The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Luck Episode 4: Pain

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

When did it start to go wrong? In Episode 4 of LUCK, host Zak Keefer dives into the darkest years of Andrew Luck’s NFL career. Somewhere, in between the broken ribs, the lacerated kidney, the torn abdomen muscle and the wrecked throwing shoulder, he lost his football innocence. A game that had once been so much fun was now a living hell. Was there a way out? And how bad did it get? As we hear, much worse than we all thought. Voices include Chuck Pagano, Bruce Arians, Bill Polian, Tony Dungy, Robert Mays, Peter King and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Heading into the 2015 season, the Colts were three years into the rebuild, an already legitimate Super Bowl contenders. Andrew Luck was entering his prime, and free agents around the league were taking notice, picking Indy as a place they believed they could win a ring. Oh, man, that what-if game, it hurts. It hurts. It hurts me. Dequo Jackson himself had signed with the Colts, thinking he'd be making a run at a Super Bowl every season. 2014, my first year there, to get to the FC championship game,

and then that following offseason, we go out and get Andre Johnson and Frank Gold. I think I called Robert Mann. Like, man, we're going to the Super Bowl. Like, we're going to win. Like, we finally got the pieces we need. A year later, fresh off an embarrassing loss to the Patriots in the AFC Championship game, the Colts were loading up. They signed Frank Gore and Andre Johnson.

Two proven veterans to add some punch to the offense. The Colts also picked up pass rusher Trent Cole and offensive guard Todd Harriman's. The impetus was clear. They were going for it. And here is where it all started to go wrong. With the 29th pick in the 2015 NFL draft, the Indianapolis Colts select Philip Dorset, wide receiver, Miami.

The last thing the Colts needed was a slot receiver. We still have problems. What a D-line, secondary defense in general has issues. This is a luxury pick. Fans were irate at the selection. Here's what my colleague Bob Cravitz wrote that night. The Colts need another wide receiver like I need 10 more pounds on my midsection. The Dorset pick was the latest example of Colts general manager Ryan Grigsen

choosing a shiny new toy instead of providing help along the offensive or defensive lines. How people were thinking defense, you went offense, you obviously had a lot of conviction about this kid. What was the thought process? It was, you know, I think it just showed. that we stick to our guns when it comes to taking the best player on our board and we don't just, it's not just party talk and that's what we did today. Those series of bad decisions came to a head in the 2015 season. This is Luck, Episode 4, Pain.

In week one, the Colts were stomped by the Buffalo Bills. The next week, they took on the New York Jets on Monday Night Football. Luck was brutalized that night, getting hit 11 times. the Colts managed just seven points. And the offensive line issues that had been bubbling up beneath the surface for three years, issues luck had been good enough to cover up, were now front and center, and it was something the franchise could no longer ignore. You know, you've got to protect, you've got to give him time,

you've got to give him a clean pocket so he can step up, you know, and not get hit when he's releasing the ball, and we've got to get it fixed. This was Colts coach Chuck Bugano after that Jets game, being as honest as he ever would be on the topic. You think he's, I don't know, being sped up because the offensive line just doesn't seem to be handling the blitz maybe as well as you would like. What was the first part of the bomb? Does he seem to you to be getting sped up, you know, trying to do things too quickly? Like the internal clock in his head is faster than normally is maybe?

You know what? I'd have to sit down honestly and have a conversation. I don't think so. I think, you know, that's been the case for three years now, has it not? You know, so he should be more than comfortable dealing what he's dealing with. We've got to get it fixed. A trendy Super Bowl pick to start the season, the Colts were now 0-2, and their quarterback was getting the crap beat out of him every week. Facing the Titans in week three,

the Colts and Luck were down 13 points midway through the fourth quarter. Staring straight at an 0-and-3 start, Luck engineered one of his classic comebacks, leading the Colts to three straight touchdown drives and a win. But that comeback that afternoon would come in a tremendous cost. With 740 left in the game, Luck was sacked by the Titans' 305-pound defensive tackle, Jarrell Casey. And what no one, least of all Andrew Luck, knew at the time, his throwing shoulder wouldn't be right for three years.

So he gets hurt in the game, it's pretty obvious. He got dinged up pretty good. Bob Cravitz is a senior columnist at The Athletic and has been a sports writer in Indianapolis for over two decades. I don't remember if it was right after the game or the day later. I asked him about it. And he said, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, which is Andrew. You know, Andrew's always beat up, but he never says a word. And, yeah, like two days later or a day later, I think maybe it was a Tuesday, he apologized for the bald-faced lie.

which, you know, I don't, I appreciate, you know, I don't like being lied to. Nobody does. But we understand in professional sports that happen sometimes, like a lot. The night he retired, Lux spoke about how he'd been suffering from an unrelenting and unceasing cycle of pain. That hamster wheel of injury, pain, rehab. It began that day against the Titans. After the case he hit, Matt Hasselbeck, Luck's backup, walked up to him and gently, tapped him on the chest, essentially to say, great job, man. Only this time, Luck winced,

and it was obvious that he was in pain. Something wasn't right. Two things were at play. Luck's reckless style of play and the Colt's utter failure to provide him with the protection he needed, and all of it was about to come to a head. Jackson, the Colts veteran linebacker, saw it up close that season. He would take every shot. He would put himself in harm's way. He would run around and he just loved a game that much and it was no way of breaking it. Because he was going to play his style because it was great when it was great.

But then his availability became a problem because of his style of play. And as a player, you know, it's hard to, for me, I was like, man, slide. You are the golden ticket. You are the reason I'm here. You know, I was like, I need you to understand this.

