walked into Jim Irsay’s office in January, one of six candidates for the Colts’ vacant GM post. He was armed with an encyclopedia-thick binder he’d been polishing for years; pages on what he seeks in a head coach, how he believes the coach-GM dynamic should work, his plan for sustained success. A week later Irsay, the Colts’ owner and a man involved with the NFL for five decades, states with conviction that the 48-year-old Ballard was “the best candidate to come about so far in the 21st century.”

Still, he’s in the honeymoon phase. Easy to look good and sound smart now. Ballard’s yet to lose a game, yet to have a draft pick bust or a free agent flop. He’s been embraced by a city that’s tired of watching its quarterback get the crap beat out of him most Sundays, tired of losing to the Texans in December, tired of 8-8. What also doesn’t hurt: He’s not the guy who traded for Trent Richardson.

But the storms will come. They always do. Ballard says he won’t budge.

“I am who I am,” he says flatly. “I don’t let other people define my thoughts. I do that.”

Where does that come from? That self-assurance? That mettle? From here: a life in football that probably should’ve never started and definitely should’ve never lasted. The game was supposed to give Chris Ballard the boot a long time ago. He never let it. He was the severe asthmatic who had to beg his mother and stepfather to let him play peewee when the doctors advised against it; the star QB in high school who left college four years later with two bum knees and without a single varsity letter; the junior high history teacher and assistant coach slogging away in Nowhereville, Texas, who was supposed to go to law school but never got around to it. Why? He couldn’t quit the game.

Early on, the pay was awful, the dream implausible. “I didn’t make no money, none, zero,” Ballard says now. He was the grunt on a Division II coaching staff in Kingsville, Texas, with no playing career to speak of, no NFL lifeline to latch onto. His parents told him he was nuts. He told them he was doing what he loved.

So he worked. He pushed. He coached. He learned. He scouted. He hit. He missed. He climbed. He waited. And waited. And waited.

“Chris was ready for a GM job three, four years ago,” says the man who gave Ballard his first scouting gig in the NFL, former Bears GM Jerry Angelo. “But he wasn’t just going to take any GM job.”

No, he wasn’t. Here – finally – a plan. The right fit. The right city. The right team. One in the Midwest, where he and his wife wanted to raise their five kids. One with an owner who hooked him five minutes into their first sit-down. One with – and this never hurts – a franchise quarterback locked up through 2021.

And when, in late January, that long climb finally reached its peak, when 23 years in football culminated with two interviews and three sleepless nights and an offer from Jim Irsay to run his beloved franchise, what’s the first thing Chris Ballard did? Sixty seconds on the job, he walked straight to Chuck Pagano’s office.

“We’re going to do this together,” Ballard told his head coach.

His wife found out he’d taken the job on ESPN.

* * *

They still tell the story up in Madison, Wis., about the undersized quarterback who nearly fought the fans.

It was early in Barry Alvarez’s tenure, years before Wisconsin football became one of the Big Ten’s most consistent winners. That first season was the toughest. The Badgers went 1-10. Late in the fall, on the wrong end of a blowout at home, the fans at Camp Randall let the team have it. The boos rained down.

What those fans didn’t know: A few of the team’s injured players were sitting in the stands right there next to them. And one of those injured players barked back.

“I can’t vouch for this story, but legend has it they had to escort Chris from the bleachers because he was wanting to fight everybody,” remembers Jay Norvell, Ballard’s position coach at Wisconsin and now the head man at the University of Nevada. “That’s Chris. Just a really fiery competitor.”

Ballard arrived in Madison as a dazzling option quarterback from Southeast Texas, five feet, 10 inches of spunk and ambition. He could’ve suited up for a handful of Division II schools in Texas, he says, but craved a chance at Division I. His options were thin: Wisconsin or nothing. So he packed his car and drove 19 hours north into the unknown. He didn’t know a soul on the entire campus. He lived on the phone his first few weeks, homesick as hell, desperate to return to Texas. His parents wouldn’t let him.

He left Madison four years later, dream dashed, ego shot, options thin. He never completed a single pass. What’s worse: Never caught one, either. Two weeks into his freshman year he switched to receiver, knowing it was his only shot to get on the field. That never happened.

“I was average,” he says, offering up his own scouting report. “I thought I could play QB at the college level, but I didn’t have the arm or the talent to do so. That was hard as a 19-year-old to accept.” All these years later, he sums up his college career with a single word: “Nothing.”

He tore up one knee, then tore up the other. He spent so much time watching football instead of playing it that Norvell, who grew to admire Ballard’s insatiable appetite for the game, asked him to stay on as a student-coach his senior year. Ballard jumped at it. “A graduate class in coaching,” Alvarez calls it today.

Ballard worked at the feet of a staff thick in talent, one that would produce multiple NFL and college head coaches, including Bill Callahan, Brad Childress and Norvell. That season served as a catalyst for the rest of Ballard’s career. Law school? Forget it. He wasn’t leaving football.

Now all he had to do was find a job.

He landed back home in Texas City a year later. He took a job teaching American history and helping out the football team at Hitchcock Junior High. He begged the area coach, Gene Sharp, to see if there were any college coaches in the area who’d take a flyer on a 24-year-old kid who never caught a ball at Wisconsin but was desperate to break into the coaching business. Ron Harms told Sharp to send the kid down.

