The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Luck Episode 1: The Rise

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Welcome to LUCK, the new podcast series on Andrew Luck, one of the great what-ifs in NFL history. The series explores a fundamental question: How did one of the greatest quarterback prospects of all-time end up walking away from the game before he turned 30 years old?In Episode 1, host Zak Keefer — a longtime Colts beat writer who covered Luck’s pro career — traces Luck’s path from his unique upbringing in Europe to Heisman contender at Stanford. Voices in the episode include Stanford coach David Shaw, former Stanford QB Tavita Pritchard, Heisman winner Robert Griffin III, Tony Dungy and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello. It is certainly, as in how I envision this or plan this, but I am going to retire. This is not an easy decision. Honestly, it's the hardest decision on my life. August 24, 2019. Andrew Luck is wearing a Colt's T-shirt and shorts. His left ankle is wrapped. He's awkwardly shuffling back and forth behind a podium on the bottom floor of Lucas Oil Stadium. confirming the news that had rocked the sports world an hour earlier. He was done with football. For the last four years or so, I've been in the cycle of injury pain rehab, injury pain rehab. Torn cartilage in his ribs, a lacerated kidney, an injury to his throwing shoulder that had knocked him out for an entire season.

And in 2019, a calf and ankle injury that just wouldn't heal. Luck and his body were trapped in an unrelenting loop. It's been tiring. I feel tired and not just in the physical sense. It didn't feel real then, and in a lot of ways it doesn't feel real now. That night, I watched a 29-year-old franchise quarterback, the very player the Colts moved on from Peyton Manning for give up the game he loves three weeks before his 30th birthday.

Broken down, battered his love of the game gone. I felt stuck in it, and the only way I see out is to, to no longer play football. That night, I saw a man who'd been drowning for four years. It was confounding, but more than that, it was sad. It's taken my joy of this game away. And this... Sorry.

Luck never expected to retire like this, never wanted to retire like this, in a late night impromptu press conference. But an hour earlier while the Colts were playing a home preseason game, with Luck standing. on the sidelines, ESPN's Adam Schaefter broke the news that Luck was done with football. You see Andrew Luck on the sidelines. There is a report that has been filed by Adam Schaefter of ESPN that Andrew has informed the team of his desire to retire from the National Football League.

The shocking news worked its way through the stands, creating an unreal scene inside Lucas Oyle Stadium. Colts fans booing Andrew Luck, the franchise of his biggest start. Yeah, I'd be lying if I didn't say I heard the reaction. Yeah, it hurt. I'll be honest, chap. It hurt. He was once labeled the greatest quarterback prospect since

John Elway. And in the early part of his career, Andrew Luck more than lived up to all the hype. There was just this joy to his game. He flung it all over the field. He screamed like a six-year-old. He ran straight into linebackers and then would help them up off the ground afterwards.

He told defensive ends great hit after they'd driven him into the turf. He led seven fourth quarter comebacks as a rookie. He won playoff games. This is a guy who in his retirement press conference that night literally thanked the game of football. And I guess in a philosophical sense, I want to thank football for so many wonderful moments in my life and the pressure, circumstances, environment that pushed me to grow, learn, change in so many meaningful ways. It's the greatest team sport in the world. Sitting there, listening to Luck tried to explain something that was both completely unbelievable

and at the same time completely understandable. I kept asking myself one question. How in the world did we get to this point? And after 2016, where I played in pain and was unable to regularly practice, I made a vow to myself that I would not go down that path again. Come to the proverbial fork in the road. And I made a vow to myself that if I ever were able to myself that if I ever, dead again, I would choose, choose me in a sense.