I need you to understand the coaches, your position coaches. They're going to make careers based on how well you play and how available you are. So if I had any issue with his style of play, that was it. Because he played the game the way he did. I get it.

But it's like, damn, man, come on. Like, you got to play a little bit smarter than that and protect yourself. And that was my biggest issue with Andrew. But, hey, it got him to that point. He was the first round of number one overall pick. He had had a ton of success and everyone trusted him. So it's hard to, as a player, if I put myself in Andrew's shoes for a minute, it's hard to change the way you play

if you've only played one style your entire career. Now most of the time, luck knew the smart thing to do wasn't to take the hit. But he burned to be on the football field and play like a football player, not just a quarterback. Get him out of the game.

Get him out of the game. He's done. In his second year in the league, the Colts were playing the St. Louis Rams, and they were getting their asses kicked. With his team down 38 to 8 in the fourth quarter, Begana wanted to pull luck from the game. In a conversation picked up from NFL films microphones, you can hear Luck practically beg Pagano

to leave him out there. Please understand. I got to go out of fighting. I will not get hit. I'll be safe. Get the checkdown and we'll run the ball over. You know what I mean? I can't go out with my tail between my life. So that would hurt my soul. Pagano eventually convinced Luck that in that moment, sitting him was the best thing for the team. Brian Schottenheimer was Luck's QB coach for two seasons in Indy, a football lifer, a former college quarterback and the son of longtime NFL coach Marty Schottenheimer, Brian saw similarities in luck with another star QB he'd worked with just a few years earlier.

He and Brett physically the most toughest guys I've been around, meaning the pounding that they would take and always get up was unfathomable and inspiring. And they're just both wired that same way. Brett was always, he was always thinking about his dad. You know, that's what motivated him. What would his dad say? I think Andrew was motivated by his teammates. What, what do they, you know, they need me.

And as long as luck stayed on the field, his teammates loved it. You don't coach that. That's something that you can't coach. I think Brett Farb had that. It galvanized a lot of us to see him, you know, scramble and take a hit and get up. Like that galvanized a lot of us to see your quarterback landed on the line. So it was like, okay, I need to go out here and take care of business. Still, at the same time, as much.

as luck's physicality energized his teammates, Jackson says that everybody knew. One bad hit on luck could mean the end of the season. Well, when I saw those hits, I just, everyone cringe. Because you know, if he doesn't get up, the future of this franchise is instantly affected, no matter how well the roster is constructed. He matters. He matters. But it just, I didn't understand, like, that should have been more of a sense of urgency to protect him, period. it to protect your golden asset. And Andrew played through it. He was going to be who he was.

And whether I want to say, hey, he should have played differently, it used to pay me to see him take all those hits. You know, you should not be taking hits when the league is set up to protect our quarterbacks, to protect them. And you have to take advantage of it, or someone has to get it through to him that this is how we're going to do thing.

And I'm sure that those conversations were had. But when you turn that tape on and when you blow that whistle, from the balls in his hands is his franchise at that point. Bruce Ariens, the Colts offensive coordinator and interim coach during Luck's rookie season, once told this story. Luck threw a pick in a game, then chased down the defender and made the tackle. Ariens ripped into him on the sidelines, telling him that's not the quarterback's job. Luck disagreed.

If I throw the pick, he told his coach, that I make the tackle. The hell you do, Ariens shot right back. The lineback are playing quarterback, and I mean, his mentality, I throw the interception. I'm going to make the damn tackle. Okay, dude. let's make sure we deal with our less shoulder. But he just had that mentality of, I'm going to win at all costs.

And because he was so damn tough, he was too tough for his own good. What made luck such a great player also made him such a great risk. He was a quarterback who played without fear, willing to put his body on the line for a first down no matter the stakes. Of course, the Colts leaky offensive line did not help. The analogy I once used was this. It's like being gifted a brand new shiny Lamborghini and then parking it outside in a hailstorm. Luck was sacked 41 times as a rookie, 41 times.

Though Arian's deep passing offense and Luck's propensity to hold onto the football certainly played a role. He extended plays and when he needed to he ran right through defenders, utterly unafraid. But over time his refusal to slide outside of the pocket did him no favors and years later after the injury started to pile up, He'd admit to playing too reckless. Daniel Jeremiah, now the lead draft analyst for NFL Network, remember seeing that sane trait in luck back in his college days.

Everything that goes back to the time at Stanford, which was he was always out to prove that I don't, you know, hey, look, my dad might have been an NFL quarterback. You know, maybe I'm at Stanford so everybody knows how smart I am, but I'm going to show everybody how tough I am. I'm a regular guy. I get along with everybody. I'm not above anything.

You know, hey, a running back's going to get hit. tight end's going to get hit, well, shoot, I'm going to get hit because I'm just one of the guys. I think that was kind of who he was. He didn't want any special treatment. He didn't want to be protected or treated like a quarterback. I don't know that I've ever seen anybody pat more helmets or slap more butts of guys that have hit him hard in NFL history. You know, early on, I think it's hard to criticize the front office and the team building approach for several different reasons. Robert Mays, host of the athletic football show. Mays has spent a decade covering the league.

One in year one, like we said, the team wasn't very good. You can only do so much. Your first round pick, your first overall pick is on a quarterback. You would spend a first round pick on a left tackle the year before. So there should be theoretically some building blocks. And then in 2012, again, you have this downfield Bruce Ariens type offense with an offensive line that is not ready and is in tatters and his head meets several different pieces. And I think he got the shit kicked out of him a lot.

