The Ringer NFL Show - Andrew Luck Retirement Rapid Reactions | The Ringer NFL Show

Episode Date: August 25, 2019

The Ringer's Robert Mays and Kevin Clark discuss Andrew Luck's decision to leave the game of football and Luck's legacy in Indy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Drinking responsibly is too. Big news, everyone. The Ringer now has a Facebook group solely dedicated to the NFL. Check out our Ringer NFL Facebook group. It's a place for real fans to have real discussions about the NFL and everything surrounding it. We're talking fantasy, gambling, power rankings, and tons of questions like, what qualities make for the best locker room guy and is Matthew Stafford actually a Hall of Famer?

The answer to that is no, by the way. Plus, each week we'll be answering a question submitted in the Ringer NFL Facebook group on this podcast. So make sure to join the group and get active. Welcome to an emergency edition of the Ringer NFL show. I'm Robert Mays, joined as always by Kevin Clark. Kevin, how you doing, buddy? I'm okay. This is becoming an annual tradition.

We had to record a weekend morning podcast last year after the cool MAC trade around this time. And now we have Andrew Lach. Yeah, it was Labor Day weekend last year. So we're a week ahead of schedule. But yeah, the same sort of idea. We still have Labor Day weekend to go. Who knows? Yeah, who knows it's going to happen on actual Labor Day weekend.

So we were just discussing this before we started recording. We were talking about how we heard about this. I received a text message from one Ben Glickman saying Andrew Luck retired, which I didn't know what to make of it at first. I was like, what do you mean he retired? Like from bowling? I don't even understand this. How did you find out?

Yeah. So I was at a, my name, American's alumni bar in San Francisco actually where I'm traveling this weekend. And I got the alert on my phone, a sports center alert, and I thought it was fake. I thought it was the kind of thing where someone hacked into the system and gave just an unbelievable bit of news. It actually reminded me a little bit. This is a very strange thing to say.

Do you remember when the NFL account got hacked by hackers like three years ago? No, I don't remember that. So they said Roger Goodell is dead, but it was an all, like, it was an all lowercase and it was clearly fake. Like, because it was just such an unbelievable thing to say that it was, that was my first thought. It was like, okay, someone hacked it. And then as I continued to see, uh, the news alerts, obviously it was real. It was, uh, you know, I've been thinking about it a lot for the, over the past, obviously over the past 14 hours or whatever it is. Um, it's getting less shocking the more I think about it.

But at first, obviously, it just seemed completely out of left field. Yeah, I mean, if anybody was going to do this, if any franchise quarterback was going to walk away from the NFL at age 29, it was going to be Andrew Luck, right? That part of it is not surprising. Yeah, no, and I completely agree. So there's a couple of things to unpack within that. You know, it reminds me, listen, Rob Gunkowski just retired at age 29 a couple months ago. the reason that we really didn't talk enough about Andrew Luck retiring is A, there were never any leaks or anything like that as there were with Gruncowski.

Yeah. You know, one of the things about the Gruncowski retirement was they were talking with that a year ahead of time. Like that was the thing. Like, oh, maybe he's going to retire. That was sort of floated out there a year ahead of time, as was, by the way, the Calvin Johnson thing. That was, you know, months in the work.

So those are the guys who retired before or around. age 30 in the last couple of years who were, you know, at the absolute pinnacle of their game. Patrick Willis was a little more of a surprise, but he obviously wasn't a super duper star in the NFL. But when you think about the Andrew Luck thing, the reason I think it's surprising is, A, he's a quarterback, and those guys are just way more famous than anybody else. But beyond that, it just seemed like everything was going in the right direction for the Colts. It looked like they were, you know, fringe Super Bowl contenders. And with the right breaks, could have won a Super Bowl this year.

It seemed like Andrew Luck was pretty healthy last year. That's obviously just looking at on the surface. Obviously, there were a lot more things going on that we didn't know about. So it just seemed like this news runs counter to everything we've seen about Andrew Luck over the past, what, 14, 15 months. Even though there were those sort of rumors and, I'm sorry, reports about the cath injury and the ankle and all that stuff,

I think people had assumed by now that Andrew Luck's going to be ready when it's time to go. And now we understand it was much more serious than we thought. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's what makes this so disappointing when you're thinking about on a football level is that this was supposed to be the year for the Colts. I mean, this was supposed to be the culmination of his comeback, of Chris Bowers, rebuild, everything else.

