How Polian turned the Colts and became a Hall of Famer

He gave a pudgy, undrafted lineman his last shot at football. Before Bill Polian called, Jeff Saturday was managing an electrical supply store in Raleigh, N.C. That pudgy, undrafted lineman wound up starting 202 games in the NFL.

He took the wrong running back with the fourth pick in 1999; so infuriated were Indianapolis Colts fans after the drafting of Edgerrin James, some called into local radio shows and threatened to boycott the team. James quelled the critics quickly. He led the league in rushing his first two seasons.

He eschewed his team’s defensive needs in the first round of the 2001 draft, instead picking a wide receiver his starting quarterback had never heard of. Fourteen years later, Reggie Wayne is the franchise leader in games played.

He convinced his head coach that a defensive end from Alabama A&M – an unknown who couldn’t even get an invite to the NFL Combine that year – was worth trading up for in the 2003 draft. Today Robert Mathis is the Colts’ all-time sacks leader.

He rolled the dice on an assassin of a safety in 2004 despite doctors warning him Bob Sanders might not pass the team physical. By his fourth season, Sanders was the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year.

But the shrewdest move came before all of that, and it wasn’t even Bill Polian’s to make. It came in December 1997, when Colts owner Jim Irsay, the new patriarch of a franchise that had plunged into NFL irrelevance and even battled rumors of relocation (the Los Angeles Colts?), sent a third-round draft pick to the Carolina Panthers in exchange for the architect who would lift his team from the league cellar to the victory podium at the Super Bowl.

Think Bill Polian was worth it? The Panthers used that third-round pick on a defensive end, Chuck Wiley, who totaled six sacks his entire career. In Polian’s 14 seasons in Indianapolis, he converted a basketball-mad state into a football haven.

How? It began with The Decision. In the spring of 1998, Polian was the Colts’ new president, dwelling over which quarterback to take with the first overall pick in the draft. It was a monumental call. He’d build his team around the right arm of Ryan Leaf, a junior out of Washington State, or Peyton Manning, a senior from Tennessee. Days before the draft, he sat in Irsay’s office and told his boss he was leaning towards Manning. He wasn't sure on Leaf. Worst-case scenario, Polian had decided, Manning would be an average NFL quarterback. Worst-case, he’d be Bernie Kosar.

“The pressure was so great in those last 48 hours,” Irsay remembers. “I remember Bill pounding the desk and shouting, ‘You’re getting Bernie Kosar! Can you live with Bernie Kosar?' ”

Irsay could. But they weren’t ready to tell Manning when he stopped by the team facility a week before the draft. Manning pressed for an answer anyway. Polian wouldn’t budge. Manning got up to leave.

“I just want to leave you with this one thought,” he told Polian. “If you draft me, I promise we’ll win a championship. And if you don’t, I promise I will come back and kick your ass.”

Manning went No. 1. The Colts didn’t get Bernie Kosar. They got a five-time MVP who delivered on his word. They got Peyton Manning, and he kicked ass in Indianapolis for 13 years.

Next Saturday, Bill Polian, the man who made the decision that might’ve saved professional football in Indianapolis, will enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“After Peyton said that in my office that day, I told myself, ‘There’s the exclamation point. That proves exactly what we believed about him,’” Polian says 17 years later. “But you have to remember, no one would have predicted Peyton was going to have a Hall of Fame career. No one would have predicted the difficult time Ryan had.

“Still, I often joke that if I had picked Ryan Leaf, I’d be parking cars at Lucas Oil Stadium.”

What Polian forgets to mention: If he had picked Ryan Leaf, there wouldn’t be a Lucas Oil Stadium.

***

So Polian took Manning and the Colts took off. What followed: 146 wins, 11 playoff berths, eight division titles, an NFL-record five straight 12-win seasons, two Super Bowl appearances, a world championship. Polian drafted or signed 13 eventual Pro Bowlers in 14 years – a ridiculous success rate – by sniffing out talent in the undersized (Sanders), the overlooked (Mathis) and the written off (Saturday).