Ariens would leave to become the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals after Lux's Rookie season, and the Colts replaced him with Luck's former offensive coordinator at Stanford, Pep Hamilton. A staple of Hamilton's scheme was the deep ball, and Luck and T.Y. Hilton were becoming one of the most lethal tundams in the league. But the issue with that was that those throws required seven-step drops, protection that held up, and when it came to play action, the threat of a run game. The Colts did not have it. Grixon had swapped the first round pick in 2013 for Trent Richardson, who in 29 games with the Colts would never eclipse 100 yards, not once, all of which, of course, put more on Andrew Luck's shoulders. Bad offensive line,

bad running back, he didn't care. He'd carry the team if he had to. So that's what he did. Andrew, especially early on, he knew what he was capable of, and so he wanted to make every single play. And part of that is holding the ball, and sometimes you just got to get rid of it. So it was a little bit different system. Tony Dungey's a Hall of Famer, the winning his coach in franchise history. After arriving in Indianapolis in 2002, he was instrumental early in Peyton Manning's career, convincing his stubborn young quarterback that throwing the ball away was okay. Punts were okay. He got through to Manning, who cut down on his interceptions, it became one of the best in the league at avoiding sacks and hits. The Colts

offensive line in those days was also much better, led by a Hall of Fame caliber assistant in Howard Mud. I know Howard Mudd just cringed whenever the quarterback got hit. And so it was, his feeling, we can't let the quarterback get hit too much. Protection has to be good. Quarterback has to be signed. We've got to know our hots. We've got to get rid of the ball when the blitz is there,

all those kind of things. So it's a combination. But I think a lot of it was just Andrew's competitiveness that he was going to try to make every single play. You watch the interception reel. He's going to make every tackle on the interception reel because he's going to run in there and make the play. and sometimes as a head coach I'd be thinking

it can be a pick six Andrew I need you next you know I don't need you laying out to make this tackle but that was his mindset I'm going to make the play Now remember Dungey's boss for all those years in Indianapolis Bill Polion had told Jim Ursa before he was fired in January of 2012

that Luck was the pick no questions asked Working as an analyst for ESPN Pollian followed Luck's career closely worrying about what all those hits would do on the young quarterback over time. He was more than willing to sacrifice his body to win games. If the people that succeed us had put a team around it, as we did with Peyton, the results probably would have been the same. That's the common sentiment in Indianapolis to this day.

The Colts should have protected him better. Now, is that fair? Absolutely. In those early years, the Colts never gave luck a serviceable line. And over time, the punishment piled up. I watched every hit live. Luck would take a shot. The crowd would gasp. The press box would go silent.

Most times, the QB would pop right back up and shake it off. But after watching a dozen or so in those first couple years, I remember thinking, at some point, at some point, he's not going to pop right back up. My colleague Bob Kravitz, who's covered the Colts going back to the manning days, agreed. He was seeing it too. I sent an email to Will Wilson and, to his dad. And I said, are you starting to get worried about the offensive line and the lack of

protection that your guy is getting? Will Wilson is Andrew's uncle who doubled as his agent. Neither one responded, which came as absolutely no surprise, but I wanted them to know that I knew that this was heading in a very negative direction. Yes, I did worry about it. Look, Grickson tried to get offensive lineman. He just got all the wrong guys. I mean, that's just the bottom line. He had some players in here, and they all got hurt, or they didn't perform. It was becoming abundantly clear to me. The lack of protection was going to get him seriously injured. Part of it is on Andrew. He played very recklessly. If he threw a pick, he had to make the tackle because he felt that it was incumbent upon him to do that. You know, he couldn't slide. They brought in somebody from

the Indianapolis Indians to show them how to slide for God's sake. This is true. Believe it or not, this is true. Really, it took luck years and a visit from a baseball coach to learn how to slide correctly. You know, he played this macho football. He couldn't help himself. And I think it hurt him a little bit too. As great a coach as Bruce Ariens. He's really into the seven-step drops and no risk it, no biscuit. Let's go for the long, long, big play, big chunk play. Andrew probably would have benefited from, you know, more dump-offs, more, you know, timing and rhythm and get the ball out of your hands quicker.

So it's not all on Grigsman, but a damn large majority of it is on Grigsin, I do believe. After the Titans game, Luck popped up on the injury report for the first time in his career. Football is a physical game, right? We all know that. And you wake up Monday morning or Sunday night after the game on the plane right home, you feel bumps and bruises, right? Some games less physical than others, and it's sort of the nature of it. But this past one certainly was physical. Sort of business as usual.

You missed the next two games with a sore throwing shoulder, and Hasselbeck led the Colts to a pair of last second victories. Luck returned for a week six game against the Patriots, a Sunday nighter made infamous after the Colts ran the single worst play in NFL history, the fake punt. That was insane. You got a guy on either side of him. What are you doing here? I mean, they don't even try to run a play.

We've seen a lot of bizarre stuff. I've never seen anything more bizarre than that. Two weeks later, after an overtime loss to the undefeated Panthers on Monday night football, I watched Lux slump in his seat in the locker room, trying and trying to lift the shoulder pads off his battered body. He finally had to have someone help him. He thrown the ball 47 times that. night. He was in pain and the season was slipping away. A day later, the Colts fired

Pep Hamilton. Luck would call it his fault. I feel like I failed him, he said. Yeah, a lot, a lot of emotions, you know, none of them good. And so yeah, it does feel like it got punched. Next up for the Colts, their old friend Peyton Manning and the undefeated Denver Broncos, the team with the number one ranked defense in the league. That game against Denver, when he took the shot and he was urinating blood, that's scared as hell. More on that, coming back after a word from our sponsors. The Colts Broncos game in the 2015 season was bigger than just a luck manning matchup.