I woke up the next morning and the first thought in my head was, did that really happen? And over the years that have followed, there have been times watching the Colts shuffle from one quarterback to another that I'll find myself asking the very same thing. And I know, I know the Colts top decision makers, owner Jim Mersey, General Manager Chris Bauer, head coach Frank Reich, have done the very same. How does one of the greatest quarterback prospects ever end up walking away from the game before he turned 30 years old. Over the course of the last five months, we've asked everyone, from Bruce Ariens to Tony Dungey, from David Shaw to RG3, from Chuck Begano to Peter King, Tom House, Chris

Ballard, and dozens more. That is the question this podcast will try to answer. I'm Zach Kiefer from The Athletic. Welcome to Luck. It's amazing that the Colts could move on from Peyton Manning, and nobody really blinked. You know, in the last 10 or 12 years, two of the best quarter, Backs to come out in the draft easily have been Andrew Luck and Joe Burrow. If it's 1 to 10, he's a 10 in every category. Is Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Ben Robertsburg, and all that's up one? I don't think there's ever been a smaller gap between someone's floor and their ceiling. The reason why Andrew turned around the Colts and turned around Stanford was that beast inside of him that would look at the opposing team and saying, I'm going to kill you today.

High end, he's a Hall of Famer. Low end, he's a multi-year pro bowler. Like, I can't see there's any way this guy does. doesn't succeed. If the people that succeed us, they put a team around it, as we did with Peyton, the results probably would have been the same. This dude deserves more. I went to him, and I literally told him, like, Andrew, you deserve more from this group.

You should demand more from everybody. I remember both of us having a moment where we both were teary out going, man, this beautiful, beautiful player is not going to play anymore. 31 months later, the quarterback who'd all but disappeared, the NFL's Bigfoot, in a sense, met me for coffee in Indianapolis. Andrew Luck, yeah, really him, showed up in Nike soccer shoes, beat up jeans, and a ratty sweater. And my first thought was, well, his fashion sense hasn't improved all that much in retirement.

He wasn't as big as when he played. He wasn't this burly linebacker who happened to play quarterback. But he also wasn't nearly as thin as everybody thinks he is these days. He made a brief appearance on ESPN at the College Football National Championship game last winter. and everybody's first reaction was, wow, Andrew Luck's lost like a hundred pounds. No, not even close. We talked for 90 minutes that morning about the game, about how it all ended, about his career, about mine, about the teammates he still keeps in touch with, about raising young kids.

He asked the conversation be off the record, and it will remain so. And more than once, a stranger walked up to our table. Is that Andrew Luck? They had to be thinking. He was more than cordial with them, happy to chat. And that morning, he very much looked and sounded like a man who'd moved on. And I just kept thinking to myself, he's still only 32 years old. So much in his life has changed.

To understand where Andrew Luck's football career ended, you must first understand where it all started. Because nothing about his journey through the game followed your typical script. Andrew spent 10 of his first 11 years in Europe, seven in Germany and three in London. And his introduction to the sport came from this scratchy VHS tape that he found in his family's home off Finchley Road in central London. Quarterback Oliver Luck will give them out near as a double-barrel offensive threat. Where Oliver Luck, Andrew's dad, worked as the president of NFL Europe. Luck's intelligent play and physical ability will provide the backbone for a rumbling, wide open offender. offensive attack. Oliver, a former star at West Virginia University, and then an NFL quarterback for

four seasons, once played behind Archie Manning, of all people. Amazingly, Oliver was often tasked with Holly Manning's two young sons, Cooper and Peyton, a round after practice. When Andrew found footage of one of his dad's best games with the Oilers, a win over the Chargers in 1985, young Andrew could not get enough of it. Oliver Luck, taking a deep drop, he throws. Tim Smith is open. He has the Oliver once told me that his son must have watched that game a thousand times. From that point forward, Andrew was hooked. But it's not like any of his classmates at the American school in London knew the rules. They were from Pakistan, from Korea, from Italy, from Japan.

So Andrew taught them. They'd play at recess, and he'd draw his receivers' routes on his palms. And his luck joke during an interview at DePaul University in 2015, there wasn't a lot of structured early in his football career. I was there from age one to 10 and always loved sports. And didn't play professional football. I didn't play. It was getting paid very early to play.

Now, Oliver did not want to be an overbearing football dad, but he did try to give his son some big picture advice. Things like, be prepared. Quarterbacks get more of the glory, but also more of the blame. And one of the upsides of playing quarterback, in theory, at least, is that you're not getting beat up as much as you are if you're a linebacker. That bit of advice would be accurate for most players, but as we learn in the coming years, not necessarily Andrew Luck. When Andrew was seven, they traveled to Amsterdam and watched a young kicker from South Dakota play for the Amsterdam admirals.

