Chris Ballard was antsy. He was pacing back and forth in the draft room, worried that the trade he’d just made would cost him the players he still wanted. The Colts’ general manager couldn’t sit still. His mind wouldn’t relax.

Should they trade back up?

Had they blown their chance?

“Hey,” his assistant GM chimed in. “Let’s just chill out and stay here.”

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It might as well be a part of Ed Dodds’ job description: Keep cool when the boss gets hot.

It was last month. The second night of the draft. The Colts had moved back 11 spots in the second round and picked up an additional third-round pick. Ballard knew what he wanted — a hulking tight end out of Virginia named Jelani Woods, and quite possibly the team’s left tackle of the future in Central Michigan’s Bernhard Raimann.

But would they still be there?

The Colts had grabbed a receiver at No. 53 in Cincinnati’s Alec Pierce. Now they waited. And while they did, Ballard started to believe his patience would come at a cost.

So Dodds, Ballard’s assistant GM and de facto No. 2, spoke up.

“I’ll bet you $20 they’re both gonna be there,” he said.

Ballard sat on the picks.

The Colts took Woods 73rd and Raimann 77th. No word on if Dodds collected on the bet.

“I sweated that for an hour and a half,” Ballard said in the draft room, after telling everyone Woods was the choice at 73. “Get Jelani on the phone. How about that? Holy shit.”

If Ballard is the face of the Colts’ front office, Dodds is the engine behind it. Ballard is candid and conversational, left to publicly answer for his team’s successes and failures. Dodds is rarely seen and almost never heard. He is far more reserved, content to grind in the shadows, an old-school scout with a penchant for keeping it real. The two go back 25 years, back to Texas A&M-Kingsville in the mid-1990s, when both decided whatever they were going to do in life was going to involve football.

Together they’ve navigated the choppy waters of the last few years: Andrew Luck’s stunning retirement, the Colts’ ensuing carousel at quarterback, the collapse in Jacksonville in January.

“I’d like to think our capacity for handling adversity is really high,” Dodds says. “But you don’t get that without going through it.”

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For the exec who once chewed out his own scouts, telling them in 2019, “We ain’t done shit yet … we won a fucking wild-card game,” there wasn’t time to dwell on how 2021 ended. The Colts fell apart. Simple as that.

The next day, Dodds went to work.

“I don’t sit here and soak over shit like that,” he said four months later. “Like, I mean, you can’t change it. We had shit to do. You can’t sit here and piss and moan about it.”

Dodds directs the Colts’ scouting department and has remade the team’s entire player-evaluation process since he arrived after the 2017 draft. He built the schedule the scouts follow, taught them what to look for in interviews, wrote the grading scale the team uses for each prospect and, each February, leads them through the midwinter slog that arrives before the draft. The Colts pore through tape of every prospect as an entire staff, debating and dissecting as a group. This year, they took just four days off from mid-December through draft weekend in late April. That’s 136 days in the building out of a possible 140, holed up in the same, dark room, stacking their board, player by player.

They’d go from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends.

Dodds learned it from Seahawks GM John Schneider, who hired him in Seattle, then watched him grow into one of his most trusted confidants: Best to not think about the finish line. The days are long. The weeks drag. The process can wear you down.

“Don’t even look at when the meetings are supposed to end,” Dodds tells his scouts in Indy. “It’ll go much better that way.”

(His grading scale stems from the one Hall of Fame Packers GM Ron Wolf first wrote back in the 1980s. It ranks players one through nine. The only nine ever given out was from Wolf himself, before the 1986 draft. The player was Bo Jackson.)

Since landing in Indianapolis, Dodds has solidified his reputation as one of the top evaluators in the game, and the league’s taken notice. Six different franchises have called since 2020 asking to interview him for their vacant GM post: the Browns in 2020, the Panthers and Lions in 2021, and the Bears, Raiders and Steelers after last season.

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Yet he’s still here, still working as Ballard’s No. 2. Dodds declined to interview with the Browns in 2020. A year later, he withdrew his name after sitting down with the Panthers, then did the same this year after speaking with the Bears.