A win for the Colts and they'd climbed to four and five, their playoff hopes still alive. A loss and they'd stumble to three and six. Just a great atmosphere of that game. You're going up against the number one defense in the NFL, just a really vaunted unit with pro bowlers all over the field at every level. Stephen Holder covered Luck's entire career in Indianapolis. This is now coming off of a series of games where Andrew Luck hadn't played

that well because he'd been in and out of the lineup. He wasn't practicing as much, all these things. And I think the injuries were really taking a toll. Colts were up 17.7 at half. But Manning and the Broncos put up 10 points in the third quarter to tie it up going into the fourth. On the first play of the fourth, Luck was hurried from the pocket. He scrambled

to his left, and four yards later, he was sandwiched between two defenders. Broncos linebacker Danny Treveithin, speared him first, then defensive lineman Vance Walker finished him off from behind. It was a vicious hit, even by NFL standards, let alone for a franchise quarterback. Luck was slow to get up.

Boy, that's another hard hit on him. Trevathan. Oh, boy, the first hit is solid, and the second one, you're right. Now, at first, luck thinks the wind's been knocked out of him. He's worried that he won't even be able to speak in the huddle. How the hell am I going to call a play? He asked himself.

Finally, he does, and on the next play, the pocket collapsing again, He backpedals and back pedals and back pedals, then finds his running back, Ahmad Bradshaw, and the soft spot of the zone for a touchdown. Cliffs, open, Bradshaw, in-zone, Indianapolis. The stadium erupts, the music blairs, the Colts celebrate. And I can't help but watch the quarterback who doesn't celebrate at all. Instead, he lumberes off the field by himself.

Thank God we scored, he's telling himself. Now I can get to the sidelines and sit down. Luck finished the game, beat the best defense in football, and delivered the Colts a win they absolutely had to have. We didn't shoot ourselves in the foot. The only positive plays. Even if drives didn't end and touchdowns are in. After the game, Luck spoke with reporters,

not knowing the extent of his injuries. Between every question, he breathed heavily, leaning over just a little bit. Yeah, I think, yeah, you could say that. You can hear the stress in his voice as he attempts to get through his answers. Guys made some plays, defense, special teams, complimentary football. And he got us a good one for a very, very good team. Four minutes in, he's had enough.

And under his breath, luck says last one, as in last question. for this team. And then he answers that final question, using only a few words. Very, very big difference. Huge. He headed home that night. He had some pizza, he drank a beer, and he fell asleep. What he didn't know was that that hit from Treveithen had lacerated his kidney and torn open

an abdomen muscle. The next morning he woke up and noticed he was peeing blood. I remember talking to a medical expert. The sort of injury used to stain in a car crash, basically. You get broadsided by a pickup truck. That's when you rupture your kidney. He did this in football by getting sandwich between two linebackers. What happens then?

He keeps playing through what's got to be just unimaginable pain, keeps playing, goes and throws the winning touchdown, beats the number one defense in the NFL, a team that goes on to win the Super Bowl later that year. And I think it goes to his mindset. There's no way he would have came out of that game. They would have had to tackle him and drag him off the field. Should he have been out there? No. But he wasn't going to ever say, I can't do it in too much pain.

His mindset is, hey, this game is about toughness. And everybody is out here sacrificing. I got a sacrifice too. And he really believed that. It's not just like cliche, just sort of a hokey thing. No, I think he truly, truly believed that. It's like everybody's out there is giving blood, sweat, and tears. I'm going to give just as much or more as they are. and that's what you get is a guy who can tough it out through just the most ridiculous conditions. Luck's season was done. The Colts said he was on this two to six week timetable, that he had a shot to make it back in time for the playoffs. But in reality, he was never going to return. His kidney had been torn open. Hasselbeck kept on winning and at one point was 4 and 0 as the starter, but eventually the wheels came off. The Colts stumbled to 8 and 8 and 8 and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2011.

For luck, it wasn't just the bum's shoulder, the lacerated kidney, or the torn abdomen. There was more. Really, not until the very end of the season did I find out from a very well-placed source that he had been dealing with. The rib pain in particular was torn cartilage. He had been taking pain-killing shots. He's not the only player, certainly. But we didn't know this about the most important player on the team. And so he was just really gutting this.

out over the course of this year. And then, as you know, at the end of the year, he's got that ruptured kidney. That was the end of that. The kidney healed, but the shoulder did not. After signing what was then the richest contract in league history the following summer, $140 million over six years, luck played the entire next season, 2016, with a torn labrum in his throwing shoulder. Fighting through the pain, he still threw for 4,200 yards and 31 touchdowns and 15 starts.

missing one because of a concussion. But DeQuil Jackson says even inside the locker room, his own teammates had no idea what luck was really dealing with. A lot of us were in the training room. Like I had my routine, all the veterans, we had our routine with our certain guys, and you kind of had an idea of who was dealing with what that, based on the treatment. If you just open your eyes and look.

