phinfan33
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if he comes out,we NEED to do whatever we have to do to get him....
Andrew Luck: The next great quarterback
Sporting News
Want to hear an all-time bad story idea? Here: Let’s walk around Stanford University with stud quarterback Andrew Luck and report all of the ways he is the Big Man on Campus.
Flaw No. 1: “The antithesis of the celebrity quarterback,” says head coach Jim Harbaugh. “The opposite of the Big Man on Campus.”
Other than that, the idea is perfect.
Luck is so self-deprecating (and maybe a shade naive) that he can’t even bring himself to admit he is recognized on campus, never mind its Big Man. Instead, he talks about the time a woman in his physics class saw his name on the class roster and thought it would be funny to see him. What’s really funny is he was standing right there.
As Luck walks around campus on a recent glorious afternoon, the only people who acknowledge him do so by name and are clearly already his friends. Well … there is one young lady working the elevator at Hoover Tower whose eyes linger on him, but that could be because he’s 6-4, 235, and, as Harbaugh puts it, “You can be 235 and flabby and soft or 235 and chiseled out of stone. He’s really put together well.”
Some women might like that kind of thing.
Flaw No. 2: This is Stanford. The Hoover Tower is named after one of two U.S. presidents who attended there. All manner of geniuses inhabit every corner of this institution, so a guy who throws a football — even if he does so utterly spectacularly — isn’t that special. “People have way better things to worry about than who the quarterback of the football team is,” Luck says. “There’s a lot of brilliant people here.” Speaking of which, Luck ran into former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice — a big football fan who teaches at Stanford—in the gym once at 6 a.m. “She was finishing her workout, and we were walking in like ...” here he makes a snoring noise before snapping to attention, “‘Oh my gosh, hello.’ It wasn’t a long conversation: ‘Good luck, how’s it going, yada yada yada.’ ”
Wait. Did he just yada-yada-yada Condoleezza Rice?
Anyway, this story will not be about Andrew Luck, Big Man on Campus. It will be about why Andrew Luck is the Next Great Quarterback.
REASON NO. 1: His arm is strong, and so is the rest of his game
Luck was born in Washington, D.C., but spent the first decade of his life living in Germany and England. His dad, Oliver Luck, played quarterback for four years for the Houston Oilers, primarily as a backup. After retiring as a player, Oliver Luck ran NFL Europe, worked as an executive for the NFL and served as president of Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamo. He was named athletic director at West Virginia, his alma mater, in June.
Growing up in Europe helped make Andrew Luck a huge fan of soccer. Asked whether he would trade his football career to be a member of the U.S. World Cup team, he laughs and says, “No, but that’s a really tough question.” Playing soccer as a boy has helped Luck play quarterback as a man. His footwork is exceptional, as are his field vision, anticipation and body control, all key skills for players of that other football.
Todd Husak works as an analyst on Stanford’s radio broadcasts and is fifth on the school’s all-time passing list. He says Luck’s nonthrowing skills already are better than most NFL quarterbacks’. “His ability to do very subtle things in the pocket, buy himself a little more time, never lose his mechanics or his ability to get the ball downfield, is what separates him from a lot of quarterbacks in the country,” Husak says.
In particular, Husak names a completion from Luck to tight end Coby Fleener in which the ball traveled roughly 40 yards down the sideline before coming down in the only place it could have in order for Fleener and only Fleener to catch it. “Just the throw itself would have been spectacular,” Husak says. “But the fact he was able to stay in throwing position while avoiding the rush — I tell you what; you hear stories where the pro scouts are stopping by and that if he were in the NFL draft this year he might have been the first guy taken. You think that’s hyperbole. But then, show me 10 NFL quarterbacks who can do that consistently. They aren’t out there.”
Luck’s advanced skills prompted his teammates to nickname him the Truth shortly after he arrived on campus. His high school teammates called him King Luck, which he didn’t like. “We were kind of teasing him, but not really,” says B.J. Griffin, a wide receiver at Stratford High School in Houston who now plays for D-III Williams College. “You hear the hype. Is he really that good? He really is that good.”