17 years later, Adam Venetary, that same kicker would make the game winner in Andrew Luck's first NFL win. As his passion for football bloom, so did other interests. In the summers, the Lux would travel all over Europe, drinking in cultures, customs, history, and architecture. And by the time they landed back in the States in 2000, after Oliver was named CEO of the Houston Sports Authority, his oldest son was ready to go out for organized football. Dad coached one of his first teams lining him up at defensive end. But after a while, Andrew told him it was time to switch. He wanted to try quarterback. We'd gone through a bunch before we ever got to Andrew, much like the draft process when people saw Andrew.

When he watched him first on film, the first question you ask is, how strong is his arm? That is David Shaw, currently the head football coach at Stanford. But back in 2007, when the school was looking at Luck as a possible recruit, Shaw was Stanford's offensive coordinator under then head coach Jim Harbaugh. At the time, Luck was a four-star recruit being quartered by schools like Northwestern, Purdue, Rice, and Oklahoma State. Hardly the top powers in college football. So many high school kids in particular, to throw the ball far, I mean, they have to kind of put something on it, right? They got to kind of step into it.

There's kind of a heaved they have to do. And everything Andrew did was so smooth. And he wasn't playing with a bunch of five-star guys. He didn't have to throw the ball 50 yards. He was throwing the ball 35, you know, getting it completed. And everything was accurate. You watch him enough. You say, okay, this guy can run too.

He's a good athlete. Here he plays basketball and you hear about his leadership. And, you know, he was in that group. Like everything else about luck, Shaw says his recruitment to Stanford was unique. came on a visit and typical Andrew no fanfare came with his dad Oliver the four of us sat down coach Harbaugh and myself and had a very non-recruiting recruiting recruiting meeting more so it wasn't wasn't salesmanship which Jim's a great salesman you know I can hold my own but we weren't selling Stanford to Andrew and his dad like Stanford Stanford was Stanford to them they understood it

It was really more of like, hey, do we have some commonality here? It was really very casual. But I don't want to give you the sense that it was underwhelming, almost feeling like, this isn't a kid, right? And he wonder, when was he ever a kid? Was he ever a kid? But I think that calm and that confidence, and I think he had to work really hard not to be overconfident,

because I think early on he knew how good he was. So the coaches invited luck to participate in a football camp at Stanford. it would act as a de facto competition between Luck and some of the other QBs the school was looking at. For Shaw, Luck began to separate himself from the pack almost immediately. It came during one of Jim Harbaugh's favorite drills. Hot potato. One coach has about eight or ten balls on the ground in front of the quarterback. There's another coach about 10 to 15 yards away.

And we tell the quarterback, okay, as fast as you can, we're going to toss these balls to you. Catch them and throw it. Don't find the laces. Don't aim. Just catch it and throw it. And as soon as you throw the first one, I throw the second. one to you. So you just throw that one. So it's serious rapid fire. You don't have time to drop. You don't have really time to step. And here comes Andrew Luck, this brainy kid out of Houston.

Stanford was interested in him, sure, but the coaches had no idea at this point that this was the player who was about to transform their program. And we'd gone through there's so many quarterbacks. And Sanford, Mike Sanford, Jr., so the one catching the balls. A couple of guys went through, and then Andrew's turn, Mike Sanford caught every single one of them. And after the last ball, Mike started just shaking his hands saying, oh my God, his hands were burning from catching these balls. That was the first time I said, oh, wow, Mike's done this a bunch. Like, his hands really hurt. Five minutes to that camp, we knew Andrew was the guy.

And Andrew, of course, says it took you five minutes. Luck would eventually sign with Stanford before his senior year of high school. And when he finally got to campus, Harbaugh and Shaw decided to register him as a freshman, not wanting to throw everything at him all at once. But deep down, they knew. they knew this kid was the future. And anyone watching one of those early practices knew it too. I tend not to get too optimistic or pessimistic after watching high school tape.