When Andrew, it was very secret. Now, he was in the building very early. A handful of us was, but, You know, you never knew. You never knew he was in. He didn't talk like that. And I think that's what made him so unique. If I'm talking, if you're my teammate, if you're my locker mate, you're Pat McAfee or

or Pops, Mike Adams, hey, man, you're doing all right? Like, I'm doing all right, but, you know, I got a little shoulder or something. Like, Andrew didn't talk like that. And watching him play and seeing him at practice and seeing all the treatment he would go through, see all the hits he would endure. It was like, man, I know you have to be in. injured. You have to, something has to be bothering you, but he didn't talk like that. And it was so odd. I was like, wait, we don't, we're not going to go tell the other team, but he's just,

that wasn't something that he wanted to discuss. And I get it. Now I get it. It's like, you never know who may slip up and hear something and have, be friends with someone else. Like, you didn't want anyone to know. But he was the one guy in my 11 years. I never knew what the hell was bothering until all this news came out. And it was like, oh, wait, he was suffering from this. This happened? It was all. news to us. And I don't know how. He's just built different. This is when everything started to change for Andrew Luck, when he started to lose his football innocence. Early in his career, there had been this unmistakable joy in the way he played.

But then with the shoulder and the kidney and the abdomen and the ribs, he was losing that. Former Colts coach Chuck Pagano says that a game that had once been so much of a game that had once been so much fun for Andrew Luck was now becoming a daily hell. Yeah, it obviously took its toll, you know, on him. And I don't think anybody really understands. You know, we all know, like, dog years. They say, like, every year, seven years, right? So kind of what he endured and what he went through,

what he had to do on a daily basis, not only the off season, take care of yourself and train and all that, but just on a daily basis to come in and spend the time that he spent in that training room, just preparing for, not to just practice that day and to get warmed up. Unbelievable. If anybody else had to do that, they would have just said, you know what, this is, this is way too much. This is, this is not worth it.

But Andrew was the type of guy that he was going to be there from hell or high water for his team and his teammates. I mean, as far as toughness goes, determination to get himself ready to compete and play at a high level every Sunday. He went through hell. Schottenheimer, Lux quarterback coach for two seasons with the Colts, says there were two beasts that he was fighting, his physical injuries, and the mental burden of the rehab and the recovery that followed. The fact that, you know, people don't truly understand, it's not where you go

into the training room for an hour and then you go home and then you go back to another hour later on. Like, when you're dealing with some of the things that he had to deal with and really all these guys deal with, I mean, it's a 10, 12, 14 hour a day process to. try to get your body right. That's the physical side, not even the mental side that these guys are asked to endure in terms of not only learning your stuff, your playbook, your scheme, your protections, your protection adjustments, your protection adjustments, your hots, your sight. But, okay, that's the starting point.

Okay, now the other team on the other side of the ball is going to try to distract you and, oh, by the way, knock your head off. So, I mean, there's a mental anguish of just preparing to play the game when you're healthy. And then when you add in some of the things that he had to deal with, I think, well, I know from watching him do it, it was absolutely a just mental grind. With Luck playing hurt, the Colts went 8 and 8 in 2016, again missing the playoffs. Grickson was fired a month after the season ended. And Luck Underwent surgery on that shoulder, an operation he'd chosen not to have after the 2015. The 2016 off season, going into 2016 off season, so coming off of the 2015 injuries, and we do mean

plural, he decides that it's a collective decision. It's the medical staff. It's Andrew Luck. It's the front office. They all get together and they decide ultimately, he told us later, he was the one who ultimately drove the decision because it's his body. Al said that, no, he would, they would try the rehab approach. And there was some belief. It could be rehabbed and he could get back to to a a very high level in performing at an elite level. The thought process was they'd work really hard throughout the offseason, keep him sideline, just work on it, work on it, and then he'd come back and he'd be okay for 2016. What ultimately happened is he didn't really resolve the problem. News of the surgery was first announced by Colt-Loner Jim Ursay on Twitter.

Andrew recovering from successful outpatient surgery to fix right shoulder injury that had lingered since 2015. He wrote on January 19th of 2017. We'll be ready for season. In the months that followed, it'd be a tweet Ursay wishes he'd never sent. And I remember Jim Ursa's tweet. He's the one who revealed it. I remember his tweet saying, you know, this is pretty routine. He'll be back in sort of a predetermined amount of time. He'll be good as new. That was the expectation. And I don't doubt that that's what the doctors told them. That's what the expectation was. But what we learned later is that that he had done, I think ultimately had done a lot of damage by playing with the injury. They had underestimated, I think, just how much that would have impacted him,

or how much it would impact him on the back end after surgery. It did have a very profound effect. And it took him a long time to become the same guy. This was not a routine surgery at all. No, it wasn't. And neither was the rehab. Luck wouldn't play for 617 days, a stretch of almost two years. and in that time he'd hide halfway across the world,

he'd lose confidence in himself, he'd question his place in the game, and he'd wonder if he ever wanted to play it again. The physical toll was adding up, and he was drowning. Here's a list of what luck dealt with his first four years in the NFL. Torn cartilage and two ribs, a partially torn abdomen, a lacerated kidney that left him peeing blood,

at least one concussion, and the torn labroman his throwing shoulder that he played through most of 2015 and all of time. 2016. He was 28 years old. Football had become misery, all of which brought to the forefront the debate that raged in Indianapolis for years. Whose fault was this? The GM, the coaches, the quarterback, the entire organization? Yeah, and I mean, I think he made some, you know, I think he made investments on the offensive line, just didn't hit on all of them. Daniel Jeremiah worked with Ryan Grigsett in Philadelphia before joining NFL Network in 2012. The same year luck was drafted.