And now we're kind of sitting here being left to wonder what might have been for the 2019 Colts. But in a way, I think that I almost feel that way about Andrew Luck's career. Because when you think about what Andrew Luck was supposed to be, And that's what to me is so shocking about this, again, on the football basis. You know, people were saying last night when I said it was the most shocking retirement I can remember, but what about Michael Jordan? What about Barry Sanders? Barry Sanders went to 10. Michael Jordan's a pretty good one, dude.

Michael Jordan won three championships, though, in a row. He won two MVP awards. Barry Sanders went to 10 Pro Bowls in a row. I mean, those guys were Hall of Famers, all-time greats when they walked away. Andrew Luck is not that. Andrew Luck was supposed to be a generational quarterback prospect. He was supposed to be the best quarterback prospect since Peyton Manning. And now what do we have? We have a few 11 and five seasons, 140 touchdown year. And that's it.

I mean, that is Andrew Luck's career. Andrew Luck was hit 65 more times than any other player in the NFL in his first three seasons, the NFL. Number two was Matt Ryan. Number three is Ryan Tanhill. I'm going to talk about that a little bit in the piece I'm writing today. I don't think you can put any sort of value on. on how much those hits can hurt.

I remember talking to Matt Hasselbeck about this last year, whereas basically, you know, it's basically four hits over his career that ended his career, right? And so if you're getting hit 352 times in the first three years of your career, it only takes one, two, or three of those

to absolutely, you know, start you on a path where your career is over. I think that most important thing here is that Andrew Luck clearly was not ready to play in 2019. And I think that's the thing about the booze here. that the booze are strange to me. It's crazy. Because if a guy, well, no, but if a guy is retiring,

he obviously was not going to be ready to go 100% in 2019. It's not like you're going from a Super Bowl contender to an absolute loser because you were never going to be a Super Bowl contender if Andrew Luck is in a position where he was going to retire. Does that make sense? I mean, he's obviously not, he was obviously not going to be ready for week one. He obviously was going to have some growing pains even in, you know, October, November or whatever. This idea that Andrew Luck was going to be ready to go in two weeks and then the Colts were going to march to AFC contention is a little bit ridiculous.

But even if he comes back in week three, this team started one in five last year. I legitimately think if he missed only a couple games that they would be right. Yeah, but you don't, but you don't know if that could have happened. I mean, he may have known that he wasn't able to play this season. I mean, we'll never have to, he will never reveal these things. A, because we're never going to find out, because he's never going to have to race to health and do all the, the kinds of things that NFL players have to do to get ready. So it is literally unknowable. But, I mean, I just think even if he came back in week three, if you're in a position right now where you're going to retire because basically injuries have sucked your life out, love of the game out, I think that there's, you know, it's not like you come back in week three and be the injury luck he was last season.

There's a million factors that go into being a quarterback, and the ability to hunker down and, you know, study ungodly amounts of tape is one of them. And if he sounds like he wasn't prepared to do that, then him coming back in week three, isn't that important? Yeah, I think if he had played, he probably, I mean, there's no way to know this. You're right. I mean, it's all unknowable, but it feels like to me if he played, he would still probably be close to Andrew Locke. I think this is way more about just not being willing to go through what it takes to get ready to play every year. I mean, I can't even imagine what it would be like to have to rehab an injury every single offseason to get yourself ready to play. And this is a guy who I think, you know, I don't want to read into his comments last night and try to parse them.

But one of the things that stuck out to me when he was talking is that he, what he said, I can't live the life that I want to live. And that really, that hit me because I just think that he's a person that, I mean, you've had conversations with Andrew Luck before. Like Andrew Luck. Three time, three time ring around a fellow show podcast. I mean, Andrew Luck is somebody who. A great interview. He wants to see the world. He wants to experience things.