“Unquestionably one of the greatest talent evaluators the NFL has ever seen,” says Irsay, who’s been around the league for close to 50 years. “Bill is like that old guy at the racetrack with all those crumpled up pieces of paper that just knows how to pick ‘em. He just has that knack.”

But there’s more to Polian than just draft-day wizardry. He could be combative, arrogant and downright petty. He sparred with national and local media. He whiffed badly in the draft late in his career (see: Ugoh, Tony). He tossed aside the chance at a perfect season (see: 2009). He drafted, and defended, Curtis Painter. Without a contingency plan in place in 2011, the Colts crumbled to 2-14 while Manning watched from the sidelines after undergoing his fourth neck procedure. It cost Polian and his son Chris, then the Colts’ general manager, their jobs.

Looking back, that’s Polian’s biggest regret. He should’ve had a back-up plan. He knows it.

“I should’ve traded up (in the 2011 draft) and taken one of those young quarterbacks,” he says.

But the rest? What a ride. What memories. The playoff highs. The playoff heartache. The vindication that came in the rain in Miami in January 2007, his only Super Bowl triumph in five trips to the big game. The draft-day hits. The draft-day misses. The shouting matches on the radio. The shouting matches in the media room. The wins. The losses. The fans. The critics.

“I thought it was my job to stand up and take the bullets for the players and coaches,” says Polian, who has, by his own admission, mellowed in retirement. (He works as an NFL analyst for ESPN.) “We didn’t take any umbrage with what the so-called experts said on TV or in the paper. It was actually kind of a nice running joke around the office.”

Says Dungy, his head coach in Indianapolis for seven seasons: “Bill’s emotional, passionate and has a one-track mind. It’s all about winning. He didn’t have a lot patience for people on the outside that weren’t going to impact winning.”

Adds Irsay, with a laugh: “Yes, he had a temper. I had to call him into the principal’s office more than once.”

Irsay will be on hand in Canton next weekend to see the man he still calls “a dear friend” inducted into the Hall of Fame. His gratitude knows no bounds. Polian transformed his team from perennial laugher into perennial contender.

“His Colts stay alone was enough to get him in,” Irsay says proudly. “For our franchise, it will be a huge, huge day. It’s very rare you get an executive in the Hall of Fame, ever.”

Indeed. Only 21 contributors have made it in the Hall’s 52-year history. (Polian and former Raiders and Packers executive Ron Wolf were elected in January in the new contributor category.) Polian is just the fourth inductee with ties to the Colts’ Indianapolis era, following Richard Dent (who played just one season in Indy), Eric Dickerson and Marshall Faulk.

Polian’s football life sprouted in the boroughs of New York City, where as a kid in the 1960s he’d root on the Giants from the cheap seats at the Polo Grounds. He played safety at NYU, then spent a decade coaching at stops in and around the city. In between, he sold advertising. He climbed the football ladder, slowly, patiently, while scouting and coaching for CFL teams like the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Montreal Alouettes. His made his name with the Buffalo Bills as director of pro personnel before being named general manager in 1985. Five years later, the Bills made the first of four consecutive trips to the Super Bowl.

After he was fired in Buffalo – ruffling feathers is a constant thread here – Polian elevated the Carolina Panthers from expansion franchise to the NFC Championship Game in just two seasons. Eleven months after that, in December 1997, Irsay found himself looking for a new general manager. He called Panthers owner Jerry Richardson and told him to name his price.

Irsay and Polian had known each other for a decade: Both were handpicked by former commissioner Pete Rozelle for the NFL Management Council that ironed out the league’s new salary cap in the 1980s. So after Richardson asked for a third-round pick, Irsay jumped at the chance.

“Didn’t even have to interview him,” he says.

***

From there Polian did what he does best. He built a winner. The Colts went from 3-13 in 1998 to 13-3 in 1999, the single-largest turnaround in league history, and won at a historic pace until Manning’s neck injury. While his profile rose in Buffalo and Carolina, Polian solidified his legacy in Indianapolis. By the time he left, in 2011, he’d been named the NFL’s Executive of the Year a record six times.

