Stampede Blue
The former Colts quarterback revists the night heard around the entire football world.
Indianapolis, IN — It’s been 1,990 days since Andrew Luck’s retirement was announced. It was an evening that shocked football fans across the globe, a retirement that happened mid-game during a pre-season matchup between the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears.
While the Indianapolis Colts were aware of Luck’s plans prior to the announcement, it was ESPN’s Adam Schefter that prematurely broke the news. This, of course, ruined Andrew Luck’s opportunity to be the one to share said plans, with the bombshell in question welcoming fans who were at Lucas Oil Stadium on August 24th, 2019 to boo the superstar quarterback out of his home field for his final exit — an infamous curtain call to say the least.
After a brief sabbatical from the sport of football, Andrew Luck has since returned to the fray to become his alma mater’s, Stanford, general manager. Though down a peg at the college level, it’s near impossible to feel anything other than joy for a man who fell so broken he had to remove himself from the sport’s biggest stage.
It’s widely known that Andrew Luck possesses the smallest social media presence of any celebrity of his generation, and potentially all-time, but a multi-year in the making podcast has finally come to fruition as Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take Podcast landed Luck for an interview on their latest episode.
To start their interview with him, podcast hosts Dan ‘Big Cat’ Katz and Eric “PFT Commenter’ Sollenberger began catching up with Andrew Luck by asking various up-to-date questions about his life such as his physical health and the activities that he enjoys, his role as Stanford’s general manager, and a few other various football-related questions before diving into what most people, especially Colts fans, want to hear about from Luck — his physical degradation and mental burnout that forced its hand at early retirement.
Or in other words, to tell his side of the story that was prematurely ripped from him.
When asked by Sollenberger if football was still fun for him at the end, Andrew Luck bluntly responded, “No.” It was no secret that Luck had taken a beating during his time in Indianapolis, but this response is even more jarring when you realize that, for the first time in his career, Luck was heading into a season that featured an up-and-coming roster that included an offensive line with potential through the roof.
It was an offseason that followed a playoff-winning postseason run which had started as a 1-5 start in the regular season. The team had a first-time head coach in Frank Reich who had played a big part in the Eagles' Super Bowl win in 2018 and followed that up with the aforementioned playoff run of the century in Indianapolis in the same calendar year.
So why did Andrew Luck seemingly ‘give up’ when the pieces to the puzzle were finally found? Because in his words, “I did...
