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Come with me now to Palo Alto. We’re hopping in the car to make the more than 30-mile drive south of San Francisco to the bucolic campus of Stanford University, where former NFL star Andrew Luck awaits us. The Stanford campus remains as gorgeous, and sheltered, as ever. This is the ideal setting for gifted minds to construct their own realities, and Luck remains one of the more gifted minds that the sport of football has ever produced. Smart enough to read the most complicated defenses at a glance, and smart enough to leave the NFL when he realized that the life of a pro quarterback was making both him, and his wife Nicole, miserable. You could argue that Andrew Luck was too smart for the NFL. But is he smart enough to turn Stanford football into a national powerhouse? That’s what I’m here to find out. After suddenly retiring from the Indianapolis Colts right before the 2019 season — a decision that the Colts franchise has yet to fully recover from — Luck relocated here to Palo Alto to raise a family amongst the smartypants elite of NorCal. Luck’s first order of business at Stanford, his alma mater, was to re-enroll as a grad student and earn a master’s degree. While doing that, Luck also made a soft reentry into football as a part-time volunteer coach at nearby Palo Alto High School. Finally, in 2024, he made a full reconciliation with the sport by accepting the general manager job of Stanford’s football program. As administrative gigs go, it’s not an easy one. Luck has taken over a program that hasn’t had a winning record in a full season since 2018, went crawling to the ACC in the wake of the Pac-12’s dissolution three years ago, and is still recovering from the scandalous tenure of former head coach Troy Taylor, a documented chauvinist whom Luck had to fire less than six months into his new job. The general manager position is a relatively new one in college football, one still being defined as the sport stumbles awkwardly into its new semipro incarnation. So, in a relatively short amount of time, Luck has had to hire a new coaching staff, recruit better players and, on top of all that, figure out just what the hell his job here at Stanford is supposed to be. Advertisement Article continues below this ad But if all of that work is stressing Luck out, it doesn’t show on this particular morning. I meet Luck at the university’s Arrillaga Family Sports Center, which serves as both a museum for tourists/recruits and the home of Stanford’s athletic department. You can gawk at all of the memorabilia and life-size images of Stanford sporting greats (Tiger Woods, Bill Walsh, Katie Ledecky, John Elway, Luck himself) that adorn the main floor before you walk upstairs to the football team’s offices, where Luck’s office is situated. He’s leaner than he was back in his playing days but still has the frame of a world-class athlete, including arms the size of legs. Luck’s work involves pinballing from football offices out to the practice field to consult with his new head coach (and former Stanford teammate) Tavita Pritchard, out on the recruiting trail, and back to the offices again. But Luck doesn’t come off as harried when I meet him. He seems more eager than anything. This is because Andrew Luck loves Stanford, and certainly appears to relish the chance to make its football program — which has sucked for a decade — more than just an occasional player on the national stage. This too, won’t be easy. The Cardinal is coming off of a 4-8 season under interim head coach Frank Reich, who served as Luck’s head coach in Indy during the QB’s final NFL season. Luck replaced Reich on a permanent basis with Pritchard, whose only coaching experience outside of Palo Alto was a two-year stint as QB coach for the Washington Commanders. Pritchard’s coaching tenure will open successfully a few weeks from now, with a 37-27 win over a middling Hawaii program in Week Zero. But the real opener comes in a matchup with the Miami Hurricanes, a team that made the national final last season, on Friday. That will be the game that shows the nation how far Stanford football has to go, and perhaps give us an idea whether Luck and Pritchard are the men who can lead them there. Advertisement Article continues below this ad But for now it’s still the preseason, so those stakes remain a friendly distance away. Luck leads me into his office so that we can talk about the job in front of him. I don’t get the introspective Luck that was on full display in the near aftermath of his retirement. The Andrew Luck talking to me today is in pitch mode: a bureaucrat here to sell me on his vision for a Stanford football team that has never been to the College Football Playoff and hasn’t won a conference title since 2015. This Andrew Luck has the requisite glasses/salt-and-pepper beard combination of a university administrator, and he liberally peppers his answers with the word “amazing,” as if saying it over and over will make everything so. Luck tells me he’s much more outgoing than he used to be, although his newfound extraversion doesn’t present as all that natural when we speak. It feels more like prescription socializing than anything else. But I’ll leave you, the reader, to decide that for yourself. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: How are you doing? Luck: SFGATE: What would you say is your job here? Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: What do you mean by highly competitive? Conference championships? Luck: SFGATE: Is your end goal consistent contention for national championships? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: Do you think that’s realistic? Luck: SFGATE: Have you had to go out on the recruiting trail yourself? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: Does Stanford have a specific radius for recruiting? Luck: SFGATE: Is that because of Stanford’s academic and national reputation? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: Have you talked to other GMs? Do you feel like it’s a job that’s consistent from program to program? I feel there’s a lot of figurehead GMs and then Michael Lombardi types who I don’t know what they do even. Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: No, he doesn’t have a job anymore. Luck: SFGATE: Do you do it anyway? Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: Have you been working one-on-one personally with quarterbacks, like with (Michigan transfer and starting Cardinal QB) Davis Warren in advance of this season? Luck: SFGATE: Why not be a quarterback coach? Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: You told me you expect to compete for championships. What does the Luck: SFGATE: Do you worry about how you’ll feel if you don’t succeed? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: You’re someone who, on the record, has said that you invested too much of your identity in playing football. Is there a danger of repeating yourself here by investing too much of your identity into the success of this program, even if you are not a coach or a player? Luck: SFGATE: What do you do about that danger? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: How does it feel being on the management side of the equation? How do you feel sending people out to battle now, as opposed to being the guy who was sent out to battle yourself? Luck: SFGATE: Thank you. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: No, of course. Luck: SFGATE: And dangerous. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: You’re mitigating it. Luck: SFGATE: Was there ever a time, at any point in your life where you resented football, where you did not Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: Did you get uncomfortable when people brought up football to you in that time period? Luck: SFGATE: Have you arrived at a point where you find the game to be a net good? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: What about for the world in general? Luck: SFGATE: You have two daughters. If you had a son, would you let him play tackle football? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: You don’t want to die. Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: Do you worry about your own long-term health prognosis now? Luck: SFGATE: Are you just shutting it off because it’s not anything you want to think about? Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: What about this job has surprised you for better or for worse since you’ve taken it? Luck: SFGATE: Give me some specifics about the fundraising. Are you going out to local car dealers and sweet-talking them to donate to the program? Are you hosting big events? Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: Are some of them also ex-NFL people, like alum John Elway? Luck: [He hands me an original copy of Warner’s book.] Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: Are you the one who underlined the passages in this copy? Luck: SFGATE: Did this job stress you out at first? Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: What was stressing you out specifically? Luck: SFGATE: Also, because there was very little precedent before you took the job for how to operate within this particular college sports environment, because it’s basically lawless out there. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: How much control do you have over not just the roster, but the depth chart? As opposed to coach Pritchard? Luck: SFGATE: You hired a coach in Tavita Pritchard whom you played with here. A friend. It’s much more likely that you two will be on the same wavelength anyway. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: What if you have to fire him? Luck: SFGATE: Why did you hire him to begin with? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: What proof did you feel you had that his culture-building acumen would translate into wins? When he was the offensive coordinator here, the team was not very good. Luck: SFGATE: But didn’t you already have a predisposition to react more favorably to praise for Tavita because you know him? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: You sat on the committee that was involved in hiring Troy Taylor. He ended up failing. What made you favor hiring Taylor back then? What did you learn from that that you put into hiring Tavita? Luck: SFGATE: Be specific. What is the culture of the university? When I think of Stanford, I think of you, but then I also think of Peter Thiel, Sam Altman … people who I do not necessarily believe have made the world a better place. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: You are a general Stanford fan, though. Luck: SFGATE: What’s the payroll for this year’s team? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: But as GM, you have to be cognizant of who’s getting paid, how much, and what percentage of the roster they’re taking up. Would that be fair to say? Luck: SFGATE: How do you do that? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: Is that good? Luck: SFGATE: Because at Indiana, so many of the kids on last year’s national title team were JMU transfers under Curt Cignetti. So what is the value of retention versus the instant results you might get bringing in NFL-level talent from another program? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: The team was bad last year, though (4-8 overall, 3-5 in the ACC). So why retain them? Luck: SFGATE: No, I mean it. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: OK, but it was bad. Luck: SFGATE: You could be proven wrong by season’s end. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Luck: SFGATE: I want to ask you about NFL, because you have not had a first-round draft pick come out of here since Solomon Thomas and Christian McCaffrey in 2017. Is that a problem? Luck: Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFGATE: Is that why (No. 2 overall pick in the 2026 draft) David Bailey transferred to Texas Tech? Luck: — Google is about to make a big change and it's gonna suck — There's a new contender for worst owner in sports — Congratulations, the Reflecting Pool is now a swamp Read more Drew Magary on SFGATE here or sign up for his newsletter and never miss a story.