Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

Your reward, after one hell of an afternoon: a few slices of pizza and a beer. A night out to celebrate the biggest win of the season? No chance. You’re spent. So you retreat to your Downtown condo with your girlfriend, your mom and your dad. You order in. Spirits are high. This victory might just be the one that turns everything around.

“That’s who we need to be,” you said of your football team a few hours earlier, and you were right.

But it took so much. None of the 66,985 fans who packed Lucas Oil Stadium that afternoon saw the painkilling injections you’d been taking before games for weeks, shots that eased the agony of playing quarterback in the NFL with torn cartilage in two of your ribs. None knew of the guilt that weighed heavily on your mind all week. “I feel like I failed him,” you’ll later admit of Pep Hamilton, your offensive coordinator for four-plus seasons at Stanford and with the Indianapolis Colts. He'd been fired six days earlier.

But the game doesn’t stop. The game doesn’t offer sympathy. It’s second-and-9 and the best defense in football is licking its chops across the line of scrimmage in the fourth quarter of a tie game, and those 66,985 fans are waiting for you to make a play.

Then that defense is coming … coming … coming. You look. You pump-fake. You look. You pump-fake. You run. “Positive yards, positive yards,” you tell yourself. You make it 4 before a pair of Denver Broncos fold your 6-4 frame like a lawn chair. The 240-pound linebacker spears you. The 305-pound defensive lineman smashes you. His chest crushes your neck. His knee hammers your back. Those 66,985 fans? They gasp.

“Oh, did he get hit,” grumbles the radio play-by-play man.

“You gotta be a tough guy to get up from that,” adds the analyst.

But you’re a tough guy. So you get up, like you always do. You’re dazed. You’re hurting. You worry the wind has been knocked out of you. Your mind races. “How the hell am I going to call a play if I can’t speak?” you ask yourself. You breathe. Whew. You call the play. You take the snap. You backpedal — another collapsing pocket. That damn defense is coming again … coming … coming. You find the soft spot. You throw. Your running back catches, turns, scampers into the end zone. The crowd roars. The music blares. Your teammates celebrate. You don’t. You grit your teeth and lumber off the field.

“Thank God we scored,” you tell yourself. “Now I can get to the sideline and sit down.”

You play the rest of the fourth quarter, beat the best defense in football and deliver the biggest win of the season oblivious to the fact you’ve suffered an injury doctors typically only see after car crashes. But you savor the win, knowing how much it took, knowing it could be the one that lifts your team from its early-season slumber. After all, 4-5 is a hell of a lot better than 3-6. You head home, scarf down some pizza, drink a beer and fall asleep.

Then you wake up the next morning and notice there’s blood in your urine.

***

Your refuge, then, becomes a couch in West Virginia. “FIFA” battles on the Xbox with your teenage brother. Books. Lots and lots of books. You showed up at work the day after The Hit and told Colts team doctors something wasn’t right. A few hours later, they told you your season could be over. The verdict: A lacerated kidney, a partially torn abdominal muscle. The time frame: 2-6 weeks. You refuse to believe it. You’re the starting quarterback. Your team is a game below .500. You gotta play.

“Let’s get another opinion,” you tell them.

No matter. The scans aren’t lying. This is a vital organ. This is serious. Stunned by the news, you call your dad.

“Wow, really?” comes his reaction. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary the night before.

“At first, I was like, ‘I’ll be back. I’m an athlete and athletes heal quicker,’ ” Andrew Luck remembers. “But as the day wore on and the week wore on, it just sort of hit me: This is gonna take a lot longer than I thought. You’re disappointed. After that game, it just stunk.”

Luck is clear about one thing: He knows he stunk long before the Broncos’ Danny Trevathan and Vance Walker laid the punishing hit on him that ended his season two months early. He was never himself in 2015. He made some awful decisions. He made some awful throws. He was a mess. The Colts were, too.

“Personally, I know I wasn’t playing well, whether I was injured or not,” Luck admitted in a sit-down interview with IndyStar this summer. “I have some thoughts, but I don’t want to share them. I wasn’t doing a good job and it’s no one else’s fault but mine.”

Last fall tested the Colts quarterback like no other season in his football life. He missed nine games after starting the first 57 of his career. He overcame the first setback — the torn cartilage in two of his ribs and a sore shoulder that cost him two games in October — to return and nearly beat the Patriots for the first time in his career (he remains 0-5 vs. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick). He took the eventual NFC champion Panthers to overtime. Then he shook off the firing of Hamilton — not to mention a lacerated kidney — to beat the eventual Super Bowl champion Broncos. He went 5-of-7 for 64 yards and a touchdown after a vital organ was injured. It was a win needed in the worst way. It proved the Colts could beat anyone. It signaled the end of Luck’s mysterious slump.

What no one knew at the time: He wouldn’t take another snap the rest of the year.

***

Doctor’s orders came 48 hours later: Rest. Nothing more. The kidney needed time to heal. So Luck headed to West Virginia during the Colts’ bye week, where his parents — dad Oliver was WVU’s athletic director before taking an executive post at the NCAA — still own a home. His younger brother was there, finishing up his senior year of high school. The two played video games. Luck read. He slept 12 hours a day. He was a quarterback on furlough in the middle of the season. He hated it.

“He missed the game,” Oliver says of his son. “He’s been playing football every fall since he was in the fifth grade, basically. Then all of a sudden, all he can do is rest. I’m sure last season feels incomplete to him.”