I mean, this is a guy with myriad interests. And it's really difficult to be a 21, 29 year old person that has all of those levels of engagement and not being able to do it. I can completely understand. I mean, this is a guy with a lot of money in the bank who's about to turn 30 and wants to live his life. I can't fault him for that.

Yeah, it's going to make a little over $100 million in his career, leave about $50 million on the table. it'll be really interesting to see what his next chapter is. As you alluded to, he has been on this show. I've interviewed him a handful of times on this show. He was actually the first person I did a podcast with in Los Angeles at the ringer. It was not you. We did a book club podcast because I had sort of helped. I sort of unofficially launched the book club the year before by writing a story about it in the Wall Street Journal. And then he actually made it formal. So then we did a podcast about his favorite books. That's just so the listener, that's not normal in the NFL is to do a book club podcast. The one thing he said was that he was not, he loved the Game of Thrones books so much that he was not going to start the show until the books were done. Yeah, I remember that.

Which I just cannot, I cannot process that. That's the thing about Angela, I cannot process, not this retirement. Anyway, yeah, I mean, he can do whatever he wants to do. If he wants to stay in football and do something that doesn't involve getting the crab knocked out of you, you can do that. If he wants to go be an architecture student or architecture, um, professional he can do that because he was an architecture student. If he wants to just travel around the world and have a hundred million dollars, you can do that. So I'm not too worried about Andrew Luck the person. Um, obviously this is bigger ramifications in the football

field, but you know, the, the, the important thing really is that, uh, Andrew Luck does not experience any more pain going forward. Yeah. And I think that's important. And it's nice to know that he won't. But now we're sitting here and the Colts are left to pick up the pieces, right? So what happens? I wrote about, I just wrote about it right now right before we started recording. I mean, this is not a team that's going to go three and 13. Like, they have enough talent and Jacoby Brissette. Jacoby Brissette's not Curtis Painter. Yes. Jacoby Preset is a solid backup quarterback. And this is a roster that, you know, even outside of Andrew Locke, many people thought could compete for a Super Bowl. So now we're sitting here and we're looking at a Colts team that's maybe, I don't know,

what, six and ten, seven and nine. So you have, you're, you're just another team, which is disappointing. I think they're probably eight and eight. Yeah, something like that, right? So even if you do that, the thing we, I mean, last time this happened with the Colts, they were so bad, they lucked into the number one pick, put in the pun not intended, and they got a generational player to replace Peyton Manning. I don't think we talk about that enough. Andrew Luck was such a promising quarterback prospect that they just said goodbye to the best quarterback that the least he gets ever seen outside of Tom Brady. And then Manning won a Super Bowl. Yes. He threw 53 touchdown passes the next year. Well, right, but then he won a Super Bowl as a literal corpse. Yes.

Two years later, he threw 50 touchdown passes. But still, it's not like Peyton Manning was done. So that's not going to happen this time. This isn't a situation where the Colts are going to be so bad that they get the number one pick and pick two and this whole thing starts over again. They're going to have to get very creative in how they eventually solve this because they are not going to be toiling down there with the likes of the dolphins and be. three and 13 and have a top three pick and put themselves in a position to get another guy. Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think that they're going to be, you know, I saw some talk about this, this morning. They're going to be a little bit similar to what the Eagles had pre-went. And I thought that was in comparison because they have roster talent.

They've got a lot of pieces. They just didn't have the quarterback. And they're not going to go, as you said, one in 15 to where they're going to be able to get a tour or in two years of Trevor Lawrence. The problem then becomes how do you get a quarterback? Do you trade up? Do you put all of your, you know, do you put all of your draft capital into getting a first or second pick? I mean, I think the problem for them in the next couple of drafts is that the quarterback prospects are so good that that sort of auction, you know, Wentz was not seen as a generational talent.

