Yesterday, Andrew Luck completed 25 of 40 passes for just 164 yards. That is an anemic 6.56 yards per completion average, making him just the 10th player to have such a low average on 25 completions. Once again, that’s Andrew Luck, who ranked 3rd in yards per completion as a rookie in 2012, ranked 5th in the metric in both 2014 and 2016.
Luck missed 9 games in 2015 with first a shoulder injury and then an abdomen/kidney laceration. In 2016, he had a frayed labrum in the preseason, but played in 15 games, missing just one game with a concussion. And in 2017, of course, Luck missed the entire year after shoulder surgery (to, you know, repair the shoulder that caused him to miss zero games in 2016).
Since he’s returned, Luck has had three of the worst games of his career in terms of yards per completion, culminating in yesterday’s career-low. The graph below shows the yards gained per completed pass for each game of Luck’s career:
Through two weeks, Luck ranked dead last in the NFL in average air yards per pass, at just 5.14. He ranked 2nd-to-last in air yards per pass on completed passes, at 3.58. Things didn’t change much in week 3, as he averaged 6.1 air yards per pass and 3.5 air yards per completed pass.
Of his 25 completions:
- 9 were completed behind the line of scrimmage;
- 8 were completed within 5 yards of the LOS;
- 4 were completed within 7 yards of the LOS;
Luck did attempt some deep passes, but this was the third straight game of mostly dink-and-dunk from Luck (in fact, he threw more deep passes this week than in weeks 1 or 2). Take a look at his pass chart from NFL NextGen Stats:
So is something wrong with him? Probably. This isn’t the Luck we’ve seen in the past, and it’s fair to question whether or not his shoulder is truly healthy. Now we have limited information, so we have no way of knowing whether or not this is a sign of things to come or if he will soon return to old form. Only Luck and the Colts know that. But it’s clear so far that the 2018 Luck doesn’t resemble the Luck we saw prior to 2017.