Former Colts QB Andrew Luck recalls the evening that his retirement was announced prematurely

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 not love football like you need to when you play quarterback. I think I also realized that you’re either all-in, or you’re not. To me, in my mind, the scheme of how you’re emotionally, physically, psychologically, and spiritually invested in quarterbacking is binary. You either aren’t, or you are 100% in and I hit the point in my life where I was unwilling to hop to the 100% end so I can’t do it.”

When it comes to the retirement announcement itself, Luck revealed that he was able to speak to the teammates closest to him prior to the mid-game reveal from Schefter, citing that players like TY Hilton, Jack Doyle, Anthony Castonzo, Quenton Nelson, Ryan Kelly, and Clayton Geathers were among them.

While Luck spoke ad nauseam about his favorite teammate in TY Hilton, he also acknowledged that his early retirement comes off as quitting on the team. Luck said, “I didn’t have a chance to tell everybody and that’s what hurts, because of being a [good] teammate, but to a certain degree I was quitting on them and I understand that. That’s hard to celebrate that — that’s a part of me that I get. It stinks and I live with that and own it. That’s okay, it’s a part of me.”

Luck would go on to describe the in-moment feeling of being on the sideline of Lucas Oil Stadium when his own retirement was spoiled for him.

Instead of revealing the news to his teammates and coaches on his own accord, Luck spent those eight last minutes of his football career huddled between three linemen who served as unofficial bodyguards so that he could maintain his composure.

It was a rather poetic conclusion to his time in Indianapolis. While the reveal itself is certainly an infamous moment that he’d surely like to get back, Luck chose to spend his waning moments as an NFL football player trusting his teammates to protect him while he thought up a diagnosis of how to move forward — the very thing that over time had beaten him down into a submissive state of no return, and yet he trusted his teammates one last time, and they delivered.