Golf was not seen as a generational talent. They were seen as good quarterbacks who deserve to go in the top five. But it wasn't like Tua and certainly wasn't going to be like Trevor Lawrence's in a couple of years. years. So it's going to be really, really hard to get up there to the tippy top of the draft if they wanted to. Um, I think it's a, listen, if you're making a list of GMs who you trust to build around right now, uh, Chris Ballard is on the very, very short list. So I think Colts fans are in better hands. I think that Chris, if Chris Ballard was the GM for the entire Antio Luck, uh, regime, then this is a very different story. Ryan Grigsson deserves a lot of the blame for

how often Andrew Luck was hit from mismanaging the entire team. It is a football tragedy, but not a personal tragedy for anybody here. Nobody's dead. Andrew Luck will be a much happier person tomorrow than he was two days ago. And if there's any sort of football tragedy, it deserves to be put squarely on Ryan Gregson. Yeah, I'm with you. And I think that part of the reason that this is so depressing on a football level, is that what we saw last year,

the fact that he got sacked 18 times, the fact that he's playing in this really fun, just innovative offense that gets the ball out quickly. It just felt like we'd finally come to a place where Andrew Luck had the team and the infrastructure that he deserved. And we got one year of it and now it's over. So I think that's part of the reason that it's so disappointing on that level, is just that we finally had reached a place where it's like,

okay, this is the guy that we thought he could be, here we go, and we got 16 games of it. it is upsetting in that regard. And again, the Grigs and thing is just ridiculous. And if they had hired another GM in 2012, then this is a completely different story. I mean, it's one of the all-time bad GM performances of my lifetime.

I mean, just the constant mismanagement every single level. And also hiring Chris Ballard after that in which he immediately cleans up the cap space, even around, you know, Andrew Lux allegedly albatross of a contract. I can't believe he said that.

And then he, you know, builds up the draft capital. he hits two rookie all pros in the first year. He crushes the draft this year. It was not just Ryan Grigsman being a bad GM. It was Ryan Grigson being a bad GM and then a good GM coming in and showing how I'm like one of the best GMs in the league.

Right. Just dunking all over Ryan Grigson. All right. Before we move on, let's take a quick break. Hiring used to be hard. Multiple job sites, stacks of resumes is a confusing review process. But today, hiring can be easy. and you only have to go to one place to get it done.

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And while we're here, everyone knows the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a. Crash. People could get hurt or killed. But here are some surprising statistics. Almost 29 people in the United States die every day in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes. That's one person every 50 minutes. Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year. Drunk driving can have a big impact on your wallet too. You could get arrested and incur huge legal expense. You could possibly even lose your job. So what can you do to prevent drunk driving? Plan a safe ride home before you start drinking. Designate a sober driver or call a taxi. If someone you know has been drinking,

take their keys and arrange for them to get a sober ride home. We all know the consequences of driving drunk. But one thing's for sure. You're wrong if you think it's no big deal. Drive sober or get pulled over. I don't want to go too far down this path because I think it's a little bit dicey. But do you remember this offseason

when we're looking at all that cap space that the Colts had? We're thinking, all right, here we go. Like, this is it. All in. Like, they have all this money. They have the team. Here we go.

And it didn't happen. Do you think it's possible that Chris Ballard had an inkling that this might be around the corner? Well, so there's some rumors that they've known for a while, but I also think that, you know what report I thought about this morning?

Was Jim Ursay last year saying they would not trade to Kobe Brissette for a first round pick. Yeah. I thought at the time I was like, well, that is ludicrous. And I wonder if, if Andrew Luck sort of talked about giving this up a lot more than we imagined. Yeah. And the fact that it didn't leak, unlike Grankowski, unlike Calvin Johnson, the fact that it didn't leak is just a testament to, you know, Andrew Lux's a different. A, Andrew Lux's a different dude.

B, his agent is his uncle who has, I don't think has any other client's side from his. his nephew. And so he's not exactly, you know, part of the NFL media apparatus that would leak these things. And then D.M.R. and Chris Bauer are not going to say anything at that time. So it's not in retrospect a huge surprise that there would be, there would, there would not be any leaks about this kind of months and years ago. All right. I guess just to wrap up here, I mean, when you kind of think about the Andrew Luck era, what are you going to remember about Andrew Luck? Yeah. One of the most fascinating people who's ever played the game, quite frankly. I've spent a lot of time reporting on him.

