Zak KeeferVerified account@zkeefer
Colts owner Jim Irsay says he believes Andrew Luck will have “no limitations” when training camp starts in roughly seven weeks.
12:01 PM - 12 Jun 2018 from
Indianapolis, IN
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Six days after this tweet..............Andrew Luck with be limited in training camp...........
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For Andrew Luck, It All Re-Starts Here
By
Albert Breer
June 18, 2018
It received less attention than
the dog-and-pony show with the smaller football on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, Colts quarterback Andrew Luck threw an actual NFL football. In front of everyone. Media included. And I’m told he did it again on Friday, while working out without cameras and reporters around to recount every one of his paces.
This is how Luck is going to have it for the next few months, and no one needs to apologize for the scrutiny. He’s a generational talent who carried the Colts—with a roster gutted to start the post-Peyton Manning era—to the playoffs in 2012, a playoff win in ’13 and a trip to the AFC championship game in ’14. He’s the NFL’s closest player to a LeBron James-level prospect this decade. And he was well on his way to realizing his potential like James has before he messed up his shoulder in 2015, and made it worse by playing through the injury for almost two years.
So yes, the attention is justified—Luck returning to the practice field and throwing was easily the biggest story coming out of NFL minicamps this week. And that’s where we’re going to start this week’s MMQB. We’ll get to why there are more holdouts this year, we’ll talk to Packers coach Mike McCarthy about his different handling of minicamp, and new Carolina OC Norv Turner about working with Cam Newton, and we’ll bounce around the league to find some guys who built up steam this spring and will hit training camp with a running start.
But let’s dive into Luck. Here’s four things I know…
1. Luck is deeper into his rehab without a major hiccup than he has been at any point since the initial procedure in January 2017. Last year he never got past the five-and-a-half month mark. One difference: He’s been more deliberate with his return to health this time around.
2. He’s pulled out all the stops, including going to Los Angeles to work with a mechanics coach and traveling all the way to Amsterdam for treatment, seeking alternative ways to train. Listening to the QB talk makes it sound like he found
something that works for him.
3. The upper reaches of the Colts brass privately have heard the tone we all did publicly last week, which is different from what Luck’s tone had been previously. The quarterback admitted he was lying to himself last year. And while he knows that getting back to throwing on a more regular basis will lead to soreness, he’s confident it will be just that—soreness, rather than pain. “The pain is gone, and it’s going to stay that way,” he said to reporters at minicamp. “My body doesn’t revolt, in a sense, to new things I ask.”
4. Luck’s injury is being handled like any other injury would be in the spring and summer—with the utmost care, given the acknowledgement that no one is playing a real game this weekend ... or will for another dozen weekends. To that end,
I’m told the plan is to give Luck days off in training camp, and monitor reps to simulate what his regular-season regimen will be, so he’ll be conditioned for Week 1 when he gets there.
Here‘s the flip side: Luck hasn’t done anything in any sort of team setting (11-on-11, etc.) yet—in front of media or not—besides stretching and the QB/center exchange, and that leaves just the six weeks between the start of training camp and the opener for him to re-acclimate. There hasn’t been a breakthrough moment or even much talk internally of where Luck stands physically for the staff to chew on—instead, just a call for patience.
And last year, there were no fewer than four setbacks along the way, based on what the team was saying. The Colts said he’d be ready for camp, but he wasn’t. Then they said he’d be ready for Week 1, but he wasn’t. Then they kept him off the PUP list, implying they believed he would play within the season’s first six weeks, and he didn’t. And then after the team had him throwing in October, he was shut down.
THE REST OF THE STORY
