What Is She Writing Down?

I wasn’t watching for it. I was just watching the Colts play the Chiefs.

But the broadcast kept showing Carlie Irsay-Gordon on the Indianapolis sideline. I will respectfully refer to her as CIG, since writing “Carlie Irsay-Gordon” a bunch is too many keystrokes.  I knew she was Jim Irsay’s daughter and that she and her sisters had taken over the Colts after their father died. What caught my attention was what she was doing.

She was walking around the sideline with a headset on and seemed to be taking notes as she watched what was going on. At one point I even noticed she was left-handed. I’m a lefty too, at least when I write or throw. For whatever reason, I’ve always played golf right-handed, so I tend to notice other lefties.

I started wondering what she was writing down.

Was she making notes about particular plays? Players? Coaches? Things she wanted to ask somebody about later? Was she evaluating what she was seeing, or was she just trying to understand everything that was happening?

Then I wondered whether having her down there made anybody nervous.

I’ve spent most of my career working with businesses and the people who run them, and I’ve always been interested in how people behave within organizations. It seems to me there is a difference between knowing that the owner is going to see the results at the end of the day and having the owner standing 20 yards away with a headset on, watching what you’re doing and writing things down.

I wondered if that was part of the reason she was there. Maybe there is some value in everyone knowing that the person in charge is there and paying attention.

After the game I got curious enough to look into it.

It looks like this is nothing new.  I read about how CIG has been doing this for years. She listens to the coaches’ communications during games, follows along with the play sheet, attends meetings and takes notes. She has explained that if she’s responsible for evaluating the people running the football operation, she needs to understand enough about what they’re doing to know whether the explanations she’s getting make sense.

I think that’s interesting.

One of the challenges in running any business is that the person ultimately responsible for it can’t possibly be the expert in everything the business does. An NFL owner isn’t going to know more about offensive line play than the offensive line coach. She isn’t going to evaluate college players better than the scouts who do it for a living. But at some point she still has to decide whether those people are good at their jobs.

That gets pretty difficult if you don’t know enough about what they do to ask the right questions.

CIG apparently wants to know.

I’m still curious about what that does to the people around her. Maybe it creates some additional accountability. Maybe it creates pressure. Maybe the people who have been around her for years don’t think anything of it anymore. And maybe none of that is really why she does it. She grew up in a family that owned an NFL team. It may be as simple as the fact that she loves football, is curious about it and wants to understand as much as she can about the business she’s now responsible for.

I don’t know.

But I’m thinking that if I worked for the Colts and the owner was standing nearby with a headset on and writing things down, every once in a while I’d probably wonder what was in those notes.

That’s what got me thinking about it in the first place.