It's like, all right, these guys are awesome. What are they playing against? Todd Husek was the starting quarterback for the Cardinal in the late 1990s. By 2008, he was back on campus as the team's radio analyst, and he liked to stop by practice every once in a while to get a feel for the talent on the roster. What's their work ethic? Are they maxed out? Can they get better?

but still remember going out to one of the practices and not having a roster, but just looking out and seeing like, all right, these guys are, these guys are pretty good. And then seeing Andrew Luck and like literally texted my buddies who I had played with. Like, we have the number one overall draft pick after watching him practice one time. Like, he was just a different player. Yeah, I can't get away from the guy. I give him crap all the time. I'm like, you came, you took my job. And now I like have your name on my business card. It's on my door. I can't get away from it. Tevita Pritchard is now the offensive coordinator at Stanford, but his official title is the Andrew Luck director of offense. The position's name was changed as part of an endowment gift

from a school donor. Back when Luck arrived on campus, Pritchard was Stanford's incumbent quarterback. And at the time, he had no idea that he was about to lose his job. For Andrew, I think the biggest thing for me was, I think you seemingly have this kind of stereotypical dad played in the league. You know, I think there was a little bit of a type, a stereotype there that, that I mean, almost immediately he kind of went against, you know, growing up overseas, which I think it just gave him a really unique perspective. I think all of us who grew up here in the United States, like, we were caught up in a lot

of other things. He came in here and he was about the relationships. And he, like, it was very clear from early on that he wasn't your stereotypical, like, Texas high school quarterback. Now, the plan was to. to ease Luck in, to let him get used to college life, to give him time to learn the offense while he sat for a year behind Pritchard. But even as a redshirt freshman, Shaw says that Luck routinely wowed his coaches and teammates in practice. I'll never forget. It's one of those moments.

Never forget. Every day there was something. So we're on the left hash. I'm standing back, 15 yards back with the receivers telling him the next play. And Andrew's looking, he drops back, he's looking to the left, to the near sideline. And then he peeked. to his right and there's a receiver about 15 yards down the field and on the far sideline. Usually you step towards where you're throwing, but Andrew's body was set to throw the ball to the left. He just takes the ball without moving his lower body and flicks the ball 15 yards down the field on the far sideline, which is an extremely long throw, 35, 40-yard throw, and the ball had no arc to it. It was a flat, firm throw that got really, really fast. We all saw it.

And I looked at Jim. Right now, I'm looking at the back of his head. He turns around and covers his mouth so nobody else can see it but me with his play script and said some words that I shouldn't say in public. And we just locked eyes and he's like, oh, my God. What was that? Right? This is a Aaron Rogers, Dan Marino, John Elway, throwed by a guy who's 18 years old.

But it wasn't just his arm. There was almost nothing on the football field he couldn't do. The quarterbacks are doing a drill where they're working on throwing the wheel route. It's just the quarterback, so they're throwing them to each other. You take your turn throwing it, and you take your turn running the wheel. Let's have to somebody else throw it to him. And of course, the quarterbacks, they all talk about how great they can catch the ball, best hands on the team.

So we're all like rotating, and Andrew's like kind of nonchalantly running to one of the, down the field routes. And it was almost like, have you ever seen, I've ever seen the movie a league of their own? Like, like,

you remember the scene where Rosie O'Donnell throws the ball at, at Gina Davis, and she catches it like that. So Andrew's running to this route. And he's like,

not even really paying attention as goofy. I mean, we just called crazy legs because he runs with his legs out. So he's like, run into his spot and one of the quarterbacks

might have been me because we always all messed with each other. Hey, Andrew, like, called his name, like, as the ball's mid-flight. And he, like, turns around and it and it just like sticks to his back and he just catches it behind his back

and just like kept him right like didn't break stride didn't really do anything just like caught it behind his back and just kept running no you can't do that like you're a freshman quarterback even catching the ball now in ridiculous highlight catches are effortless to you one of us probably got a madonna rosy old Donald reaction like you're kidding like what just happened that's kind of where the legend legend started but that's how that's kind of how that was everything that we did he just did it better than everybody. Luck would be a redshirt freshman in the fall of 2009. It was also Pritchard's senior year, and in his mind, his last chance to lead a program

that Harbaugh was beginning to revive. What he didn't know, and what he slowly had to come to grips with, was the fact that Stanford was about to become Andrew Luck's team. I was the incumbent starter. I was going to be the guy started going forward. So he took to me because, like, he just kind of attached himself to my hip. Like the same things I advise our young guys to do is exactly what he did his first summer here. I mean, he's next to me, honestly, the entire summer, like, okay, what's this?

