“She’s Not Hiding Her Involvement”: Former NFL Exec Calls Out Double Standards As Carlie Irsay Gordon Faces Backlash for Sideline Presence
· Yahoo Sports
Carlie Irsay-Gordon is taking heat for standing on the Colts’ sideline during games. Former Raiders CEO Amy Trask says that’s exactly the problem. Owners are far more involved on game days than most fans realize, yet they rarely hear the criticism Irsay-Gordon is hearing now.
“You are absolutely right,” Amy Trask said, via an NFL on CBS X post. “It depends on the team. There are 32 different structures. Some team owners are extremely involved. Others are far, far less involved. As relates to the Colts, Carly is down on the sideline for all to see. And in that respect, good for her. She’s not hiding her involvement.
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“There are other owners sitting up in their box that have telephones. And when they want to get a message down to the sideline, or they want to ask something, or they want to pull a player from the game to protect him, or otherwise, they pick up that phone. So Carly is taking pushback for doing that, which a lot of owners do. Not all of them, but a lot of them.”
Carlie Irsay-Gordon standing on the Colts’ sideline with all kinds of sheets and headphones in her ears isn’t a new sight. She took over as owner after her father, Jim Irsay, passed away in May 2025, and she has been doing this for a long time, per ESPN. She went viral this year after she approached a coach on the sideline to discuss what looked like plays.
Bill Simmons, the founder of The Ringer, called out Irsay-Gordon for her apparent involvement with the process of it all.
“I think the owner on the sidelines taking notes is [expletive] nuts,” he said on his podcast. “I think it’s bonkers. I can’t believe she does, and I can’t believe people haven’t talked her out of it.
“If a male owner was doing this, we would be ridiculing this guy ’til the cows came home,” he added. “Even Jerry Jones wouldn’t do that.”
Not everyone is on board with that take, though. Michael Lombardi, an American football executive and former analyst, thinks the reaction is blown way out of proportion.
But as Trask said, it all depends on owner to owner and team to team. Jones is always seen inside his special suite in the AT&T Stadium. That has become the norm for him. It’s simply the opposite for Carlie Irsay-Gordon.
“I like to say on a good day I have like a fifth-grade reading level understanding of the game and just the basic concepts of what we’re trying to do, depending on the week and depending on our opponent and depending on the situation,” she told Bridget Condon of Front Office Sports Tonight. “But I think, then, it just helps to understand and to ask questions because I think one of the things, in my opinion, like being a good leader is about listening, really to understand. And I think that’s what the best teams do.”
Many see her involvement as a bit too much, because it is expected that owners leave the football stuff to the coaching staff. But Irsay-Gordon is genuinely interested in observing things up close. Per The Athletic’s Rustin Dodd, she attends almost every practice and walkthrough, has traveled on the road with scouts, and keeps hours like those of a coach.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever been around a more process-driven person than her,” Chris Ballard, the Colts’ general manager, told the publication last year.
The good news for Irsay-Gordon is that the noise is easier to tune out when the results are trending the right way.
The Colts opened the season with two straight losses and looked like one of the weakest teams in the league. They have since won two in a row, just one win behind rivals Jacksonville Jaguars for the top spot in the AFC South.
If that run continues, the sideline chatter will likely fade on its own.
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