Andrew Luck's retirement doesn't tell us anything about the state of football

There are a lot of rules of thumb I like to live by. One is that if the New York Times gives something a 3 percent chance of happening, it probably will. Another is that if Troy Aikman tells you that you are wrong about football, you should shut up.

When Andrew Luck, the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, announced his retirement on Saturday evening, citing his many years of injuries, he was booed at home by his own fans. Doug Gottlieb of Fox Sports described Luck's decision, evidently made with great reluctance at pretty much the last possible moment, as "the most millennial thing ever." "Total bullshit" Aikman replied.

I would be happy to rest my case here, but the Cowboys Hall of Famer was not the only current or former player who defended Luck. Frank Gore, the toughest active running back in the NFL, recalled his memories of playing with Luck in Indianapolis and talked about how difficult it is just to suit up on Sundays. Robert Griffin III, who beat out Luck for the Heisman Trophy in 2011, praised his former rival. Jim Harbaugh, who coached Luck at Stanford, quoted Kung Fu: "One of my all-time favorite players that I ever coached. His wishes are to not play right now. As far as other people and their reactions, I would say his intentions were very clear and very well spoken. I would say to not understand a man's purpose does not make him confused."

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This is pretty much all that should have to be said about Luck's decision. A number-one overall draft pick who played the game as well as anyone could have expected — taking his team to the playoffs four times, never winning fewer than eight games in any year in which he started the entire season, including an astonishing number of comeback victories — has decided that he wants to move on with his life. Good for him. Only a month shy of 30, Luck is the same age that Jim Brown was when he retired at the height of his powers in July 1966 and only slightly younger than Barry Sanders was when he quit the league in 1999.

Instead, we are being forced into some kind of meaningless national conversation. Drew Magary of Deadspin, who never sounds stupider than when he decides to put his thinking cap on, says that Luck's retirement is evidence of football's terminal decline, of the inherent cruelty and viciousness of this "unsustainable game," and, no doubt, of the Trump administration's China policy. According to Magary, in a piece with the almost impossibly pretentious title of "What Andrew Luck Means":

I don't know. If this piece is any evidence, what Luck's retirement will actually do is increase the primal urgency of Venture Capital-Funded IPA-Sipping Brocialist Men to find Things to Complain About. But that is true of pretty much anything — a random dropped pass, a solid hit, a victory or defeat by any team during any week of the season, green grass, homeostasis, the Planck constant.

Meanwhile, we are also supposed to be very concerned about the fact that a small handful of Colts fans — a lunatic minority within the already insane subset of people who actually buy tickets to preseason games and then stay for the whole thing — booed Luck as he left the field on Saturday night. Like millions of other Americans, including normal people who were enjoying the hot offense-less mess of a college opener between Florida and Miami on ESPN instead, they had just learned that their franchise quarterback was retiring two weeks before the start of the regular season. Is it really so surprising that, in those circumstances, following a close (if meaningless) loss to Chicago, some of them would react this way? Spare us the phony outrage about "bad looks."

Which is the whole problem. Football is supposed to be fun. It is supposed to be thrilling and surprising and emotional. At present a bizarre confederation of fantasy football nerds, for whom the on-field heroics exist only to make numbers go up and down on a screen, and woke sportswriters, who would like football as we know it to disappear forever, is doing everything possible to suck all the joy out of this thing.

This is something that Luck could never have been accused of during his time in the NFL. It would be hard to think of a more affable player, at his or any level of the game. Even the joyless Bill Belichick, who pretended on Monday not to have heard the news about Luck, will concede that he was a great player and a good man. We should all be wishing him the best of, argh, luck.

Everyone, especially Colts fans, should take a deep breath. Football season, the thing some of us have been waiting for since January, is here again. Let's try to enjoy it for once.