I know they had taken some guys in the, you know, second, third round during that period of time. I just didn't necessarily hit on all of them. So in hindsight, maybe you should have, you know, continued to pour more investments and resources into that and give yourself some leeway in case you do miss on a guy to have some more options there. But, you know, the funny thing is I've talked to so many quarterbacks over the years, you'd think, okay, they want protection first and then and then playmakers second. But the majority of them will tell you, gosh, just give me as many playmakers. I can, we'll be okay.

I can get the ball out or I can make things happen. And we can help guys that need help. But I just, I don't want to go into a game without anybody that can make a play. And I think they did a decent job of that. Obviously, the stats that he put up, you know, bear that out. But, yeah, in hindsight, you just wish you wouldn't, you would have hit on some of those guys you took in the second, third round area. Here are the facts. The Colts tried to protect Andrew Luck.

They really did. They were just very bad at it. After Luck's rookie season, a year in which he was sacked 41 times. Grigsen scribbled on a notepad in his office and big bold block letters, Protect 12. The following off season, he handed out a five-year $35 million deal to the top right tackle on the market, Goster Cherales, but Chirillis hurt his knee in his second season and would be released a year later. Grickson also signed guard Donald Thomas during that 2013 off-season, but he played just one

game for the Colts after tearing quad muscles in consecutive seasons. The misses in the draft were especially damning. The Colts took guard Hugh Thornton in the second round in 2013, then sent her Khaled Holmes one round later. Neither would prove to be a long-term starter. Even the hits ended poorly. In 2014, the Colts grabbed Ohio State Guard Jack Mewhart in the second round. Muirth would start 45 games before debilitating knee injuries halted his career. Related here are the Colts other personnel moves on offense during that time.

Not until 2018 with Marlon Mack did luck ever have a potent running game, and at one point, the Colts went a whopping 61 games, a stretch of almost five years without a hundred-yard rusher. It was the third longest such streak in NFL history. At receiver, the Dorset pick felt like the final straw, a 5-10 receiver in the first round after the Colts had been bullied up front and consecutive playoff losses to the Patriots,

it never made sense. Dorset would only start seven games over the next two seasons before being traded. The 2015-16-17 run that's when I feel like you can really throw malpractice onto the way that the team was built. Robert Mays, host of the athletic football show. Because that was the concern is that you spend a first round pick on Trent Richardson. You spend a first round pick on Philip Dorset.

Instead of going out and using your free agent money on guys like Goster Sherrillis, I mean, they think one of their biggest free agent signings during that stretch was they spent it on Andre Johnson. You know, they were throwing money around in ways that just were not conducive to his protection. And I think at a certain point, they started playing fantasy football a little bit. And even if the scheme had changed a little bit, you still had the same mentality with your quarterback. And I think that's when he started really taking hits. And that was the enduring thought was, I can't believe they did this. You know, early on, I think you can explain away some of the decisions.

But in that range, it was like, I can't believe they let this happen with the ways that they spent this. You look at that year they drafted Philip Dorset, Donovan Smith and Rob Havenstein were second round picks. You know, it's not like this was, that's, those are. two of the best second round offensive tackles drafted in the last 10 years. And Rob Haventstein's a right tackle. Dropped him right in there. You wouldn't even have to think twice about it. Instead, again, you got Joe Reitz over there, and God bless Joe Reitz and La Ravin

Clark and whoever else they were trotting out there. But it was really, really hard to watch that happen. It was, and it cost him. Here's what the analytics tell us. Luck was pressured on 111,111 of his dropbacks across the first 70 games of his career. according to pro football focus, and sacked a league high 156 times over that stretch.

The Colts failure to piece together a sustainable offensive line was the primary reason. Over the first 83 starts of his career, luck lined up behind 40 different offensive lines. 40. This stuff is never as simple as this is why this happened.

Here is one reason this is why this happened, especially when it comes to past protection. The pieces and how they fit together, the quarterback is almost as responsible for his own protection as the offensive line is. We've seen that over time, and then Scheme also plays a factor.

So when you have a guy that was unabashed about how much he enjoyed physical contact as part of playing football, and at that position, even if you're built like a Mack truck like Andrew Luck was, over time, that can be a problematic way to approach how you play the game. And I think ultimately we saw that. In 2016 and 2017, the Colts were regressing. And by the end of it, their franchise quarterback couldn't even lift his right-

arm. Meanwhile, the drafting got worse. The signings got worse. For those who've forgotten, some of the Colts draft whiffs during that time. Bjorne Verner, a first rounder in 2013, who pile up just six and a half sacks before being cut two years later. Thornton, Hughes, Dorset, DeJohn Smith, a third-round pick at cornerback in 2015, who never started a game for the team. T.J. Green, a second rounder in 2016 at Safety, who started 11 games for the Colts, never made an interception, and was cut two years later. This was a second round. This was a on top of some awful signings in free agency and the Tret Richardson trade in 2013, which remains among the worst in franchise history. I think you look at what the way the chiefs have done.

It's so easy to excuse all these moves individually when you're thinking, you know, they really needed speed and their receiving core was older and, you know, Philip Dorset kind of would have given them a gear that nothing else did. Yeah, you know, the Trent Richardson trade, it's tough to stomach when you link back on it, trading a first round pick for the running back and one who hadn't been very good. But if they can lean on the running game a little bit more, would that take some of the pressure and some of the punishment off of the quarterback? You can excuse them all individually.