Okay, how do we read? I mean, like, to the point where it was like, hey, man, like, give me a little bit of space. The physical gifts were obvious, but what made luck such a complete quarterback was his mastery of the mental game. He got it from the very beginning. And it was very clear that, like, this whole football thing was, and again, this is unfair of me probably because it's hindsight. site, but like everything came pretty naturally. Like it wasn't real. Like it didn't seem like it was real taxi.

Like I remember the stuff that gave me pause as a freshman. He was like, okay, yeah, I got that. I'm like, you do got that already? Like, damn. Hussack, a former NFL quarterback himself, says a buzz started to build around the program about the young quarterback who was taking over. One conversation stood out with Greg Roman, who at the time was Stanford's

tight ends coach, but would go on to become an offensive coordinator in the NFL for three different teams. I remember talking to Greg Roman saying this guy can run an NFL offense after three practices, or three meetings. Like he just gets everything and understands it and absorbs it and can execute it, which is pretty rare for an 18-year-old kid. After Luck was named the starter, one thing Shaw had to do was convince his young quarterback to stop seeking out contact.

Simply put, the kid loved the physical nature of the game. This would remain a theme as long as Luck played football, the fight with him himself, to not take unnecessary hits. It worked on sliding, it worked on getting out of bounds. I have an old phrase that I used to say a lot from John Gruden, which was for quarterbacks, you know, protect the crown of your head and your throwing shoulder. Those are two things John would always say.

Protect the crown of your head and you're throwing shoulder. At Stanford, they'd worked with luck on protecting himself from himself. But as Shaw quickly learned, sometimes with this kid, it didn't matter. In Luck's first ever college start on the road at Washington State, he took an early scramble down the sidelines. And the safety's coming, bearing down on him, right? And I just know he's going to step out of balance. Andrew puts his left foot in the ground,

takes his right, his throwing shoulder, and slams his shoulder into the other guy's head and just crushes him and trucks him and runs him over and gets another three or four yards. We go down, we score, he comes back off the sideline. Coach, I know you want me to step out of bounds, but I haven't been hitting a couple of years, and I had to get that first hit it.

I didn't even say anything. He just came off. He knew what I was going to say, right? He had to finish the drive first, and he came back off. And as he's coming off the field, he's explaining why he had to, he hadn't had contacts. So he just knew in the back of his mind, at some point during that game, he needed to get hit. I just looked at him. I said, well, you know, we spend a lot of time designing plays where you don't get hit.

And he's like, coach, I'm sorry, I won't do it again, but I had to do that. I said, okay. Years later, after luck came back from missing an entire season following shoulder surgery, he'd say much of the same thing. To him, it didn't feel like a football game until he'd been walloped at least once. In fact, Shaw says that some of Luck's biggest disagreements with his head coach were because Shaw tried to protect Luck

from getting hit. There were times where we would actually use Tavita Pritchard or Alex Lucas as our athletic quarterbacks to go out and run the ball just to take some hits off of him. And he would be so pissed, so pissed to take him off the field to put somebody else out there to run the ball. He's like, are you see me? Like, I would love to do that.

I want to do that. The signature hit of Lux College career wasn't one he absorbed, but one he dished out. It came in his second season as the starter in 2010 against rival USC. Stanford was driving just before the half, and what ensued is something they're still talking about in Palo Alto, even a decade later.

Out of the eye in a tight formation. We're at the end of the first half, and we're trying to hand the ball off to get the halftime. Stefan Taylor, who never fumbles. I'm like, fumbles. Loose ball. U.S.C. has it, and luck saved the touchdown by creamy. Cherise Wright, are you kidding?

When the ball went down on the ground, Andrew went from, like, the quarterback kind of posture, and ball hit the ground, and you see his body weight drop, right? His body weight drops, right? to be like a defensive player. Like, you know, you want to have angles for power, right? You want to bend at the knees, bend at your hips, bend at your ankles.

