INDIANAPOLIS – The man who had never sat out a snap due to injury in his first three NFL seasons will now miss nine games in his fourth professional year.
Chuck Pagano has ruled Luck out for Sunday's regular season finale against the Titans.
It will be Luck's seventh straight game missed due to abdominal and kidney injuries. Luck also had to sit out Week Four and Five contests earlier this season because of a shoulder injury.
Luck has practiced on a limited basis for each of the past three weeks. He still has yet to be cleared though for team drills in practice or game action.
"I was very hopeful and optimistic about getting back to play this week," Luck said on Wednesday.
"It's sort of the same old story, I haven't been medically cleared yet. Getting better, but not good enough to go out and play a football game."
Delivering such news to Luck is a person that shouldn't be envied inside the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center.
Watch Luck on the sideline during a game and you witness a guy extremely invested from a mental, and an emotional, standpoint.
Having to spectate in critical December games hasn't been easy on Luck.
"Football players want to play football. You want to be out there playing," Luck says as he's watched his team fall out of playoff control.
"You feel like you're letting teammates down. You feel like you're letting people down. You watch Matt (Hasselbeck) and Charlie (Whitehurst) battle and fight and be warriors. I watch Frank Gore playing his butt off week in and week out, you want to be out there with those guys and when you can't it stinks."
On Wednesday, Luck wasn't in the mood for a bunch of reflection on his season.
This 2015 campaign for him has, of course, not gone according to plan, on multiple levels.
After Pro Bowl seasons in each of his first three seasons, Luck was just 2-5 as a starter in 2015.
It's now a real possibility Luck will head into his fifth NFL season looking back on a season that's been marred by an injury to an internal organ.
"I'm a bit disappointed in myself and how things went this year and wish we could have done better to date," Luck says of his own play.
"I probably know too much about kidneys now than I ever wish to know, and organs. But it's a bit of an unknown. There's not much medical history to go back on. Unfortunately, it just hasn't healed."
