Joe Thomas was aghast about the Jeff Saturday hire.
Thomas, the presumed future Hall of Fame left tackle for the Cleveland Browns, eviscerated Colts owner Jim Irsay for naming Saturday as the team’s interim head coach.
“When you hire your drinking buddy to be the head coach of an NFL football team, it is one of the most disrespectful things I’ve seen in my entire life, to the commitment, the lifestyle and the experience that it takes to be an NFL coach — any coach! — much less the head coach of the Indianapolis Football Colts!” Thomas said on NFL Network’s “Good Morning Football” on Friday.
“You have got to be kidding me that this is something that Jim Irsay and Jeff Saturday, who’s not blameless for accepting the job could’ve talked about and decided this was the best thing for the Colts at this juncture of the season.”
To illustrate the time commitment required to be a head coach, Thomas told a story about Rob Chudzinski, who in 2013 coached the Browns to a 4-12 record during his lone season in charge. Chudzinski, Thomas said, only saw his own four children once or twice a week.
“This is something that changes your life when you decide to be a coach,” Thomas said. “It’s one of the reasons I don’t want to be a coach. I want to see my children. I want to have a life outside of football. When you’re a coach in the NFL, you don’t have a life outside of football. Why do you think coaches never retire? What are they gonna do? They haven’t developed any other parts of their life. They don’t have hobbies, or friends outside of their football world.”
Thomas said it was “disrespectful” and “insulting” to men who have worked their whole lives to try to get a head coaching job in the NFL for Irsay to defend hiring Saturday because his lack of coaching experience meant he wouldn’t be scared and be too beholden to analytics. Thomas thought it was a “joke” when he first saw the news.
“It was the most egregious thing I can ever remember happening in the NFL — and I went 1-31 my last two years in the NFL,” Thomas said.
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