Andrew Luck, by my count, can become any or all of the following things now that he’s retired: a TV analyst, a football coach or executive, a professional Settlers of Catan player, the host of a Game of Thrones book podcast, an architect, a full-time book club leader, deputy commissioner of the XFL alongside his father, or just a regular dude who travels the world with his family.
Luck can be anything he wants, except the one thing everyone expected him to be: a longtime, elite NFL quarterback. He’s fine with this—he told The Athletic’s Zak Keefer this year that if his worth as a human was tied to whether he won or lost a football game, then he would have a “shitty life”—and it should be fine with basically everyone else. In the first three years of his career, Luck was knocked down—that means hit or sacked—352 times, about 60 more times than any other player during that span. He is walking away from tens of millions of dollars and, if he played long enough, possibly a hundred million dollars more in future earnings, because his body simply can’t do this anymore. There is a lot of talk about Luck walking away from his team two weeks before the season, but he made the courageous choice: He walked away from glory, fame, and money because he was honest with himself.
Luck’s retirement makes more sense the more you think about it. As laid out by Keefer, the injuries Luck suffered in his career include torn cartilage in two ribs, a torn abdomen, a lacerated kidney, a concussion, and a torn labrum. Most recently, he’s missed parts of training camp with an ankle injury. Football, like fighting sports, has far too many stories of players retiring too late and not enough of them retiring too early. Luck plays a position that requires watching ungodly hours of tape and staying at the facility for hours on end. If you’re not all in, the job gets rough very quickly. Luck was not all in because his body didn’t allow him to be. Recognizing that and acting on it is a rarity in this sport.
The game will miss Luck because he was unapologetically himself, and that is also why he’s walking away from it. Football is obsessed with a “no distraction culture,” which roughly translates to not doing anything a coach may not like. Luck never created a distraction, but he never hid who he was either, a rarity in the sport. He connected with his teammates in his own way. After Vick Ballard tore his ACL, Luck gave him the inspirational World War II epic Unbroken. He read books about concrete on team trips. He was tough as hell. He often said he liked to get hit as early as possible in a game to get the juices flowing, and he complimented players who sacked him. Toughness and intellect defined Luck’s career, and those two things led him to walk away at age 29.
Football is worse off on Sunday than it was on Saturday afternoon. The NFL is losing one of its best personalities—the guy with the flip phone, the guy who once told me he loved the Game of Thrones books so much that he wouldn’t start watching the TV show until the books were finished (he will be waiting a long time). Shortly before he signed a $140 million extension in 2016, I asked him what he would buy with his millions. He struggled to come up with something at first and then said a robot ping-pong machine so he could play whenever he wanted, even if there was no one to play against.
There are a handful of players in this league who can talk about anything on or off the field—Aaron Rodgers, Malcolm Jenkins, and Josh Norman are a few of them—but Luck was among the best. Now he gets to enter the next chapter of his life and do whatever he wants.
In the summer of 2016, the day before I started at The Ringer, I got a strange email: Andrew Luck wanted to talk to me. This happens from time to time—usually if players don’t like a story—but I found it odd since I hadn’t written about Luck in months, so there wasn’t much for him to have been mad about. When I inquired further, I was told it was about something I’d written, a 2015 story about Luck’s habit of recommending books to teammates. Luck was literally starting a book club, and he wanted to promote it. He was a guest on the first Ringer podcast I recorded in the Los Angeles studio. He talked about his love of historical fiction. He talked about the fantasy genre. He talked about everything. We ended up doing three podcasts over the course of a few years, and he is one of the most fascinating interviews in the sport. He may no longer be a football player, but he remains a fascinating person.
There will be a lot of talk about the booing in Indianapolis on Saturday night. It won’t go down as one of the great moments in Colts fans’ history. I think the reaction is a misunderstanding of Luck’s current place: If he’s ready to retire at this moment, it means he wasn’t ready for the season. It means he wasn’t hitting the ground running and the Colts weren’t marching to a Super Bowl behind his arm. Luck and the organization probably understood that things weren’t going swimmingly far earlier than Saturday night. Football is a sport that injures people, and because of that plans often change. The Colts were not meeting their fans’ expectations this season because Luck clearly wasn’t healthy. Working out those anxieties by booing a banged-up player who has admitted to peeing blood after getting hit is not an ideal move.
Rob Gronkowski, the best tight end of this era, retired for injury reasons earlier this year. Calvin Johnson, perhaps the most talented receiver of his generation, retired at 30. These things happen because football, as former Bills GM Doug Whaley once said, shouldn’t be played by humans. Luck is privileged in ways other players thinking about walking away are not: Quarterback is a uniquely lucrative position. Luck has nearly doubled the cash intake of, say, linebacker Luke Kuechly, a similarly elite player drafted in the first round of the same draft as Luck. Most NFL stars end up with a lot of money in their bank account, but Luck never has to worry about money for the rest of his life. And again, he could literally become an architect with his Stanford degree if he finds himself needing an income at some point.
Andrew Luck was a unique character in the history of the NFL, and you’ll read a lot about how he was different than many players. He certainly was, but he was also, like any player, human. He couldn’t get healthy. He couldn’t give it his all and so he walked away, knowing the consequences. He said he was in a bad place. He said he’s quite tired. He teared up. So, yeah, he’s human.
Now if George R.R. Martin could just finish those books …