Then Eagles offensive coordinator Shane Steichen left the Super Bowl field at State Farm Stadium, with the wrong color confetti falling on his head, at around 10 p.m. ET. Within an hour, he was back at the team hotel. The next morning, he was on a flight to Indianapolis to finalize a deal to become the Colts’ new coach. He spent much of his time on the plane jotting down notes on whom he’d thank and what he’d say at the press conference.
And that gave him a little window between his hire being announced on Valentine’s Day, Tuesday of that week, and that press conference, around noon that day, to decompress a little. You might imagine how he used it.
“I had about an hour before the press conference, and that's when I flipped it on,” Steichen said, with a hint of pain still in his voice, on Saturday, driving home from work. “I turned on the Super Bowl about an hour before my press conference and I watched 33 plays. And then I just stopped. And then I was like, , and I went and did my press conference.”
Steichen never finished getting through the tape.
Part of it, for sure, is Steichen’s not wanting to relive the pain—through 33 plays, Philly had things well in hand, and watching the rest would, for a football coach, qualify as a form of self-flagellation. But the other part of it is far less complex than that.
Really, the 37-year-old simply hasn’t had time to get back to it.
It’s now been 55 days since he was officially announced and introduced as the new boss in Indy. In the interim, he’s hired a staff, worked with that staff to teach GM Chris Ballard and the scouts what they’ll look for in players at every position, started work on the draft, completed work in identifying and pursuing free-agent targets, and, over the last week, jumped headlong into figuring out which quarterback is worth taking with the fourth pick.
Monday, Steichen will hit another milestone, probably his most significant one yet. This week, he and the NFL’s other four new head coaches will open their offseason programs. That means this morning, Steichen will be in front of their players for the first time.
Not surprisingly, he’s got a pretty detailed plan for it, like he’s had for everything else over the last eight weeks. But that doesn’t mean his head isn’t still spinning a little, with all there’s been to digest since he left that field in Arizona back in February. Enough so that he never really got to digest all that came with the loss he and the Eagles suffered that night.
A day will come, he’s sure, when he’ll get time for that. That day isn’t today.
