I miss Luck
 

For all of you unemployed or retired fucks who have about 17 minutes to spare, here's a good video that should bring back great memories. With the shit show we have seen this year, and how depressing it has been, I decided to watch something that makes me feel better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQxt_j3BEvc

So yeah, I miss Luck. Can you imagine how good Luck would be with this team?

Him retiring early was such a shame. i don't blame the guy but for football fans, we fucking missed out.

F him.

You're just a ray of fuckin sunshine

Well, it does say "member" under his name.

We are 3-5 and appear headed no-where fast. Not a ton to be poppin' tops about. Ticked off because I think we actually have quite a bit of talent and can compete but are being held back by two guys and neither of them are on the field.

He had to overcome a lot... He was amazing!! Luck and Taylor would have been something special.

He had Trent Richardson. :o

He would be our best player so he might get 18 or so touches for the game.

That you are posting your “use them up” line of thinking in a thread about a great player who retired early due to injuries is pretty ironic. Nobody has said what you are claiming, but yes I 1000% wish the team had done more to protect Luck instead of expecting him to just tough it out.

He's at least half of the reason we're in this mess. He quit out of the blue and torpedoed the franchise for years to come. I'll be nice and not say anything else.

I can't help and look back at that and feel like we fucked up. Not that anyone here could have done anything about it. But the organization as a whole, that they messed it up.

Luck
 

I miss Luck also but wish him and his family all the best. Living the good life on Eagle Creek. I think its impressive that he stayed here especially since he's not from here originally. Irsay went on the cheap and didn't provide Andrew with an adequate offensive line and he took a beating.

The way we were rolling his last season I really thought we were gonna go in there and kick KCs ass, and to look back now they way he left the field and stood in the tunnel his mind was already made up

His last interview “It was a very fulfilling and rewarding season “

I remember a few weeks before the draft there were a handful of Colts fans suggesting they trade the Luck pick and draft Ryan Tannehill, not sure how much they could have gotten for that pick, but in hindsight this may have been a wise decision! I was a huge Luck fan, but the way he left this team was very damaging to the franchise....the Colts are still trying to recover from it!

That's why they got Wentz. He's the Dollar General version of Andrew Luck.

o


I don't believe that Luck's sudden departure ruined this franchise beyond the solitary season of 2019, when they had to muddle by with Jacoby Brisset at quarterback to the tune of a 7-9 record. Last year, the Colts went 11-5 with a 39 year-old Philip Rivers at quarterback. This year, as exasperating as the Colts' 3-5 record is, really isn't that much different than last year's 11-5 team. Carson Wentz missed the end of the Rams game, and subsequently a chance to pull out the victory. He was also severely hobbled in the following week's loss to the Titans. Our kicker (Rodrigo Blankenship) being injured ultimately cost us the game against the Ravens when punter Rigoberto Sanchez' 47-yard attempt sailed just a bit wide-left on the final play of regulation.

I believe that Luck was a great quarterback, but he wasn't Peyton Manning. Luck could take a below-average team and make them an average team with a record of 8-8. Manning could take a below-average team and make them a playoff team with a record of 11-5 or 12-4. Luck could take an average team and make them a playoff team with a record of 10-6 or 11-5. Manning could take an average team and make them a bona-fide Super Bowl contender.


Again, I really believe that Luck's sudden departure screwed the Colts for the 2019 season, and the 2019 season only.

o

Andrew Luck was a monumental talent who lacked the one thing that all great players bring to the field…an insatiable need to compete. Peyton had it, Brady has it, and so did every player whose bust resides in Canton.

I understand his need for a break from the constant rehabbing and his reluctance to play behind a third rate OL. But, the 2021 Colts have the best OL on the planet, along with elite talent at the skill positions. Any QB, with even a sliver of competitiveness would have leaped at the chance to stage a comeback when Irsay approached him during the offseason.

So, I wish Luck well in his retirement. He got his money, and that, apparently, was what was important to him.

If Irsay is at fault it is only because he rode with Grigson/Pagano for way too long. Unfortunately that's what post season appearances do. They delay what needs to be done and even worse getting rid of a cancer survivor in Pagano would have been frowned upon greatly, including by Colts fans. Being cheap wasn't the fault that lies with Irsay.

I don't miss him at all. I hope he and his neck beard are healthy and happy, but I'll take Carson Wentz and ride with him now.

I was about to disagree...

My thought was trading that pick would have meant keeping Manning, and restocking the team with fresh defensive players and o-line.
Kuechly or someone like that in the first round.

That would mean saving the QB pick to a future year (and likely whoever would make that trade would have to cough up a few future 1st rounders).

But then I looked at the QB classes over the next few years...

2013:
EJ Manuel, Geno Smith (wow what a shit year for QBs)
2014: Blake Bortles, Johnny Manziel, Teddy Bridgewater, Derek Carr, Garoppolo (combo of shit players and just OK players, no true franchise QBs)
2015: Jameis Winston, Marcus Mariota (I guess Winston has been OK but its unlikely we would have had the #1 pick that year...but maybe... either way I'm kinda glad he's not a colt)
2016: Goff, Wentz, Paxton Lynch (funny we might have ended up terrible in the immediate post-Manning years and ended up with Wentz anyway)

But seriously after Luck there was a 3 year run with virtually no good QBs. Derek Carr or Winston would have been the best out of that crew prior to 2016. That's just terrible.