Several experts talk of seeing Luck for a short period of time and knowing immediately that he is far more developed than his age and experience would suggest. “Let me tell you a story,” says Rod Gilmore, an ESPN college football analyst and former Stanford defensive back. “My sophomore year, our starting quarterback-to-be was Turk Schonert. Turk had been around Stanford for a long time, sat behind Guy Benjamin, sat beind Steve Dils, guys who led the NCAA in passing. Turk was ready. Turk was great. We figured Turk was going to lead the country in passing also. One summer practice, John Elway shows up.”
Elway stepped in and threw one pass — that’s all Gilmore needed to see. He knew immediately that Elway was better than Schonert. “There was no doubt about him and what he was going to be,” Gilmore says. “It was the same thing with Andrew Luck. The first time I saw him in practice I said, ‘Oh, my goodness. We finally have found another one.’ ”
Don Nehlen was Oliver Luck’s coach at West Virginia. Oliver sent Nehlen video of Andrew’s high school games to get his thoughts. “I said, ‘Hey, Ollie, it doesn’t take any brains to evaluate him,’ ” Nehlen says. “The great ones jump out at you, and the lousy ones jump out at you. It was written all over him.”
REASON NO. 2: He’s a dropback passer with flair
On the walls and shelves of Harbaugh’s office are photos of such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Bo Schembechler and Dwight Schrute. They watch impassively as Harbaugh gets fired up showing, on his computer, play after play of Luck making something out of nothing. This is an underrated part of Luck’s game. Most of the talk about him involves his intelligence, arm and maturity. But that skips his playmaking ability. He finds seams where there aren’t any and contorts his body to make it and the ball do things that even upon multiple viewings don’t seem possible ... or prudent.
“Get out of bounds, Andrew.” That’s Harbaugh, offering advice seven months after the fact as Luck runs toward the sideline against Arizona State. Harbaugh stops the video. “Is there anybody open here?” he asks. Obviously not. There seem to be six or eight defenders chasing Luck and another six or eight around each receiver. The smart play for Luck is to keep running out of bounds. Instead, he ****s his arm ... “Nooo!” Harbaugh says ... and whips the ball across his body, across the field right to left, from the 25 to the 5. The ball zips as if on a wire. Receiver Ryan Whalen snatches it ... “Yes! Good job, Andrew!” Harbaugh says.
Griffin, the high school teammate, suggests checking out “shoeless QB” on YouTube. In that play, Luck
a) somehow runs out of his left shoe evading the rush, b) loses his right shoe when he jumps and spins out of the clutches of a diving defensive player, c) takes eight steps with no shoes on before d) throwing the ball 50 yards on the run as time expires at halftime of a high school homecoming game. The ball lands softly in Griffin’s hands, and he steps into the end zone for a touchdown, the first, he says, of his high school career.
Often the corresponding downside to having a risk-taking player is that those risks turn into turnovers. But Luck threw only four interceptions last season in 288 attempts. “Maybe I didn’t throw that many interceptions last year,” he says, “but the ones I did were just stupid. Things that I know I can fix. I’d like to really cut down on those mistakes.”
REASON NO. 3: As good as he was last year, the offense was not built around him — so he could put up even bigger numbers
In addition to spawning presidents and geniuses, Stanford has birthed great quarterbacks. Lots of them. Four of Luck’s predecessors won the Sammy Baugh Trophy as the nation’s best quarterback, a total second to BYU’s seven. A fifth, Jim Plunkett, won the Heisman but not the Baugh.
“It’s very humbling. It raises expectations for that position a little bit — which I’m sure anybody would like,” Luck says. “Why not put a little pressure on yourself to live up to those guys? Obviously I’m never going to live up to a Jim Plunkett or John Elway, but it’s good, I think, to raise the standards.”
Whether he will live up to Elway and Plunkett remains to be seen, but leading the Cardinal to an 8-4 regular-season record (he missed the bowl game with a broken finger), as Luck did last season as a redshirt freshman, was certainly a good start. Which brings us to the big question: Can Luck play at the same high level without star running back Toby Gerhart behind him? (Gerhart — now he was a BMOC. “I heard of him getting standing ovations in class,” Luck says.) With Gerhart gone to the NFL and Luck no longer a relative unknown, he will face defenses much more intent on stopping him — and they’ll be better prepared to do so. But he’ll also have a full year’s worth of experience of reading defenses and making split-second decisions.
“Most quarterbacks make a pretty good step forward from their first year to the second year they play,” Oliver Luck says. “Things do slow down a little bit. You understand the reads better. I think he’s going to understand the offense better, no question about it. There’s going to be more responsibility on Andrew’s shoulders, but I think he’ll be able to handle it.”