And he dropped down and Shrews picked that ball up. And Andrew was a missile. He turned his body into projectile. That was the quarterback. That's the hardest quarterback shot I've ever seen. It was probably top 10 loudest hits I've ever heard in a football game. I coached nine years in the NFL. I played with John Lynch.

right? So even in practice, you hurt those hits. This hit was vicious. I didn't know Shrease was going to get up. There's not a better open field tackle in the last 15 years for Stanford than what Andrew Luck did on Sheree Wright. Husek was in the Stanford radio booth on the call that night. Put his helmet on the front side, lower his shoulder, under his shoulder pads. And this is a 185, 190 pound corner running a 4-4. And Andrew just absolutely laid him out in a perfect hit. and actually a pretty big play because we were driving down and I see he had a chance to make a big play defensively and Andrew just absolutely lit him up.

Again, another reason why everybody respected him. He probably could have played a couple positions around the field, tight end or linebacker and been pretty effective because he's just a football player. Over the years, Shaw came to accept what he had in luck. Beneath the dorky, nerdy exterior, luck was a competitive freak. He was a monster who reliant, the physical nature of the game and had no issue whatsoever putting it all on the line. And more than anything for the coach, it was a hell of a lot of fun to watch.

He keeps that monster under wraps. But every once in a while, it pokes his head out and it gets your attention. Even his best friends on the team, they knew when the monster was out, you better tread lightly. You better follow his directions. You better do what he says, because first of all, he's right. And second of all, like, that's why we're going to win. The nice guy, Andrew, the great teammate, that's phenomenal. But the reason why he turned around the Colts and turned around Stanford was that beast

inside of him that would look at the opposing team and saying, I'm going to kill you today. He was a beast on the field, but off the field, Luck was just another brainy bookworm at Stanford. There were certain things like that where it's like, this guy's kind of an alien. More on Luck, the alien, after a word from our sponsors. Okay, you can't do a podcast or write a long story about Andrew Luck without the word dorky coming up. Yes, in a lot of ways, Andrew Luck is a dork. We'll talk about the tensile strength of iron as opposed to the compressive strength of concrete. Super down-to-earth guy, like dorky. I mean, he was dorky.

Tevita Pritchard says that Luck's time growing up overseas created a little bit of a cultural gap between Luck and his Stanford teammates. Because again, he didn't have this like typical American upbringing, so there were certain like pop culture references or whatnot that he'd be like, you know, give you a blank stare. The office was happening big time. I was big into the office in college. I mean, college duty, like he wasn't a video game player. All of us were video game players.

There were certain things like that where it's like, this guy's kind of an alien. But let's remember, this is Stanford we're talking about, just about the dorkiest school in major college football. But even in the land of dorks, luck was on a different level. I call him a dork tongue in cheap because we were all dorks. Like, you got a bunch of guys who are like, Like, yeah, we're damn serious about football, but like some pretty nerdy guys as well. You know, I mean, Andrew's the one who started me on the Game of Thrones series.

Like, and this is back before the TV show was even talked about, right? And so just to give me an idea, like, that's kind of the air we breathe around here a little bit. It's funny to make a big deal about a college athlete who actually liked the school part about going to school. But with luck, it was actually a really big deal to him. I'd never been to Stanford. When I was on campus, I was like, this is incredible. I mean, it's just so different than pretty much every other college campus in America. Robert Mays is the host of the athletic football show.

Before that, he was a writer at the Ringer and Grantland. In the fall of 2011, he was sent to Stanford to write a story about who Andrew Luck really was. The thing that always struck me about him, the first couple times I was around him, was the way he talked, first of all. I mean, it's just unlike anything else you'd ever seen from a football player. Remember, in a post-game press conference, either early on with the Colter when he was still at Stanford. He started to say modus operandi and stopped himself because he's like, that's not what I need

to say. That's not what I'm trying to. I'm going to say this in layman's terms, in actual English. And it was just so funny to watch that happen. Luck's favorite class at Stanford was C-E-31, accessing architecture through drawing. It was taught by Lux's academic advisor, Professor John Barton. Mays says Barton explained exactly what type of student luck was at Stanford. I remember sitting with him at one point.