The thing about Luck: More than anything, he loves the democracy of football. He craves the accountability the game demands, the fact that a team doesn’t win unless every player pulls his weight. In his mind, the starting quarterback is no more important than the left guard.

“That’s why I think it’s the greatest sport in the world,” he says. “I can never do what T.Y. (Hilton) does, but I trust him to be in the right spot at the right time. I could never do what Anthony Castonzo does — I’d have no idea! Or Robert Mathis or Erik Walden. I’m never even on the field with them. But we trust each other. It’s a two-way thing. I love that.”

Teammates can respect that. What they appreciate most about the guy they simply refer to as “12” in the locker room: his authenticity. With Luck there is no façade. Linemen don’t mind blocking for a quarterback who now rakes in an average of $23 million a year but shows up first to work every day in sandals and a hoodie, carries around a beat-up flip-phone (yes, he still has it) and a Velcro wallet with his college logo on it. Sometimes, he forgets to shave his beard. Other times, he’s just too lazy. He’s unnecessarily critical of himself but never of teammates, even if they deserve it. He detests the spotlight that comes with being a star quarterback. The man just wants to play football and go home and read a book.

Which is why 2015 ate at him the way it did. Luck was forced to stalk the sideline, to become an assistant offensive coordinator of sorts. So he did. And he gave it all he had. He watched his backup, Matt Hasselbeck, win his first four starts.

Then he watched it all go to hell.

There was the 35-point loss in Pittsburgh. The 35-point embarrassment in Jacksonville. Then the one that hurt the most: a loss to Brandon Weeden and the Texans with the division title on the line. All the while, Luck’s beard thickens. His kidney begins to heal. And his guilt grows. “You just feel like you’re letting your teammates and your coaches down,” Luck, 26, says now. “You’re used to being in control. As quarterbacks, we all have control issues.”

There it is — that accountability. For the first time as a pro, Luck couldn’t slip on his Superman suit and save the Colts. For the first time, his career wasn’t on the ascent. It had stalled. Declined. Regressed. Whatever you want to call it. He was helpless. It left him humbled. It also left him seething.

“Nothing in this league ever goes to script in the NFL,” is how he summarizes 2015. “Never, ever, ever.”

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By Christmas the rumors were swirling. The head coach was swatting off questions about his future. The general manager was Public Enemy No. 1. The owner had a decision to make. The franchise, some thought, was headed for its second reset in four years.

All the while, the star quarterback couldn’t help but wonder how much trouble he’d have saved everyone if he’d just slid that day against the Broncos.

***

The coach stays. The general manager stays. The quarterback exhales.

“I think Mr. Irsay showed a lot of guts keeping coach (Chuck) Pagano and Ryan (Grigson),” Luck says now. “I think the easy thing is to start all over, I really do. I think that was an awesome, gutsy move. I think it surprised me, but then again, I think any decision would’ve surprised me.”

The kidney heals. The doctors give him the go-ahead. Luck gets to work. He revels in the little things — his first time back in the weight room, his first throwing session, his first huddle. Man, he missed it. “How awesome is this? I can work out!” he remembers thinking. Spend half a season on the sideline after taking every meaningful snap since your sophomore year of college and you'll never take the game for granted again.

Teammates notice. “Did you see him? Oh my God!” Frank Gore said. “Last year, I didn’t see him like that.”

Insider: Andrew Luck, young core ensure Colts will contend for years

His owner notices. “I’ve never seen him more motivated …” Irsay said. “That fire is in his eye in a special way.”

Luck won’t say it, but he’s an angry quarterback entering 2016. Last season pissed him off. He threw 12 interceptions in seven games. The Colts went 2-5 with him and 6-3 without him. They missed the playoffs for the first time in four years. He fell to No. 92 in the NFL Network's Top 100. (Last year he was No. 7.) Pundits questioned his talent, his production, his decision-making. They wondered if he can even stay on the field. Irsay said the team was willing to bring in a baseball manager if that’s what it took to teach Luck to slide properly. He wasn’t kidding.

All the while Luck stayed quiet. He turned the page. He said goodbye to the only position coach he’s ever worked with in the NFL, Clyde Christensen. He said goodbye to Hasselbeck, his backup, mentor and confidant. He said goodbye to Hamilton, the coordinator he’s worked with for the bulk of his career. He said goodbye to Coby Fleener and Griff Whalen, teammates who go back to his Stanford days. It’s a new season, with a new offensive coordinator, a new quarterback coach, a new backup, a new scheme. It's the second phase of Andrew Luck's career.

In June, he signed the biggest contract in NFL history. Afterward he offered a vanilla-as-can-be, 44-word statement that ended with this: “I can’t wait for the season to start.” Make no mistake, Luck welcomes the expectations that come with $140 million. They are Manning-like expectations. No one knows that better than him.

Finally, football. Training camp inches closer. It’s been 259 days since The Hit. Luck has moved on from the disaster that was 2015. But he hasn’t forgotten.

“Motivation,” he calls it.

IndyStar reporter Stephen Holder contributed to this story. Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

Training camp opens Tuesday

The players will report to camp at Anderson University on Tuesday. Their first open practice is Wednesday afternoon; there will be a total of 11 practices open to the public. Camp runs through Aug. 11. Complete schedule here.