Why?

He knows the wrong fit when he sees it, he says.

“I mean, I’m gonna look at every situation and I’m gonna do my own research and, you know, a lot of people, I don’t know if they’d say this publicly, but a lot of guys will say, ‘Well, if it’s life-changing money,’ (they) go in there and say whatever they can to win the job,” he said.

That’s not his M.O. Never has been.

“No, it’s not,” he continued. “I mean, there’s quality of life. You have to feel like you’re being allowed to make an impact and do it the way you know works. I mean, there’s more than one way to skin a cat — like, there are other ways that work, but there’s a way I know, and I’m not going to learn some new way and become an expert on it at 42 years old. That’s not the training ground to do it.”

In other words, Dodds believes in his approach. He’s not a yes-man. He won’t become one.

“I’m respectful and polite, but if they ask me a question, I’m gonna give them the answer I believe is the right course of action,” he said. “If they don’t wanna do it that way, that’s fine, that’s their prerogative … they don’t have to. But (I tell them) what I’d do.”

As for the jobs Dodds stayed in the running for, the Lions hired longtime Rams exec Brad Holmes as their new GM in January of 2021; the Raiders picked Patriots director of pro personnel Dave Ziegler last winter. The Steelers’ search to replace Kevin Colbert is ongoing.

“I’m gonna look at each one independently and make the best decision I can,” Dodds added. “And if it’s not (the best), I don’t want to waste their time. So if I look at it and I’m like, ‘No, that’s not quite the situation I’m interested in,’ then I’m not gonna (continue with the process).”

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One of the things Dodds is most proud of is how his scouts in Indy have taken ownership of the system he’s put in place. The process, he says, “literally took me two years to write.” It’s everything — from the travel it takes to scout over 1,000 players during the college football season to what the area scouts document in their reports to how they dig into a prospect’s background. (The Colts have used a private investigator in the past.)

“I’d say the first two years, it was like hands on throttle and stick, constantly,” he said. “I felt like I was performing eight different roles.”

Now?

“I mean, it’s kind of running itself.”

Hard as he is on the scouts, Dodds fights for them. He’ll go to Ballard and urge him to give more responsibility or more resources.

When he has to, he’ll play peacemaker.

“When Chris is getting pissy,” Dodds says, “I’ll step in and say, ‘What’s going on here?'”

The Monday after the draft, Dodds sits down with Matt Terpening, the Colts’ assistant director of college scouting, and Mitch Chester, the team’s college scouting coordinator, to review the last 12 months. “What do we need to change?” he’ll ask them. “What sucked? What worked?” Dodds will do the same with Kevin Rodgers and John Shaw on the pro personnel side.

An old friend from Seattle, Gus Bradley, arrived this winter, tasked with taking over the defense. The coordinator who helped construct the famed Legion of Boom unit, Bradley knew Dodds would be a weapon in the draft process as the Colts look for rangy defensive backs who could fit his Cover-3 scheme.

“That is an advantage, now,” Bradley said. “He knows the system, knows the style of players that we’re looking for … any question that may pop up at 9:30 at night when they’re all in (the draft room), I think he has a really good feel.”

The question did pop up a few weeks back. The second night of the draft was winding down, and the Colts were out of picks. A safety they’d coveted for Bradley’s scheme, Maryland’s Nick Cross, was falling.

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Dodds looked at the work they’d done: With their first three picks, the Colts had attacked their three biggest needs, adding a wideout, a tight end and a left tackle.

“With everything filled, you’re not pushing,” he said. “And that lets you go get Nick Cross.”

The Colts traded back into the third round and grabbed Cross at No. 96.

Ballard knows his No. 2 won’t be here forever. The fact that Dodds has lasted five years in Indianapolis is probably a surprise. He’ll be a GM at some point, running his own show and making the final decisions on draft night. For now, the last three years haven’t been good enough — and he knows it.

The Colts haven’t won a playoff game since the 2018 season.

As Dodds would say, no time to piss and moan about it. Time to fix it.

(Top photo courtesy of the Colts)