We were talking about Andrew, and he was just telling me about the project that the architecture students were doing. And they were supposed to redesign. I want to say it was a library of some kind. And Andrew's project, he put forth this idea that between the public and private parts of the building, they would be constructed of two different building materials, like one of stone and one of glass. And so the actual materials that built the building would show you how the elements and areas of the building were different. you would feel it even if you didn't consciously understand it. And it was first of all just very advanced work by a 20-something who's also a full-time football player.

But two, it really spoke to in a way, the way that Andrew can compartmentalize the types of person that he was, right? I mean, he was a football player, but in so many other ways, he was not that. Harbaugh Shaw and Luck lifted a Stanford program, one that hadn't had a 10-win season in 18 years. And together, they turned the Cardinal into a national championship contender. And in the land of future CEOs, entrepreneurs and innovators, Stanford football actually became a big thing on campus again. One of the things that I wrote about when I was there was just how remarkable it was that Stanford football had come back and that it was meaningful again. People even on campus were into it and that the team had become this focal point again at a place where it's hard for that to happen. There's so many other things going on at Stanford.

People don't go there to go to football games. It's not like going to an SEC school. Harbaugh and Andrew Luck together kind of helped create and revive this football program. In Luck's redshirt sophomore season, he finished second in Heisman voting to Auburn's Cam Newton. After the Cardinal pounded Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl, 40 to 12, in a game where luck through four touchdown passes and was named MVP, Harbaugh left to become the head coach at the San Francisco 49ers. Shaw was promoted to take his place. That next fall, Luck was considered one of the favorites for the Heisman, along with a supernova running gun quarterback out of Baylor

named Robert Griffin the 3rd. Our pass did not cross until I was recruited by Stanford. RG3 told me there was a chance that he and Luck could have actually been college teammates. Jim Harbaugh had just come from San Diego to Stanford, and Andrew Luck was already committed to Stanford. So when Jim started recruiting me, he always recruited me under the premise that I was his guy, Andrew was a guy that was already committed, but that he liked him as well, and that we would compete out.

I had a conversation with Coach Harbaugh when I went pro. Well, Coach Harbaugh brought me in for one of those combine meetings when he was at the San Francisco 49ers. And we didn't talk any football. He literally sat down. He threw his marker against the board. Why didn't you come to Stanford? And we literally had a 15-minute conversation

about why I didn't go to Stanford. But Griffin would end up at Baylor, and by 2011 he and Luck were the top two quarterbacks in the nation. Instead of competing against each other at Stanford, that competed for the Heisman. Keeping up with it, I think, was more so like my teammates, because we always would razz each other about who's the best quarterback and who's the best running back in the country.

And we felt like we had those guys at quarterback, running back and wide receiver. So with Andrew, it was kind of like, well, Rob, this is what Andrew did the other day. What are you going to do? And that was kind of, you know, the running joke in the locker room because they all knew about me possibly going to Stanford. And as good as luck had been up to that point, the 2011 season, his final year at Stanford, was different.

Shaw gave him the keys to the offense, and he took it from there. But like in 11, in 11, it was like he was playing a video. And by this point, Tavita Pritchard was back on campus working as a Stanford assistant coach. My guess is it was probably at some point in the offseason, you know, towards the end of 10 and into 11, that you were like, yeah, this guy's a different, he's a different beast altogether. I was working on defense, so I really got to kind of watch him almost. almost detached, you know, because we're kind of so siloed in football. But I just remember watching it.

It was like every game was just like it was a video game. He was just doing what he wanted to out there. There was a narrative building in the media and between college football fans pitting RG3 versus luck. One week, RG3 erupted for 430 yards and three touchdowns for Baylor and a loss, but no doubt his Heisman buzz was heating up. In a tight race, signature performances like that carried a lot of weight. Stanford head coach David Shaw remembers how his quarterback responded. Another great perfect Andrew Luck story.

He's right in the middle of the Heisman race, and we play Washington. And Washington baseless playing these different versions of Too High. And we had done so much to put the game in Andrew's hands to where he's running the show. We gave him a bunch of options. He can give us one of the three plays we gave him that play, or he could choose something else on his name. We broke the school record for rushing that game. I think it's 446 yards, something like that. In a game where luck could have done anything he wanted on the field.