I was screaming to keep Peyton at the time and trade that #1 for a boatload of picks. Remember, the Redskins gave up three #1's and a #2 for the next pick. Colts could have gotten even more than that. Those picks would have helped them build around Peyton again and possibly get another Lombardi before he was done. They could have then taken Russell Wilson in the third round that year too, so they could have gone that way, and Foles and Cousins went in later rounds, so they may have grabbed one of those three to develop behind Manning or, as insurance for his neck. But since Peyton also played four more years, you stretch out your search to 2016, when they may have been smart enough to get Dak before the 4th round.

It is amazing though what a QB wasteland the 2013 and 2014 drafts were for QBs. Derek Carr and Teddy Bridgewater were the only two decent choices those two years, in retrospect.

Also, if they keep Peyton, does Polian still leave? If so, then they have Grigs and Chuck running things, and Peyton dies on the field. So, that would have sucked.

I disagree with this assessment, and the evidence is his rookie year. The Colts purged a bunch of talent off of the roster in 2012 in expectation that the team would perform poorly that year. Instead they went 11-5 and got a Wild Card berth into the playoffs, largely on the strength of Andrew Luck's 7(!) Game Winning drives in the 4th quarter or overtime, which at the time was tied for the most in NFL history and was the same number as Peyton Manning had in his 2009 MVP season.

o


The Colts also went 8-8 in back-to-back seasons in 2015 and 2016.


In 2015, they did it with Matt Hasselback, Josh Freeman, and Charlie Whitehurst playing more than half the season.


http://www.jt-sw.com/football/pro/re...Teams/2015-ind



In 2016, Luck played the entire season ..... and they again went 8-8.

http://www.jt-sw.com/football/pro/re...Teams/2016-ind



Luck was great, but he was not Peyton Manning. If his career were longer, perhaps he would have done more with lesser teams and proven to be in the same vein with the likes of Manning and Dan Marino, but it wasn't.

o

The roster was getting old and over paid. Saturday, Clark, Brackett and others were essentially done. It was time to move on and rebuild.

And IIRC, peyton was owed a ton of money, huge roster bonus or something that would have precluded us from signing good players. I dont think we would have won with manning if he stayed, not SBs at least. He won in denver mostly from a killer defense.

The problem was poor choices in grigson and pagano.

Well, I didn't say I was smart. Just that i was screaming to keep Manning.

And agree on Grigson and Chuck.

The Colts are now like everyone else. Not every organization have been blessed with so many franchise QBs going back to the Baltimore days. Now they have to be really bad at the right time and make a wise pick.

They did well with Rivers but odd enough using hindsight I wish they would've signed Brady. I never thought I would say that.

I tend to agree. Going the Brady route, while sacrilegious in every sense of the word for a Colts fan, would probably have been the wiser choice for a Plethora of reasons, but mainly:

1)Brady would have been quite cheap for his production, allowing us move money for plays that.....

2)Ballers wanting to come play with Brady and win a Lombardi. If Brady had come to Indy, we would have had the cap room at the time to bring in his entourage at the time. This O would have had Gronk, AB, and likely another guy star on O. Probably would have brought in Suh and a few other aging stars to make the push.

Instead we got Rivers, another dose of TY, and Trey Burton. We spend all of our money and draft capital on O-Line and D-Line which hasn't panned out. We went cheap, to build through the draft, and the mediocrity of most of the picks has hamstrung us into the hell that is mediocrity in todays NFL. Never picking high enough to change your franchise and never picking low enough as a result of being a true contender.

But don't worry, we have a top 15 first round pick this year which will help....oh wait.

It begs the question.....What more does Carson Wentz require to be elite and make playoff runs with the Colts year after year? Definitely a WR2 opposite Pittman and a slot guy. And also an alpha dog TE. That's about it. So if what we are seeing out of Wentz now is pretty much his ceiling at this point, we probably are stuck in mediocrity town for the foreseeable future without a bit of luck falling our way.

I say fuck optics and fuck sportsmanship. If we become out of the playoff race or its even close, find a cleanup procedure for Wentz for the last 3-4 games of the season. We need to see what we have in Ehlinger as a backup. If Wentz is too fragile to be on board for this plan, then he really doesn't want to win a Lombardi and surround himself with the best possible talent going forward.

JMO

The problem with keeping Peyton at the time was that there was a hard date we had to decide, and keeping him would've tied up ~20-25% of our cap. Within several weeks of having to decide, Peyton couldn't yet throw the ball 20 yards or more, and there was no guarantee yet that he'd be able to. It was a shitty deal, timing wise. Don't remember when foisting Grigs upon us became a sure thing, but keep in mind, Polian Jr., after clearing out our top-rate scouting group over the years, had the cupboard pretty bare by this time.

Considering this, its pretty crazy that we didn't just pay Manning what was owed regardless of the risk associated with it. Considering what he did/meant for this franchise anyway. We had no issues doing so when Luck retired (albeit we had tons of cap room and a completely different management team), so why not Peyton? If he ended up being too disabled to play then sure we were screwed for the year money wise but could have rebuilt with Luck OR trade the picks for a kings ransom.
Hindsight is obviously 20/20, but I think we mismanaged this one considerably.