Shane Steichens road to Colts job began in high school: He was just a magnet

Publish date: 2024-05-07

All these years later and Chris Jones isn’t exactly sure: Either he subtly slipped the stadium keys to his 160-pound wisp of a quarterback at one point that summer, or he’d just “forget” to lock the gates at night, mindful that the kid was going to find his way onto the field one way or another.

At least this way he didn’t have to hop the fence.

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This was El Dorado Hills, Calif., back in 2002, and Jones was the 28-year-old varsity football coach at Oak Ridge High School, quickly learning that his quarterback — most around town still knew him as Sean Steichen’s little brother — couldn’t turn it off, even in the dead of summer. On Friday nights, while most of his teammates were doing what high school kids tend to do — partying somewhere in town — Shane Steichen was recruiting his wide receivers to join him for throwing sessions inside an empty stadium.

Sometimes, teammates remember, he’d take a few steps into one of those parties, then pull a hard U-turn and leave. He had little interest in the social scene. His ideal Friday night, even at the age of 17, consisted of a ball and a receiver and an empty field.

“I’ll be honest, I was at the parties,” admits one of those receivers, Marcus Spain. “And I can tell you for a fact, Shane was never there. His life revolved around football.”

The third of the four Steichen boys, Shane was a string bean — a lanky 6-foot-3, maybe 165 pounds with pads — but he could spin it, just like Sean, who went on to briefly play quarterback at Boise State. Shane earned the starting job his junior year, and from there, was eager to climb from big brother’s shadow. Doing so, in his mind, would leave no time for normal adolescent activities. Socializing became an afterthought.

Led by senior quarterback Shane Steichen (15) and wide receiver Marcus Spain (19), head coach Chris Jones (far left) led Oak Ridge High School (Calif.) to a 12-1 record and a section title in the fall of 2003. (Courtesy of Aaron Brackney)

One of his teammates happened to be cut from the same cloth, a speedy wide receiver named Austin Collie; as a devout Mormon, Collie had no interest in the party scene, either. The two spent their Friday nights that summer working up a sweat inside the stadium they’d set records in that fall. Years later, Collie compared Steichen’s obsessive-like approach to the game with that of the Hall of Fame quarterback he caught 118 passes from in the pros: Peyton Manning.

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Early on, it was just the two of them working on those empty fields, but over time, more joined, lured by the quarterback who was starting to sound a lot like a coach.

“He was just a magnet,” Jones remembers. “He just had this personality that hooked everyone around him.”

“I mean, he honestly could’ve been the offensive coordinator,” Spain adds. “And he was 17 years old.”

Two decades have passed. That string bean of a quarterback has been tapped to revive a stagnant NFL franchise, a team marred by months of dysfunction and the disappointment that comes with 4-12-1. The Colts need a QB and a way forward. They haven’t won a division title in eight long years. Shane Steichen arrives as the third-youngest head coach in the league, eager for the opportunity he’s been destined for since he was convincing teammates to swap parties for throwing sessions way back in high school.

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To understand Steichen’s expedited rise through the coaching ranks, start in the foothills just east of Sacramento. That’s where Sean’s little brother came into his own, where his Oak Ridge teammates started to realize they didn’t just have a quarterback under center but a coach-in-the-making.

Aaron Brackney goes all the way back to their first snap together, one he screwed up badly — and still remembers to this day. He was a backup center, playing football for the first time in his life, trying not to embarrass himself too much during an early season practice. The first drill was QB-center exchanges. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing.

First snap: fumble.

The QB was not pleased.

“Shane starts barking at me,” Brackney says. “Not in a bad way, but he was very clear, ‘This is where I need the ball.’ I figured it out real quick. When you’re working with Shane, he’s gonna expect a lot out of you, because he was gonna give you the same thing. Every time I snapped for Shane after that, I made sure that ball was in the perfect spot.”

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Spain goes back to the freshman team’s first game that season. The offense had advanced inside the opponent’s red zone, and Steichen gathered them in the huddle to call the play. He was thinking touchdown.

The formation: 12 personnel, two tight ends and a lone receiver. The route: a fade for Spain to the corner of the end zone.

The QB stared at him for a few seconds.

“Hey, Spain,” Steichen said, “this is going to you.”

The wideout felt the nerves trickle throughout his body.

“Instinctively, Shane always just took command,” Spain remembers. “He knew he was gonna throw a good ball. He knew I was gonna be in single coverage. He was basically telling me, ‘Time to go make a play.'”

He laughs about it now.

“Good thing I caught that ball.”