He only attempted 21 passes that night, completing 16 for a modest 169 yards. It wasn't exactly an electric box score, but Stanford won going away 65-21. I came just short of apologizing to Andrew. Came just short of apologizing because he's in the middle of his race and the nation's watching. He's like, coach, are you kidding me? He's like, I just played my best game. He said, that was a chess match between me and the defensive coordinator. I saw what they were doing and I went to the weak spot every single time.

And it's like the same time you're like, oh my God, I love you, right? That you see the game that way and you take yourself out of it. And at the same time, like, doggone it, can't you be a little selfish? Like, can't you, don't you really want, don't you want that Heisman trophy? Don't you want these other things? It legitimately didn't come into his thinking because he was presented with a game plan. Everything was at his fingertips. and he ran the ball down Washington's throat.

Like that says so much about who he was and had a smile in his face. Like, Coach, this was awesome. The second part of it is for him to see his teammates excited, for him to see the offensive line, like every play in the huddle, like tossing on their toes, because they're just kicking ass and taking names. And to see every single one of these runners, his boys rushing for 100 yards and 5, 10, 15 yards to clip, like nothing was happening. Nothing could be better for Andrew.

That was that quintessential monster, which had nothing to do with him and his stats. It had to do with him saying, I just kicked your ass today, and I didn't have to throw the ball. In his last year at Stanford, Luck threw for 3,500 yards and 37 touchdowns. His team went 11 and 2 and earned a trip to the Fiesta Bowl. In December, when all five Heisman finalists, including Griffin and Luck, gathered in New York City for the award ceremony, it was Griffin who prevailed. You know, the great coach, our brows always says great things only come with great effort. And we've certainly worked for this.

Griffin earned 405 first place votes to Lux's 250. And despite the competition between the two-star quarterbacks, RG3 and Luck bonded that night in the celebrations in New York City. So when you get to the Heisman ceremony, they kind of walk everybody through and they tell you, hey, whoever wins, you have an option to go out on the city in New York. a limo by yourself or you can get a limo and provide other limos to the rest of the Heisman candidates. Now, they're obviously thinking you're going to pick the latter option. So I definitely picked the latter option. And after the Heiser ceremony, it was able to go out and really enjoy the city in New York with Andrew, Tyron Matthew, who was tied up with Diddy at that time. But that's a story for another podcast. But no, we went on the town and we're able to

experienced the nightlife that New York had to offer. And that's when I got to know Andrew the most. And so if anybody wants to get to know Andrew Luck, this is probably not going to happen when he's sober. But when he gets a couple drinks in him, he definitely loosens up and becomes more of a people person. By the time his college career wrapped, Luck had joined the likes of Jim Plunkett and John Elway as one of the best quarterbacks in Stanford history.

individually, Luck set school records in a number of categories, including most touchdown passes and highest completion percentage. But more importantly to him, Andrew Luck ranks first all-time at Stanford in total wins. He, along with Jim Harbaugh and David Shaw, completely turned around a dormant program, making Stanford at the time one of the dominant teams in college football. It was time to leave behind the architecture classes in the Palo Alto Sunshine. The NFL was next. On episode two of luck, what does it take to move on from a franchise legend? How many people would you move on from Peyton Manning from, given all you had invested emotionally

in him? There's no easy way of getting rid of a shoe-in Hall of Famer like Peyton Manning. It's so difficult in the NFL to find off-ramps and pivot points when you've committed to a certain version of your franchise. Very rarely does that opportunity present itself, and it did for the Colts. Two days before or three days before we were let go, Jim had a meeting, and he said to me, who do we take with the first pick? And I said, there is no question in the world about who we pick. It's Andrew Luck. I wrote a column saying we've seen the last of Peyton Manning in that Colts uniform. That went over really well. Late in the season, I approached Peyton's locker,

and he goes, hey, it's Andrew Luck's agent. Thank you for listening to episode one, all six episodes of luck are available right now. Go to the athletic football show on your favorite podcast player to find the rest of the series. Luck was written and narrated by Zach Kiefer. The executive producers are Mike Smelts and Matt Havia. The athletics head of audio is Andrew Wasserman.