But when you look at a team like Kansas City who had that moment in the Super Bowl where Patchman-Holmes is just under siege the entire game, they sat there in the off-season after that and said, it doesn't matter. We're going to get four new offensive linemen. We are not going to let this happen again. And when you have the quarterback to stabilize everything else, you're going to, you have the quarterback to stabilize everything else. I think that they're, it's easy to justify us saying, we're going to make these fairly extreme choices in order to preserve his career and give us the best chance to win because all that really matters is whether or not he's protected and healthy in a part of the organization.

And I think that the decision to not do anything like that and just kind of say, we'll figure it out and we'll tinker with it and we'll go from there was ultimately a mistake. I asked Stanford coach David Shaw, who remains close to luck to this day, if he believes the Colts, protected their franchise quarterback the way they should have. The question was first met with silence. For three or four seconds, Shaw said nothing. And finally, he said this. And this is a lot for me, because I'm a college head football coach. That's the most loaded question I've ever been asked.

Then he answered. The answer is absolutely not. And once I'll harken back to another question and another conversation I go with Andrew, which I'm not going to tell tales out of school, right? I'm not going to betray confidence. But I asked Andrew one time, I was like, what do you need? He's like, I'm great, coach. I said, no, really?

What do you need? He said, no, I'm good, blah, blah. I said, it's me. He's coach, I love the play action game. And the play action game doesn't work if we don't run the ball. And that was so quintessential, Andrew, and he was so right, you want me to perform? Give me a running game. You want me to perform?

Build the offensive line. And I think that was one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have, right? It wasn't just for the personnel people at the time is that when you have this great athlete at quarterback, you've got this freak show of a passer that you need to continue to get weapons. No, no. Like, you need to get him protection. You need to get him a running game because anybody that you put outside, he's going to make them better than they are. like he's going to raise the level of every pass catcher, right?

He did it when he first got there. He did it at Stanford. He did it in high school. He's going to raise the level of every pass catcher. He's got to be able to have time. And on top of having time to throw, he's also won, just like we talked about early, he doesn't want to drop back 50 times to throw the ball. We reached out to Ryan Grickson for this project, but he declined to participate.

Peter King, the longtime NFL writer for Sports Illustrated and now NBC Sports, doesn't believe that Grigson deserves as much of the blame as he's received. For King, he views what happened to look as a byproduct of the violent nature of the game of football. You know, a lot of people have criticized Ryan Grigson for the team he put around him. I don't. I don't criticize him at all. And the reason is, when you build a football team, you build a team sitting in a draft room, and sitting in personnel meetings and building a consensus year after year about what is best for our team.

Ryan Grigsden, that's what Ryan Grigson was trying to do. Did every pick he pick work out? No. But, you know, there's a lot of drafters. There's a lot of even really good general managers. Ron Wolf once said, if I hit 333 on my draft picks, I'm happy. You're just going to miss on a lot of those guys. We could probably go over pick by pick and say, well, why didn't they take a left tackle here?

Why didn't they take a blocking tight end here? Why didn't they do this? I think it's easy to do after the fact. And who knows? I don't know how I Andrew Luck feels about it. But I don't look at this and blame Ryan Grigs. I look at this and I blame football. Dequelle Jackson, the defensive captain for the Colts during those years,

remembers pulling luck aside at one point and pleading with the quarterback to be more vocal about what he wanted and how he wanted it addressed. I remember just having a brief conversation with it and just letting him know, it's like, hey, you know if you can march up to the powers of B and tell him, hey, I demand X, I demand this, I demand that, they will do it without a doubt. And that was one of my issues that I had with Andrew. And it's not any indictment on him, but if you're in a front office, if I could put on the GM hat for a moment.

If you understand that about your legend, your golden ticket of the franchise, you go out and get offensive linemen that has that brashness that can come in and say, you know what, he's the guy we need to protect and we're going to protect him at all cost because without him, we don't have a career, period. And I think that was the misstep that front office kind of overlooked. You know, I think ultimately it ended up retiring early because they assume, hey, this guy's going to play forever. It was never about the money with Andrew. Never. It was about I have a gift. I'm really good at it. I'm competitive. I want to be the best at it. I'm going to be genuine.

I'll be myself. But identifying that from a front office standpoint, I think in my issue, again, was a misstep that ultimately cost him years of us being able to see Andrew flourish and ultimately win the Super Bowl for the franchise. The punishment was becoming more that he could bear, even for a quarterback built like a linebacker. But let's not excuse luck. Plenty of those hits came outside of the pocket and they could have been avoided. He'd admit to this internal conflict later in his career. Fighting those instincts he's been blessed with, trying to play smarter, protecting himself, but early on he just wasn't very good at it. There have been players over time that have done such a good job of having a more mobile playmaking, play extending style, but being really good at protecting

themselves. Russell Wilson is a perfect example of that. You know, Russ really didn't miss time until this year and it was a finger. Think about how many times Russell Wilson was under siege and in peril and how often he ran the ball, but always ducking out of bounds, always sliding, always making smart plays. Lamar Jackson has this uncanny ability to avoid taking huge shots. And it's just this nimbleness and awareness that is impossible to really articulate or understand. And Andrew just didn't play like that. And he was somebody that had that mobility and ability to extend plays and do stuff with his feet, but didn't want to shy away from contact or to avoid all of that.

