Indianapolis Colts’ fans can be forgiven if they are not inclined to feel sorry for another team suffering through quarterback problems right about now.
The ill-timed torn Achilles suffered by Colts’ QB Daniel Jones has put the franchise’s future – both immediate and long-term – into serious jeopardy. Still, it must have struck some kind of sympathetic chord when Indy fans heard the statements of Cincinnati Bengals’ star quarterback Joe Burrow earlier this week.
“If I want to keep doing this,” the former Heisman Trophy winner said, “I have to have fun doing it… If it’s not fun, then what am I doing it for?”
That sounds eerily familiar to every Colts fan. Less than a decade ago, they heard their own star QB offer the same sentiments. “I haven’t been able to live the life I want to live… It’s taken the joy out of the game.” That was what Andrew Luck said when he announced his surprise retirement from the NFL shortly before his 30th birthday.
Could Joe Burrow be the next Andrew Luck?
Luck was talking about the repeated serious injuries he had suffered throughout his relatively short professional career. But there appeared to be more than the mere physical battering that led to his decision. The pressure of the game, which forces players to perform despite debilitating pain and to push recovery timelines to the extreme, took a psychological toll as well.
Virtually every serious football player has felt that acute sense of letting his teammates down when he cannot perform. That falls harder on quarterbacks than on any other position.
Burrow returned this season well ahead of schedule after needing surgery to repair a turf toe injury. When he came back, his Bengals were in trying to dig out of a serious hole and get back into the payoffs for the first time since 2022.
With Burrow, the Bengals have won three out of four games this year. Without him, they have gone 1-8. After dropping a heartbreaker to Buffalo in Week 14, the Bengals are virtually eliminated from playoff contention for the third straight year.
Their career trajectories aren’t exactly identical, but Burrow and Luck do share a lot of similarities. Burrow is in his sixth season. Luck retired after playing six seasons, though a potential seventh had been lost to injury in 2018. Both had success early, going to the playoffs multiple times. Burrow took the Bengals all the way to the Super Bowl in his second year.
And both have been battered.
During his short career, Andrew Luck suffered and lacerated kidney, torn rib cartilage, a torn labrum that required surgery and kept him out of action for an entire season, and ultimately a posterior ankle impingement that simply refused to yield. That was the final straw for Luck.
Burrow tore three different ligaments in his knee during his rookie season, and then tore a wrist ligament and dealt with turf toe that required surgery this season.
Both won the NFL comeback player of the year. Burrow actually has won it twice. It is a testament to his resilience, but a dubious achievement nonetheless. In a mere 73 career games, Joe Burrow has been sacked an astonishing 203 times. Luck only fared slightly better, going down 174 times in his 86 games.
Both Luck and Burrow have been recognized as elite players. Both have been given the tag of “franchise quarterback.” It is the single highest descriptor a QB can get. There are teams right now who have been in search of the elusive franchise QB for more than a decade.
When you think you have one and he suddenly disappears with little warning, it doesn't just set a franchise back on the field. It does something to the psyche.
After Luck departed, Indy desperately tried to manufacture QB play that could approximate what they thought they had already secured. Their strategy, to pluck established veterans who were nearing the end of their careers, resulted mostly in mediocrity for a few years. Then they took a flyer on an untested rookie in Anthony Richardson, who did not appear ready for the NFL.
For a while this year, it appeared that the club had finally caught a break with the emergence of Daniel Jones, but that hope seemed to go the way of his Achilles.
If Joe Burrow follows suit – if he decides that the constant battering is not worth the meager on-field success of the past three seasons – the Bengals, like the Colts, enter into an existential crisis that will probably take a very long time to resolve. Every struggling team likes to tell itself, “If we could only find a franchise quarterback, we’ll start winning big.”
But what happens when you find that player, and you aren’t able to surround him with a championship-caliber team? What happens when you don’t provide him with an offensive line and a game plan that can keep him healthy? What does it mean for your football team when you find you savior and he decides to call it quits long before history suggests he should?
That is a waystation that the Colts are still trying to evacuate, and one that the Bengals are dangerously close to discovering.