Harms ran the Division II powerhouse at Texas A&M Kingsville (then Texas A&I). He met Ballard on the practice field one afternoon. He interviewed him. “Very personable young man,” Harms remembers. “But what stood out was that he didn’t try to sell himself.” There it is again. Be who you are. Nothing more.

Harms let Ballard coach the receivers – “and he coached them hard,” Harms says. So hard, in fact, that one afternoon Ballard grew so irate at his unit’s indifference to a blocking drill that he hopped in himself, resolute to show his players what a proper cut block looked like. When he finished the demonstration, he fell to the ground and hollered for the trainer.

He’d broken his collarbone.

* * *

Kingsville proved fertile ground for Ballard to flourish. He rose from coaching the receivers to running the secondary to coordinating the defense, where he develop a future Pro Bowler in Al Harris. He’d wow pro scouts and personnel execs when they swung into town, hawking his players as future stars. He’d stroll into high schools without an ounce of fear, determined to compete for recruits with the powerhouses of the Big 12. He became an indispensable part of Harms’ staff. The Javelinas won 69 games in seven years.

“I remember sitting in the stands at a game,” Angelo says, “and I hear this screaming from the press box. This coach is yelling so loud at his players they could hear him on the field. I said to myself, ‘Who in the hell is up there?’”

Angelo, then the director of player personnel for the Buccaneers, took a liking to the lively young assistant. A friendship was forged. By 1997, Tampa Bay grabbed Harris in the sixth round of the draft, “based largely on what Chris said,” Angelo remembers. Harris would last 14 years in the league. Ballard’s career would never be the same.

In 2000, Angelo called. He was the new GM of the Chicago Bears, and he wanted Ballard to come scout for him. A shot at the NFL? Ballard jumped at it. And in the process, found his passion.

“It just fit me,” he says. “I liked being on the road. I liked evaluating, really digging into who a player was as a person, figuring out how he was gonna fit.”

Two years later Ballard met an old friend for dinner. Art Briles was the new coach at the University of Houston, and he was putting together a staff. He wanted Ballard to run his secondary – a move, Ballard says, that would’ve tripled his pay. He went home and told his wife he wasn’t doing it.

“By that point, I was secure in who I was and what I wanted to do,” he says. And what he wanted to do was build a team, not coach one.

He stayed in Chicago for 12 years, helped the Bears become an NFC Champion, rose to director of pro scouting, then left for Kansas City and helped the Chiefs flip a 2-14 record into 43 wins in four years. All the while, he waited. In the past few years, Ballard’s name has been connected to GM openings with the Jets, Titans, Bears, 49ers, Eagles, Browns and Bucs. He interviewed only twice.

Then, in January, Irsay called. Ballard grabbed his binder. He wanted this one.

* * *

Ballard sneaks in an hour or two to himself each night, his eyes fixed to words on his oversized phone. He reads Phil Jackson, or Steve Kerr, or Theo Epstein. “I want to know what makes the great ones tick. Like, what was their mindset when it was hard?”

On his nightstand this summer: “Creativity, Inc.” The story of Pixar. He explains: “They’ll go to work on this movie for a full year or two, then they’ll bring it into a room with a bunch of people and just chop holes in it. Honesty. Honesty. It really fits in our world. It’s how we come to our final decisions. It can’t be about one person making a decision. It’s about all of us.”

If it seems like he’s musing on animated movies here, he’s not. He’s talking football. He’s talking about the Indianapolis Colts.

“There’s no magic wand to this thing,” Ballard continues, echoing one of his favorite maxims. “You work and you demand people work. And you hold people accountable. Then you let it fall where it falls.

“What you see with me is what you get. This is me, every day. I’m gonna work. I’ve got energy. I’ve got ideas. I’m not always going to be right, but let’s get to the right answer.”

In his first three months on the job, Ballard cut four starters, traded another, dismembered an aging and unproductive defense and pieced it back together, dishing out $49 million guaranteed cash to 14 new players. That defense could see as many as eight new starters come Week 1. It’s anyone’s guess if it’ll work.

Oh, and one more thing: His franchise quarterback hasn’t thrown a football in seven months.

Still, Ballard has infused the building with sense of optimism that felt nonexistent in recent years. Publicly, Irsay and Pagano handled Ryan Grigson’s exit gracefully, doling out due credit for his five seasons as the Colts’ general manager. But they could no longer mask the discord that was crippling the team behind closed doors; despite Irsay’s wishes, and despite those stunning Black Monday extensions for both after the disastrous 2015 season – “tied at the hip” were Irsay’s words then – the coach and GM’s relationship never improved last fall. One report revealed the Colts went so far as to hire a psychologist to help the two communicate. No matter. Sometimes a marriage is simply broken. The Colts went 8-8. Again.

Consider this statement from Irsay, from his press conference the day he fired Grigson: “There’s excitement in people’s eyes in the building today.” And consider this one from Pagano, asked about Ballard in June: “He’s brought this building together.”

The coach, entering his sixth season in Indianapolis, was in a noticeably better mood throughout spring and summer workouts, laughing with his players, joking during press conferences, poking fun at his propensity for clichés. He looked like a man at ease. A new boss can do that.

Irsay has been effusive in his praise of his new general manager, even, at one juncture, comparing Ballard with former Colts president and Hall of Famer Bill Polian. “It’s my feeling,” Irsay said after the draft, “that Chris is going to be here for a long time.”

Easy to say that now. Ballard’s still 0-0, still sliding through the hallways in sandals, still looking like a man who’s had the answers all along.

For a guy who never had a plan, this will do.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.