I came in as an NFL writer in 2012 the same month he was drafted, and I basically spent my first four years as chronicling nothing but Andrew Luck and Tom Brady. And he gave us endless stories. And I don't think, I think there's a handful of people in this league who can talk about anything. Aaron Rogers is one of them. Malcolm Jenkins, I think Josh Norman's been in that a little bit. And he's one of them.

And again, he can do, I think his next chapter is going to be way more interesting than almost anybody else's next chapter. He can do whatever he wants. If he wants to move to Europe and just follow a German soccer team around, he can do that. He likes that stuff. So I think in five years,

we're going to have Andrew luck in our lives and it's going to be just as interesting as it is now. Yeah, I mean, he's easily one of the most fascinating people to walk into the NFL in a long time. I remember reporting a story years ago where I sat down with his academic advisor from Stanford for a while and just talked about just the way he thinks.

And it was fascinating. I mean, there are just very few people who have come into the league that have a mind like him. And it's funny because his left tackle was one of them. He was like a Rhodes Scholar candidate. Like they always, it was funny that those two guys were on the same

team because they're two of the smartest people I've ever met in sports. But from the football perspective, I just think that I'm going to look back on this and just wonder what might have been for this season for the Colts and for the last seven years. Because again, Andrew Luck was just supposed to be this thing as a prospect that we have not seen in a really long time. And it never happened. He was a really good quarterback, but it never was quite what we had imagined. And now it's never going to be. And that's what's going to stick with me. That's football. But that's football. The The problem is when you have a sport in which you can get hit, what, 253 times or whatever the number was, that all, again, it takes one time for an entire career to become derailed. It takes one hit for an entire team to have to start over again. It takes one hit for an entire city to inexplicably start booing the guy who'd given everything to them for the past seven years. This happens. It's the real tragedy of football. Football, I, is a, is, you know, it's given us our livelihoods.

I'm excited to talk about it every day, but it sucks sometimes. It absolutely sucks to play. It sucks to rehab an injury. It sucks to wake up and know how long the climb is back. I mean, both of us haven't played since freaking high school, and we remember some of the hits we took, okay? And we've, you know, one of the things that we get that people don't get is we get to stay on the sidelines and see the car wrecks that happen when there's a hit. It is unbelievable how

hard these guys hit. You would have, it is, you even go, you go to a Pittsburgh Steers practice on like July 29th. Okay. And they're doing live tackling. And you think like, oh, they're going easier or whatever. And in large, in large parts, they are going easy. But you're like, I would not survive one hit because humans, you know, Doug Whaley said it a couple of years. ago and he had to backtrack from it, but it's true. Humans are not meant to play football. And we learn that every couple of years. Yeah. And he took more punishment than anybody. So I can completely understand it from that perspective. But here we are. So in the AFC, just briefly wrapping things up here, is it just the Patriots and the Chiefs and really nothing else

at this point? Is there anybody that you think can crack this? So the Texans lost their running back last night, Lauren Miller. which is unfortunate for Lamar Miller, but I'm not sure it's the worst thing in the world for the Texans. I mean, it's better to have Lamar Miller than not have Lamar Miller.

Sure, but I mean, I think they'll be okay. Yeah, they'll be fine. I also think they absolutely should be on the heart with the Chargers.

I think the Chargers have a chance here to get their reparational. I'm already worried about them. I think the Chargers become the third best team in the AFC now. And they're a team that has already lost Derwin James that doesn't have their,

left tackle for the first however many games of the year. That's how, like, thin it is at the top of the AFC right now. It's not pretty. It's the worst thing that happens to us is that we get a Chief's Patriots AFC title game again. I'm in. Yeah, that's true. I agree. But it's still just one of those things where the AFC looks a lot different now than it did that started yesterday. I can tell you that much. Yeah, a lot of things too. All right, buddy. That's all we got. As always, guys, thank you so much for listen to the Ringer NFL show on the Ringer podcast network. We'll be back later this week with two more shows. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, guys. If you think drunk driving is no big deal, you couldn't be more wrong. You could get in a crash, people could get hurt or killed. And you could get arrested, incur huge legal expenses or even lose your job. So next time you plan on drinking, make sure you plan ahead. Designate a sober driver or use a ride service to get home safely. Drive sober or get pulled over.