As the group moved up, from the freshman squad to JV, then finally varsity, Steichen’s influence started to spread. When Jones was asked to teach at football clinics in the area, he’d have his quarterback come with him. He’d bring Steichen up on stage in front of hundreds of coaches to show them what picture-perfect mechanics looked like. On quiet nights at home, Steichen would play Madden, hoping to get a better feel for the defensive schemes he’d see on game nights.

In the fall, Jones opened up the offense, confident that his QB could handle anything he threw at him. Oak Ridge started to veer away from the run-heavy system so many Northern California teams leaned on at the time.

With Steichen, they threw it all over the field.

“One game, he decided to start putting in these option routes,” Spain remembers. “Shane’s basically telling me at halftime, ‘If the defender rolls, I stop, or if he stops, I roll.’ It’s not that hard for me because I just look for the tell and react, but for him, he’s thinking about that, about every other route the receivers are running, about the defensive line coming after him …

“I remember thinking to myself: Did coach put that in, or did Shane?”

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During games, when Jones would ask the offensive leaders if they had any plays they wanted called, Steichen would speak up.

“He had three or four he knew would work every single time,” Spain remembers. “And they always did.”

But it wasn’t just the mind that stood out. Steichen worked. He demanded his teammates did, too. Spain remembers his QB routinely begging him to keep his cleats on after practice.

“Let’s throw some more,” he’d urge him.

“Man,” Spain would sigh, “I already ran 100 routes today!”

The QB also had no problem getting in the faces of teammates he felt were coasting. One afternoon at practice, he noticed one of the team’s best players — a hulking offensive tackle — was giving iffy effort. Steichen wasn’t having it. He called him out in front of the entire group.

“Listen, we’re a team,” he told the tackle, “and we need 11 out there, not just 10.”

“Shane has no problem getting fiery when he needed to,” Spain says.

By the middle of their season, Brackney says the offensive linemen started to figure out. Give the QB time, they told themselves, and he’d take care of the rest.

“We had this mentality: if we did our job, if we could hold the line, Shane was gonna win us every game. He was always prepared. He got on us, but he didn’t bring you down. He set a really high bar. We all followed.”

Steichen, Spain, Collie and Brackney nearly won every game that season. Oak Ridge finished 12-1 and as Sac-Joaquin section champs, the lone loss coming by one point because of a failed two-point conversion late in the game. The QB threw for 2,500 yards and 34 touchdowns. His next stop was UNLV, where he started as a freshman before a leg injury halted his college career.

After a few years as a low-level assistant at UNLV and Louisville, Steichen got the call that changed everything. Norv Turner, the father of one of his college teammates, had a job for him with the San Diego Chargers. Steichen hopped in his car and drove across the country.

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Twelve years later, he beat out one of the most crowded fields in recent memory — over 35 days, the Colts interviewed 13 different candidates — to become an NFL head coach at the age of 37. His old coach kept in touch with him throughout the process, while Steichen simultaneously chased the Colts job and a Super Bowl.

“Got a really good feeling about this,” Steichen texted Jones after his first interview with the Colts, a five-hour virtual session on Jan. 14.

It was more of the same a week later, after Steichen sat down with Colts owner Jim Irsay in person, then with general manager Chris Ballard and a few other front-office executives a day later.

“He wasn’t like, ‘This is mine’ by any means,” Jones remembers, “but he was confident. He felt like everything clicked.”

Shane Steichen speaks during his introductory news conference with the Colts. (Darron Cummings / Associated Press)

The Colts felt the same way. They were sold on Steichen after the second-round interview, impressed by his intelligence and buoyed by his conviction, a conviction that was first formed on those fields at Oak Ridge High School, where a string bean quarterback outworked his older brother’s shadow and pulled his teammates along with him. During his introductory press conference last week, Steichen retraced his football journey, thanking every coach and mentor who played a role along the way.

When it came time to mention Chris Jones, Steichen’s voice began to crack. His words started to slow.

“Thank you for teaching me the game,” he said, “and making me foster a love for the game.”

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Jones was watching back in El Dorado Hills, marveling at how fast this all came to be. Feels like just yesterday, he thought, he was handing Steichen the keys to the stadium (or leaving the gates unlocked). He’s followed his old quarterback’s career closely, traveling to games in San Francisco when Steichen was in town with the Chargers, or to Arizona for an Eagles game last fall.

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Now his old protege — the quarterback he used to drag with him to coaching clinics all over town — was getting his shot to run an NFL team, and he was thanking him for being there when it all started to take off.

“As a coach and a teacher,” Jones said a few days later, “that was one of the coolest moments I’ve ever had.”

(Top photo of Austin Collie, left, and Shane Steichen in high school: Courtesy of Chris Jones)

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