Written by Gregg Doyel at Indy Star.com
The good news, people, is that quarterback Andrew Luck’s shoulder injury is not career-threatening. The Indianapolis Colts say so, and let’s be optimistic here:
They have to be right, eventually.
When it comes to Luck’s shoulder, the Colts have been wrong every step of the way since September 2015. That’s when his injury first sidelined him, causing him to miss two games. Here we are, 26 months later, and only now are the Colts putting Luck on injured reserve. He hasn’t played in 2017. He won’t play in 2017. Andrew Luck has the largest contract in Colts history, what was once the largest contract in NFL history, and he won’t play a down of football in 2017 …
… because of an injury that happened in 2015.
Incompetent? Oh, that’s not even a question. Of course the Colts are incompetent.
That’s not a word the Colts would use, obviously. They prefer “optimistic.”
“We all were optimistic that this was going to work out sooner than later,” says first-year general manager Chris Ballard, who inherited this mess and now is the poor sap trying to explain it. “But unfortunately the human body — everybody’s human body is different and we are where we are. There’s not much we can do about it.”
Can you imagine being an NFL free agent after this season and choosing to play for a team so, um, optimistic that it botched its quarterback position — and its quarterback — as badly as this one? Owner Jim Irsay uttered these words in October 2016, when Luck was on the injury report weekly with a shoulder injury that was a year old at that point. “He is fine,” Irsay said, “and the shoulder is something that just disappears into the woodwork when he wins his next MVP or when he wins a Super Bowl.”
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