He embraced it in a way that always made you wince a little bit. And so that's the problem, though, is that it doesn't take one Friday Night Lights-esque shot where it's just this cinematic, huge blow-up moment and a guy's out for six, eight, ten games. Over time, it just starts to add up. In the end, it didn't really matter whose fault it was. By the winter of 2017, Grigsin had been fired. Lux's throwing shoulder was in a sling, his confidence was shot, and for the first time in his career, he'd started to question himself. He missed the entire off-season, then showed up on the first day of training camp skinnier than we'd ever seen him. He tried to shrug it off, tried to convey some hope and optimism, but deep down,

he knew he wasn't even close to ready. He was still in pain, and he was about to endure some of the darkest months of his life. Well, you know the moment when I realized that this was not routine? I remember in the late summer 2017, training camp starts. He's out there on day one of training camp. He's talking to us for the first time, I think, in quite some time. and walk out there and he's a toothpick. Here's huge hulking Andrew Luck

and he looks like, I don't know how much weight he lost, but he looked literally like skin and bones. And I'm thinking what is happening? Because what you know, what many people don't know about Andrew Luck is that this guy was furious in the weight room, okay?

He was an absolute animal in the weight room. Like he went after it hard. You know, he just, he certainly was never built like a typical quarterback, right? And so, with this shoulder injury, that had to come to a stop. And I think when I saw him there, that really betrayed just how inactive he must have been since that surgery to look the way he looked. It was striking. It was really, really striking. And so I'll never forget that and thinking to myself, okay, wait, what? This guy's going to play in two weeks? No. When the season starts,

it's never going to happen, right? Or in a month or so. He missed the first game, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. In early October, the Colts brought him out to practice, where he lobbed some long throws, maybe 30 yards. And for a brief fleeting moment, hope was restored. The franchise was returning. Only he wasn't. Luck would later tell me the morning after those storing sessions,

he couldn't even lift his arm. He wasn't close to ready. And I know that was a really dark moment for him because he had been putting this off for a long time, clearly. And then you're told, okay, this will be pretty routine. and then it turns into a complete disaster. I know at that point, he's thinking, okay, where is this going to go? I can't play football right now.

This is the first time that's ever happened to him. Andrew Luck, this body had never failed him, not at this level. And now his body is just completely failing. There's no fourth quarter magic. Basically, he's useless for the first time as a football player. His teammates are out there struggling, they're fighting. I think they started the season pretty slow. So he's in a dark place, both because of what he

could not do, and also the fact that he can't do anything about what's happening, what's actually happening on the field. That was just a real struggle for him, and it only got worse. The team tried a quarter zone shot midway through the year as a last-ditch effort, but nothing worked. They put him on IR in early November, ending his season. He disappeared to the Netherlands and wasn't heard from for months. As we come to find out, he's in another continent. He's in the Netherlands, undergoing a special sort of therapy with a renowned physical therapist over there at a clinic in the Netherlands. This showed, I think, the level of desperation, both for him and the team at that point, because he had not been really responding well to things that have been

done at that point and really decided to just try something really extreme going all the way to Europe to try this. And I think that's when I wondered, okay, is this really going to work. Because if he's got to stoop to those levels to get this done and to get back to being himself, now I'm starting to wonder, will he ever be himself? And I think that was a pretty fair question to ask at that point, because it just seems so extreme to have to do that. I mean, you've never heard of such a thing. After six weeks abroad, Luck returned in time for the Colts 2017 season finale. Pagano's last game is head coach. He vowed that his shoulder was stronger and more stable. He denied having any sort of stem cell therapy, which had been widely speculated at the time,

instead insisting that he was there for rehab, strength training, and soft tissue work. My gut and my feeling tells me that I do not need another surgery, he said that day. But at that point, nobody really knew. He said his expectation was to be ready for the start of the off season. Sure, everybody thought. We've heard that one before. Nobody truly knew, including Andrew Luck. But just think about the moments before that, the stage that he was at at that point,

where you tried to come back, you're running the scout team. Here you are a pro-ball quarterback who's been to the AFC championship game. They're telling you go run the scout team to see if you can, you know, throw a screen pass. And his body is functioning at such a low level. He can't even do that to the point where he decides to go try this therapist in the Netherlands. I mean, that's, you talk about extreme. That was just, it was stunning to learn, frankly. It just seemed like he was both physically and metaphorically, like, so far away, you know.

And it was just really strange. I mean, most times guys are around. They're on the sideline during the game. Andrew Lux in the Netherlands. It's just flabbergasting. Shaw, Lux College coach, remembers having some really difficult conversations with his old quarterback during this time. We had a couple of deep conversations that were heartbreaking for me. and for him also, I mean, I told you about talking to him as a high school junior,

this kid had never expressed doubt, not just fear and all those other things. Like, he knew once he got on the field, he was going to be the best guy in the field. He didn't care who else was out there. And that doubt now, like, can I ever do this again? And it was there halfway across the world, swallowed by Shane that Andrew Luck asked himself this question for the first time in his life. Should I walk away from football? On the next episode of luck,

There was no light at the end of the tunnel. He was buried in the tunnel, and he was getting zero feedback from anything. He really couldn't even roll a football 20 yards. I think at that point we were one in three. Tom and I are sitting on the gator, practice in. Andrew walks over and looks at Tom, and she said, look, will I ever be great again?

You know, will I ever be who I was again? I just remember him saying, Jacobi, like, this is going to sound weird, but can you hit me on the sideline? Because I need to feel the game right now. I don't think I'm supposed to hit you. I thought that he and Frank Reich made an incredible tandem, the happiest I'd seen him as a player,

and he just had just a newfound outlook on the game. Thank you for listening to Episode 4. 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 Havio.

The Athletic's head of audio is Andrew Wasserman.