College football season kicks off this weekend with Stanford taking on Hawaii this Saturday, Aug. 23. Stanford hired a new general manager, Andrew Luck, a familiar name on the farm and in the NFL. Raj Mathai goes one-on-one with Luck in this NBC Bay Area exclusive.
“Being on this campus, it’s sort of not to just sort of blink and look around and say, ah, what a lucky guy I am,” Luck says about returning to his alma mater.
Luck left Stanford in 2012, after finishing as the Heisman Trophy runner up, twice. Then, he was the number one pick in the NFL Draft, played seven standout seasons and earned about $100 million with the Indianapolis Colts. But, he shocked the football world in 2018 when he retired from the game at 29. He walked away because of injuries and chose family over football.
“I miss football. I wouldn’t be in this job if I didn’t miss parts of football,” Luck says. “Different than missing playing quarterback, right? More than anything … time has been one of gratitude, appreciation, you know, for the opportunities, the people.”
It’s been a whirlwind start for the new GM with a lot of shakeup in the program. He fired Stanford’s head coach Troy Taylor and hired his former Colts coach Frank Reich in March. A new athletic director, John Donahoe, the former CEO of Nike and eBay, starts in September.
“I certainly didn’t have a few of these things on my bingo card when I started the job, but look, we adjusted in many ways,” says Luck. “I know certainly we adjusted, and coach Reich’s here for the year, which has been incredible for our young men and incredible for me. We plug away, and we keep getting better as a program.”
The game is changing dramatically. Players are making big money within the billion-dollar college football industry. We asked Luck what concerns him the most about college football.
“I don’t want too much of the soul of college football to get lost, right?” says Luck. “Look, to a certain degree, it’s always been a business, right. And it’s, you know, players getting paid. It’s about time. Too much money has been made on the sport. … But we need some more rigor. I don’t mean this in a patronizing way, but we gotta protect players, you know, and I’d love some rigor around agents and representation and help to make sure where everybody’s on the same page.”
Luck says he can’t predict what the season will bring for this team, but he says he will advocate for his players.
“I’m bringing all of me. I can tell you that,” Luck says. “This is going to be a team we can all be very proud of.”
Source: NBC Bay Area