He’ll have to. This is Luck’s team now. “Through the offseason, he’s really started to emerge as more of a leader, embracing that role, not just because he’s the quarterback and he’s supposed to be, but just naturally it has come along for him,” says Whalen, the receiver who caught the pass that should not have been thrown.
REASON NO. 4: His head is as solid as his arm
People talk about him so gushingly it’s almost embarrassing. “I’ve got a 9-year-old son who just worships the ground he walks on,” says Eliot Allen, Luck’s high school football coach. “One day, wherever he ends up, he’ll be a good, solid role model for a lot of people.”
Luck was a valedictorian in high school, a fact he pooh-poohs by pointing out his school had a bazillion of them. “He’s the kind of guy who will walk into my meeting and he’ll take notes just to placate me,” Harbaugh says. “He remembers stuff almost like a photographic-type memory.”
Luck has the knowledge and work ethic of a coach’s kid without the teacher’s pet proclivities of a kid brought up to be a quarterback. That’s because he wasn’t brought up to be a quarterback. That he plays the position and so did his dad is a happy coincidence rather than a foregone conclusion. Oliver and Andrew are father and son not coach and son. They rarely talk about football. “All I’ve really told him is college football is a lot of fun,” Oliver Luck says. “You’ll make friendships that’ll last forever, and you should enjoy it.”
Andrew Luck lives that advice. He makes fun of himself, the lameness of his answers, what passes for his athleticism. All of the sunshine that has been blown up his rear so far in his young life has not made him bigheaded. If he were to start to behave in a way that suggested he believes what everyone says about him, his friends and family would remind him, colorfully, that he shouldn’t believe everything he hears.
He is as likable as a day at the beach — and takes himself about that seriously. (See: Condoleezza Rice, yada yada yada.) During the walk around campus, he wears shorts and flip-flops and on one leg sports a nasty looking strawberry. He got it playing football ... sliding to make a catch ... on a field outside his dorm. Somewhere, Harbaugh is yelling, Nooo!
Read more: http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-fo...luck-the-next-great-quarterback#ixzz15CXfHEh6
Want to hear an all-time bad story idea? Here: Let’s walk around Stanford University with stud quarterback Andrew Luck and report all of the ways he is the Big Man on Campus.
Flaw No. 1: “The antithesis of the celebrity quarterback,” says head coach Jim Harbaugh. “The opposite of the Big Man on Campus.”
Other than that, the idea is perfect.
Luck is so self-deprecating (and maybe a shade naive) that he can’t even bring himself to admit he is recognized on campus, never mind its Big Man. Instead, he talks about the time a woman in his physics class saw his name on the class roster and thought it would be funny to see him. What’s really funny is he was standing right there.
As Luck walks around campus on a recent glorious afternoon, the only people who acknowledge him do so by name and are clearly already his friends. Well … there is one young lady working the elevator at Hoover Tower whose eyes linger on him, but that could be because he’s 6-4, 235, and, as Harbaugh puts it, “You can be 235 and flabby and soft or 235 and chiseled out of stone. He’s really put together well.”
Some women might like that kind of thing.
Flaw No. 2: This is Stanford. The Hoover Tower is named after one of two U.S. presidents who attended there. All manner of geniuses inhabit every corner of this institution, so a guy who throws a football — even if he does so utterly spectacularly — isn’t that special. “People have way better things to worry about than who the quarterback of the football team is,” Luck says. “There’s a lot of brilliant people here.” Speaking of which, Luck ran into former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice — a big football fan who teaches at Stanford—in the gym once at 6 a.m. “She was finishing her workout, and we were walking in like ...” here he makes a snoring noise before snapping to attention, “‘Oh my gosh, hello.’ It wasn’t a long conversation: ‘Good luck, how’s it going, yada yada yada.’ ”
Wait. Did he just yada-yada-yada Condoleezza Rice?
Anyway, this story will not be about Andrew Luck, Big Man on Campus. It will be about why Andrew Luck is the Next Great Quarterback.
