The Colts have cycled through seven starting quarterbacks since Andrew Luck retired, and their first move after firing Chris Ballard appears to be calling the quarterback they had before him. Shortly ...
The Colts have cycled through seven starting quarterbacks since Andrew Luck retired, and their first move after firing Chris Ballard appears to be calling the quarterback they had before him.
Shortly after the Colts fired Ballard, Dan Patrick told listeners on The Dan Patrick Show that a source had just told him the team’s first call would be — or already has been — to Peyton Manning. According to Patrick, the Colts aren’t just calling Manning for names and suggestions. They also want to know whether he’d be interested in running the front office himself as general manager, with an ownership stake in the franchise as part of the deal.
“So now you have an opportunity to put Peyton back in Indy as a GM and part owner,” Patrick said. “And he gets to pick his quarterback. So now all of a sudden, the community is going to love this. The league would love this. Would Peyton love this?”
“The Colts’ first call will be/has been to Peyton Manning.” — DP shares what his source has told him. https://t.co/MgTbuJIxhW
— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) October 19, 2026
Patrick noted that this would be the first major hire for the late Jim Irsay’s daughters since they assumed control of the franchise, and he recalled asking Irsay a couple of years ago whether he would ever consider bringing Manning aboard as a part owner. Irsay, according to Patrick, had no interest in selling any portion of the team, even to the quarterback who delivered the franchise its only Super Bowl in Indianapolis.
Peyton Manning has been the white whale of NFL media and front offices for nearly a decade. ESPN leadership, including Jimmy Pitaro and Connor Schell, flew to Denver in 2018 to recruit him for the Monday Night Football booth after Jason Witten left to unretire, and Manning still turned them down, leaving ESPN to slide Booger McFarland from the ill-fated BoogerMobile into the booth. When the Broncos went up for sale in 2021, Jason La Canfora, then with CBS Sports, reported that Manning had already held discussions with several ownership groups considered favorites to buy the team, though no formal role materialized after Rob Walton’s group won the bidding.
Instead, Manning built his own media empire.
The ManningCast debuted that same 2021 season, and ESPN eventually signed a nine-year extension with Omaha Productions through 2034, covering the Monday night altcast along with Peyton’s Places, Eli’s Places, and a growing slate of spinoffs. The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand has said ESPN pays Omaha a figure in the same range as Pat McAfee’s reported salary, with the company now producing podcasts for Brian Windhorst, Mina Kimes, and Scott Van Pelt, among others, as well as NFL Honors, the ESPYs, and a steady stream of other altcasts and docuseries.
The ManningCast itself, however, is no longer the phenomenon it once was. Its most-watched episode came during that debut season, when a Giants-Chiefs game drew 1.96 million viewers, and the show averaged more than 1.1 million viewers per week in its second year. Last season, despite expanding to 12 regular-season games, the ManningCast failed to reach one million viewers for a single broadcast, with only two episodes approaching 900,000. The slide continued this fall, as the Week 1 ManningCast drew just 705,000 viewers on ESPN2, roughly 3% of the 23.2 million who watched Broncos-Chiefs on the main broadcast, prompting calls for the brothers to cut back on celebrity guests and get back to breaking down the game.
With the altcast losing steam and Troy Aikman’s future at ESPN in doubt, Marchand even floated Peyton and Eli last month as a possible replacement for the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback in the main Monday Night Football booth, but that would seem to be dead on arrival if Peyton were running the Colts, though it could still leave the door open for Eli. Either way, Puck’s John Ourand recently reported that his best sources expect Greg Olsen to land the job when his Fox contract expires.
Patrick didn’t pretend to know how Peyton Manning would weigh all of that against a return to Indianapolis, and he was upfront that he was thinking out loud on live radio. He suggested Manning could take the general manager title as an entry point to steer the transition and find the next quarterback, joked about the Colts landing Arch Manning until Paul Pabst reminded him the team doesn’t own its first-round pick (the Sauce Gardner trade), and even proposed bringing in Eli and Cooper while they’re at it.
Patrick’s source did flag one potential problem, though.
“Now my source says the only question will be Peyton’s family,” Patrick said. “They enjoyed Denver quite a bit. His kids are getting to the age where moving has implications, difficulties. But it would seem all involved owe it to themselves to explore it and consider it.”
Meaning the Colts will have to offer a lot more than a homecoming to bring him back to Indianapolis.
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