The next person in the Colts' head-coach drama that the world needs to hear from is Andrew Luck.
Or, a case can be made, Luck is the first person the world should have heard from. Or even the only person.
This is not to diminish Chris Ballard, the blunt, combative general manager who planted his feet on behalf of an embarrassed-but-salty organization Wednesday. Or to diminish Jim Irsay or anyone else in a position of power, and how they’re reeling from Josh McDaniels' 180-degree turn.
But the Colts are all about Luck. They have been for six years, and they will be as long as he wears their uniform … even when, like last season, he isn't wearing the uniform. It can never be repeated enough, no matter how painful it is for the Colts faithful to hear: The franchise is in the midst of wasting Luck’s prime.
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And now, Indianapolis can't waste another second getting itself on track again to take advantage of what it has, how much it has left of Luck and how much it has invested in him.
The top candidates speculated to (for lack of a better term) replace McDaniels not only sound great, but they could well fit better than McDaniels would have. That doesn't change the fact that the Colts chose McDaniels as their best option of many, sold themselves to him above all the others — presumably including his previous and now current Patriots employers — and had Luck on board on the next stage of his interrupted career.
Now, the Colts have to start over and work from behind. Just dating this back to the day Chuck Pagano was fired, they had gone through 38 days of searching for their next coach and mapping out the immediate and near future. (Realistically, you know they had things in motion before that.) Will their next hire’s vision match that of McDaniels? Look similar? Look vastly different, or subtly different?
How fast does Ballard have to switch gears on his own vision, while still looking side-eyed at every candidate to protect himself from another 11th-hour jilting? He’s got to be at least a little gun-shy; this was his first head-coach hire, after all.
And how does Luck fit into this?
That wasn't clear after Ballard put on his face-saving show. The general manager refuted reports about more surgery. He did say Luck is not throwing yet. Remember he threw very briefly at practice back in October, inspiring wild confidence and speculation. He was shut down again soon after that.
Luck’s own update in late December was pretty much just that — nothing earth-shattering, but nothing terribly encouraging, either.
Speaking of speculation: The notion that McDaniels ran back to Foxborough because Luck’s health scared him off seems ludicrous. Why would he have even agreed to terms had he not been comfortable with the progress of Luck's rehab? If something changed catastrophically in the day or so between being in and being out, that might bode poorly for Luck and the franchise.
Again, though … ludicrous.
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Back to Ballard and Luck’s progress: No less important than the news that Luck had not returned to throwing was Ballard saying Luck was "not going to skip a step." That’s hard for an impatient audience to hear, but it’s how the Colts and Luck are proceeding. No declarations, a la Carson Wentz and, before him, Robert Griffin III, that they’re "all in for Week 1" or any other week in 2018. The teases of 2017 were draining enough.
It's good to see the Colts and Luck wanting to be extra sure they don’t live the step-forward, step-back public life. But as that goes on, the idea that they’re never really going to get back the franchise cornerstone in the condition he was in three years ago, or will never see him at his best, grows just a little more.
No head coach, no feisty GM and no rah-rah rivalry catch phrase can sweeten the sour taste of that possibility. The wait for the next Colts head coach is annoying. The wait for the next version of Andrew Luck is exponentially worse.