REASON NO. 1: His arm is strong, and so is the rest of his game
Luck was born in Washington, D.C., but spent the first decade of his life living in Germany and England. His dad, Oliver Luck, played quarterback for four years for the Houston Oilers, primarily as a backup. After retiring as a player, Oliver Luck ran NFL Europe, worked as an executive for the NFL and served as president of Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamo. He was named athletic director at West Virginia, his alma mater, in June.
Growing up in Europe helped make Andrew Luck a huge fan of soccer. Asked whether he would trade his football career to be a member of the U.S. World Cup team, he laughs and says, “No, but that’s a really tough question.” Playing soccer as a boy has helped Luck play quarterback as a man. His footwork is exceptional, as are his field vision, anticipation and body control, all key skills for players of that other football.
Todd Husak works as an analyst on Stanford’s radio broadcasts and is fifth on the school’s all-time passing list. He says Luck’s nonthrowing skills already are better than most NFL quarterbacks’. “His ability to do very subtle things in the pocket, buy himself a little more time, never lose his mechanics or his ability to get the ball downfield, is what separates him from a lot of quarterbacks in the country,” Husak says.
In particular, Husak names a completion from Luck to tight end Coby Fleener in which the ball traveled roughly 40 yards down the sideline before coming down in the only place it could have in order for Fleener and only Fleener to catch it. “Just the throw itself would have been spectacular,” Husak says. “But the fact he was able to stay in throwing position while avoiding the rush — I tell you what; you hear stories where the pro scouts are stopping by and that if he were in the NFL draft this year he might have been the first guy taken. You think that’s hyperbole. But then, show me 10 NFL quarterbacks who can do that consistently. They aren’t out there.”
Luck’s advanced skills prompted his teammates to nickname him the Truth shortly after he arrived on campus. His high school teammates called him King Luck, which he didn’t like. “We were kind of teasing him, but not really,” says B.J. Griffin, a wide receiver at Stratford High School in Houston who now plays for D-III Williams College. “You hear the hype. Is he really that good? He really is that good.”
Several experts talk of seeing Luck for a short period of time and knowing immediately that he is far more developed than his age and experience would suggest. “Let me tell you a story,” says Rod Gilmore, an ESPN college football analyst and former Stanford defensive back. “My sophomore year, our starting quarterback-to-be was Turk Schonert. Turk had been around Stanford for a long time, sat behind Guy Benjamin, sat beind Steve Dils, guys who led the NCAA in passing. Turk was ready. Turk was great. We figured Turk was going to lead the country in passing also. One summer practice, John Elway shows up.”
Elway stepped in and threw one pass — that’s all Gilmore needed to see. He knew immediately that Elway was better than Schonert. “There was no doubt about him and what he was going to be,” Gilmore says. “It was the same thing with Andrew Luck. The first time I saw him in practice I said, ‘Oh, my goodness. We finally have found another one.’ ”
Don Nehlen was Oliver Luck’s coach at West Virginia. Oliver sent Nehlen video of Andrew’s high school games to get his thoughts. “I said, ‘Hey, Ollie, it doesn’t take any brains to evaluate him,’ ” Nehlen says. “The great ones jump out at you, and the lousy ones jump out at you. It was written all over him.”
REASON NO. 2: He’s a dropback passer with flair
On the walls and shelves of Harbaugh’s office are photos of such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Bo Schembechler and Dwight Schrute. They watch impassively as Harbaugh gets fired up showing, on his computer, play after play of Luck making something out of nothing. This is an underrated part of Luck’s game. Most of the talk about him involves his intelligence, arm and maturity. But that skips his playmaking ability. He finds seams where there aren’t any and contorts his body to make it and the ball do things that even upon multiple viewings don’t seem possible ... or prudent.
“Get out of bounds, Andrew.” That’s Harbaugh, offering advice seven months after the fact as Luck runs toward the sideline against Arizona State. Harbaugh stops the video. “Is there anybody open here?” he asks. Obviously not. There seem to be six or eight defenders chasing Luck and another six or eight around each receiver. The smart play for Luck is to keep running out of bounds. Instead, he ****s his arm ... “Nooo!” Harbaugh says ... and whips the ball across his body, across the field right to left, from the 25 to the 5. The ball zips as if on a wire. Receiver Ryan Whalen snatches it ... “Yes! Good job, Andrew!” Harbaugh says.