In Indy he unearthed gems at the top of drafts and deep into the later rounds: Edgerrin James (fourth in 1999), Reggie Wayne (30th in 2001), Ryan Diem (118th in 2001), Dwight Freeney (11th in 2002), Dallas Clark (24th in 2003), Robert Mathis (138th in 2003), Cato June (198th in 2003), Bob Sanders (44th in 2004) and Antoine Bethea (207th in 2006).

Fans at local restaurants erupted in boos on April 17, 1999 when Polian took James over Heisman-winner Ricky Williams. He was right on that one. More uproar followed his 2001 decision to pass on defense in the first round and instead take a receiver out of Miami. “That’s the first time I’ve heard his name,” Peyton Manning said of Reggie Wayne that day. “I was thinking defense.” Suffice to say the two got along just fine in their 10 seasons together.

Before the 1999 season, Jeff Saturday was working in Raleigh, N.C., figuring his football career was shot. “I guess I’ll be pumping frickin’ gas and fixing tires for the rest of my life,” he’d told his boss after a dismal Pro Day at North Carolina. Then Polian, biting on a hunch from a Colts player had given him, gave Saturday a call. He played 14 seasons and made six Pro Bowls.

On Draft Day 2003, Polian was determined to take a defensive end from a tiny school in Alabama. Dungy hesitated.

“He had to talk me into certain guys,” Dungy says now. “We all liked Robert Mathis. He loved Robert Mathis. But, at first, I wasn’t up for trading the next year’s picks.”

Polian insisted. And insisted some more. Dungy finally relented. The Colts sent a fourth-rounder in the following year’s draft in exchange for the pick they used on Mathis early in the fifth round. Twelve years later, he’s still on the roster, a six-time Pro Bowler with 111 career sacks to his name.

“It’s pretty obvious that was the right move to make,” Dungy concedes.

Polian plucked unconventional talents for the Colts’ unconventional schemes. He envisioned the skillsets of a pair of Iowa standouts, Dallas Clark and Bob Sanders, fitting seamlessly in the Colts' speed-heavy schemes. He was right. He pictured Gary Brackett, a former walk-on at Rutgers who’d gone undrafted, as the heady linebacker Dungy’s Tampa-2 defense craved. He watched Cato June star as a safety at Michigan and told Dungy to shift him to linebacker. He was right on both of those, too.

“He was a guy you could play for,” Brackett says of Polian. “He was tough. He was fair. And he rewarded guys. He took care of his own. The players in the locker room respected him for that.”

Polian’s moves, and his team’s sustained success, reshaped the Indianapolis sports scene. The Colts weren’t always king. Polian remembers arriving in the winter of 1997 and realizing the uphill climb that lay ahead.

“Basically, we were behind college basketball and pro basketball and auto racing in terms of popularity,” he says. “There was a lot of work to do.”

He walked onto the field for his first game as team president in September 1998 and saw a sea of Miami Dolphins jerseys in the RCA Dome stands. What was going on?

“They’re Miami fans because of Bob Griese (a former Purdue quarterback),” Polian was told. “We’ve never given them a reason to be Colts fans.”

Polian did. In the 14 years before his arrival, the Colts won 88 games and went to the playoffs three times. In Polian’s 14 seasons: 146 wins, eight division titles, 11 trips to the playoffs and the city’s first major pro sports championship in three decades. Further proof: The team’s sold out every home game since 2003.

He was many things. Above all he was a winner. After his arrival in December 1997, the Colts were never the same.

“It all goes back to him,” Dungy says. “He changed everything. Changed the coaching staff, the scouting staff, the way they did everything. He created the culture. And if you look at where the team was in 1998 and where it is now, his handprints are all over it.”

Pete Ward, the Colts’ CEO and a man who’s been with the franchise for 33 years, sums it up this way.

“Bill Polian created a football town.”

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.