Doyel: Andrew Luck finally has a coaching staff who deserves him

Gregg Doyel | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption Colts head coach Frank Reich talks about Andrew Luck Indianapolis Colts coach Frank Reich discusses Andrew Luck's progress on June 12, 2018. 'I confess' he has seen Luck throw an NFL regulation ball.

INDIANAPOLIS – Finally, the Indianapolis Colts are doing right by Andrew Luck.

Took them five or six years of negligence to get here, and the neglect started at the top, with owner Jim Irsay pushing out Peyton Manning after the 2011 season because he wanted to draft Andrew Luck, the child prodigy from Stanford – and then gave that child prodigy a kindergarten teacher for a coach.

No more. The corrections started at the top and have trickled down. Irsay in 2017 replaced general manager Ryan Grigson, a former offensive lineman who tried to improve Luck’s protection but flailed about for five years and made it worse, with Chris Ballard. The new GM is so serious about protecting Luck that he picked a guard (Quenton Nelson of Notre Dame) in the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft. And the second round (Braden Smith of Auburn). The Colts’ offensive line room is the deepest it has been since Luck arrived, so deep that solid young pro Joe Haeg finds himself at fourth string.

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Ballard replaced Chuck Pagano, a big-hearted but defensive-minded and decidedly old-school meathead of a coach, with Frank Reich. It might not have been the sole reason behind the hire – though I suspect it was – but Reich played the same position as Luck and played it well enough, and intelligently enough, to last 14 years as an NFL backup.

Finally, Luck is speaking the same language as his coach. And his offensive coordinator. Plus his quarterbacks coach, who happens to be his head coach, but you probably knew that: Frank Reich is Luck’s position coach.

What does it mean? Here’s a word: Everything.

For years Luck has been a salmon swimming upstream in the Colts’ building, playing for a head coach who constantly referred to him as “the quarterback” – it always jarred me that in Pagano’s mind, Adam Vinatieri was “Vinny," Darius Butler was “D-Buts,” and Andrew Luck was “the quarterback” – and playing for offensive coordinators and QB coaches who were hired because they were someone’s buddy (Pep Hamilton and Rob Chudzinski), or someone’s son (Brian Schottenheimer). Meatheads, all of them.

Now Luck is playing for a cutting-edge offensive coach, Reich, who last worked for Super Bowl-winning Doug Pederson of the Philadelphia Eagles, and with an even more innovative offensive coordinator in 36-year-old Nick Sirianni, who’s just out there as far as the way he sees and talks the game. And out there is right where the Colts need to be, to get the most out of a quarterback whose talent is superior but whose game was stagnating even before all those meatheads put him through a grinder that ultimately cost Luck the 2017 season.

Luck is throwing publicly for the first time in eight months, and until we see him playing an actual game it remains possible to wonder if he ever will, but the Colts finally have surrounded this quarterback genius with the right instructors.

Starts with Reich, whose connection to Luck runs immediately, impossibly deep. Put it like this: Three weeks ago Luck was beginning to ramp up his throwing regimen – from tennis balls to weighted balls – when he decided he needed to take the final step, if only for a moment, to show that brain of his that he could do it. Luck wanted to throw an actual NFL football. Who did he call? Not his buddy Jack Doyle, the tight end from Indianapolis, or any other teammate in town for weekly organized training activities.

Luck called Reich.

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Reaction: Luck threw a football in public and sports Twitter exploded

You understand the significance? Luck was so unsure in his own mind that he could throw a regulation NFL football – “a mental block,” he called it – that he wouldn’t do it around teammates during OTA’s. He’s private and he’s guarded, but the one person he felt he could trust with that moment was his new coach.

Reich had earned that trust by being at every Luck workout since being hired. If Luck was lifting weights or doing conditioning or just working on regaining flexibility in the shoulder, Reich was there to see it.

“Every workout,” Reich says, and not in a boastful way, but to explain why he truly believes Luck is on a progression that will culminate with starting the season-opener Sept. 9 against Cincinnati: because he’s seen the progress with his own eyes.

They played toss, coach and quarterback, two survivors of shoulder surgery.

Oh, didn’t you know? Neither did I, until Reich told me Tuesday: He had the same surgical procedure as Luck, albeit at a different point in his career. Reich had his at the end of his 14 years in the NFL, after playing the final two years with a damaged shoulder, one that required surgery – just as Luck played in 2016 with a shoulder requiring surgery – because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to come back from the brutal rehab.

“I was only backing up, but I knew I was at the end of my career and wanted to try to squeeze out another year or two,” Reich says, “just in case the rehab didn’t go well at my age.”

Reich didn’t just play Luck’s position – he had Luck’s surgery, and his rehabilitation. You think that matters to Luck? Try this quote on for size:

“Frank and I have had some really, really good conversations,” Luck said, “and will continue to have great conversations.”

Makes me wonder how many great conversations Pagano ever had with “the quarterback.”

All of it makes me wonder. How could the Colts – starting with Irsay in 2012, but trickling down to Grigson and Pagano – build an entire franchise around one player, and then put such little care into his well-being? Oh, I’m sure they all thought they were looking out for Andrew. They didn’t try to screw him up.

Screwed him up anyway.

Only now, six years into a career that is about 4,500 passing yards and one Super Bowl short of where it ought to be, does Andrew Luck have the right men around him. Listen to this comment from Reich, who wasn’t saying this to impress anyone, just saying it because it’s true. But man was I impressed, and you know it matters to Luck. Here it is, and pay special attention to the words in italics, emphasis mine:

“We plan on Andrew being the starting quarterback Week 1,” Reich said, “and here is the rhythm of the season, so let’s work to that end in mind. There is the rhythm of (throwing on) Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I can tell you how many throws a quarterback throws those days. I know exactly how many throws a guy throws when it rains, depending on the quarterback. So it’s really easy to work back from that and know that we are in control.

“Then once you get that handled (we’ll) modify that for training camp, because training camp is not a normal rhythm. So that’s what Andrew and I have been talking a lot about. How do we modify training camp to mimic the season for him? That’s why you would hear him say that training camp he is going to be all out, but the rhythm of it – we are going to try to find ways that keep it close to the rhythm of the season.”

All this talk about rhythm, and it reminds me that we’re talking about a genius-level talent at quarterback, the child prodigy now a man in search of his opus. And until a year ago, the Colts entrusted their football Mozart to a couple of quacks down the street.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.