Griffin, the high school teammate, suggests checking out “shoeless QB” on YouTube. In that play, Luck
a) somehow runs out of his left shoe evading the rush, b) loses his right shoe when he jumps and spins out of the clutches of a diving defensive player, c) takes eight steps with no shoes on before d) throwing the ball 50 yards on the run as time expires at halftime of a high school homecoming game. The ball lands softly in Griffin’s hands, and he steps into the end zone for a touchdown, the first, he says, of his high school career.
Often the corresponding downside to having a risk-taking player is that those risks turn into turnovers. But Luck threw only four interceptions last season in 288 attempts. “Maybe I didn’t throw that many interceptions last year,” he says, “but the ones I did were just stupid. Things that I know I can fix. I’d like to really cut down on those mistakes.”
REASON NO. 3: As good as he was last year, the offense was not built around him — so he could put up even bigger numbers
In addition to spawning presidents and geniuses, Stanford has birthed great quarterbacks. Lots of them. Four of Luck’s predecessors won the Sammy Baugh Trophy as the nation’s best quarterback, a total second to BYU’s seven. A fifth, Jim Plunkett, won the Heisman but not the Baugh.
“It’s very humbling. It raises expectations for that position a little bit — which I’m sure anybody would like,” Luck says. “Why not put a little pressure on yourself to live up to those guys? Obviously I’m never going to live up to a Jim Plunkett or John Elway, but it’s good, I think, to raise the standards.”
Whether he will live up to Elway and Plunkett remains to be seen, but leading the Cardinal to an 8-4 regular-season record (he missed the bowl game with a broken finger), as Luck did last season as a redshirt freshman, was certainly a good start. Which brings us to the big question: Can Luck play at the same high level without star running back Toby Gerhart behind him? (Gerhart — now he was a BMOC. “I heard of him getting standing ovations in class,” Luck says.) With Gerhart gone to the NFL and Luck no longer a relative unknown, he will face defenses much more intent on stopping him — and they’ll be better prepared to do so. But he’ll also have a full year’s worth of experience of reading defenses and making split-second decisions.
“Most quarterbacks make a pretty good step forward from their first year to the second year they play,” Oliver Luck says. “Things do slow down a little bit. You understand the reads better. I think he’s going to understand the offense better, no question about it. There’s going to be more responsibility on Andrew’s shoulders, but I think he’ll be able to handle it.”
He’ll have to. This is Luck’s team now. “Through the offseason, he’s really started to emerge as more of a leader, embracing that role, not just because he’s the quarterback and he’s supposed to be, but just naturally it has come along for him,” says Whalen, the receiver who caught the pass that should not have been thrown.
REASON NO. 4: His head is as solid as his arm
People talk about him so gushingly it’s almost embarrassing. “I’ve got a 9-year-old son who just worships the ground he walks on,” says Eliot Allen, Luck’s high school football coach. “One day, wherever he ends up, he’ll be a good, solid role model for a lot of people.”
Luck was a valedictorian in high school, a fact he pooh-poohs by pointing out his school had a bazillion of them. “He’s the kind of guy who will walk into my meeting and he’ll take notes just to placate me,” Harbaugh says. “He remembers stuff almost like a photographic-type memory.”
Luck has the knowledge and work ethic of a coach’s kid without the teacher’s pet proclivities of a kid brought up to be a quarterback. That’s because he wasn’t brought up to be a quarterback. That he plays the position and so did his dad is a happy coincidence rather than a foregone conclusion. Oliver and Andrew are father and son not coach and son. They rarely talk about football. “All I’ve really told him is college football is a lot of fun,” Oliver Luck says. “You’ll make friendships that’ll last forever, and you should enjoy it.”
Andrew Luck lives that advice. He makes fun of himself, the lameness of his answers, what passes for his athleticism. All of the sunshine that has been blown up his rear so far in his young life has not made him bigheaded. If he were to start to behave in a way that suggested he believes what everyone says about him, his friends and family would remind him, colorfully, that he shouldn’t believe everything he hears.
He is as likable as a day at the beach — and takes himself about that seriously. (See: Condoleezza Rice, yada yada yada.) During the walk around campus, he wears shorts and flip-flops and on one leg sports a nasty looking strawberry. He got it playing football ... sliding to make a catch ... on a field outside his dorm. Somewhere, Harbaugh is yelling, Nooo!
Read more: http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-fo...luck-the-next-great-quarterback#ixzz15CXfHEh6
