Working For Andrew Luck

At least one ex NFL QB loves taking feedback from a subordinate.

Trying something new here: On Sunday morning, I’ll have a big feature on Andrew Luck, the former star quarterback who is now Stanford football’s first general manager. In a lot of ways, the profile is about modern college sports and what it takes to keep up. But I’d say it’s more about a guy just trying to figure shit out in his 30s, who he is, who he wants to be, then how he can get there without fully compromising what once made him one of the best in the world at something. I hope it’s relatable (aside from the whole star athlete part). I can’t wait to share it with you all.

By the time you wake up tomorrow, you’ll be able to find the story on my writer page (click here). I also plan to fire off another newsletter to promote the link. Or if you love endangered species, it will even be in the Washington Post’s Sunday sports section.

In the meantime, though, I thought it would be fun to look at the cutting room floor. Two days with Luck in Palo Alto — plus many, many phone calls — left me with a lot of material. Below is a small sliver of the outtakes.

I didn’t take enough candid photos of Luck to spread across multiple newsletters. So here’s a shot of a fountain at Stanford. The campus made me wish I studied more in high school (or for starters, did my homework once in a while).

Working For Andrew Luck

If you follow college sports, you’ve probably noticed many schools hiring GMs for football and basketball, even though that role has typically been reserved for the pros. Some were super early to this. Stanford, as with a lot of things in the modern era, was not.

But when Stanford did add a GM for football, it did so in a progressive way, making Luck the boss boss of the program. That means he’s above the head coach, on par with the athletic director and effectively reporting to the school president. To put it in NFL terms, the president is a quasi owner and Luck is a GM in the same way John Lynch is general manager of the 49ers (just with a lot more duties beyond roster and cap management). If that seems intuitive, try to imagine Kirby Smart or Steve Sarkisian not being the most powerful person in the building. It could take a while before this model is replicated at any sort of scale.

So in the second job of his life — the first being star NFL quarterback — Luck is a manager. And so far, he has just one direct report: assistant general manager Sam Fisher, a Stanford grad (two times over) who founded a sports tech company and was more recently working as an executive coach.

Before I left Palo Alto, I interviewed Fisher, starting with a simple question: What has surprised you since starting the job in late November?

“Well I’m the first person to ever work for Andrew …” is how Fisher began, then he explained a quirk that feels specific to reporting to a former NFL QB. Luck wants Fisher to tell him when he messes up, when something could be better, even when it’s so close, almost there, but not quite right. Like, Luck wants that sort of critique really, really badly.

Now think about this from Fisher’s perspective. It’s his first time working for a football team, let alone the football team Luck led to a program-record 31 wins. Luck is all over the walls in the football offices. The team’s auditorium is named after him. Some of his awards and records are listed above the freakin’ water fountain.

Luck, to his credit, wants all of that to come down. Yet at Stanford, no matter what’s on the walls, Andrew Luck is ANDREW LUCK and Sam Fisher is just Sam Fisher. Still, Fisher has listened to his boss — good for the yearly review! — and leaned into honest feedback. Early on, after Luck finished a TV hit on The Dan Patrick Show, he asked Fisher to critique his answers. Fisher told him it was fine, great. The truth was that he had been fiddling on his laptop and not really listening.

But soon enough, Fisher watched Luck give a presentation to campus leaders and took a deep breath. The slides were too long. Luck was rambling a bit, maybe losing people in the process.

“Hey, like, overall good, but like too long,” Fisher remembered telling Luck. “The last couple answers in particular could have been shorter, 40 minutes could have been 30.”

Reflecting later, Fisher said: “It wasn’t that hard because he had been asking for it, I just didn’t have any great answers to that point. And then I thought about it more, and this is a guy who spent a lot of time in the film room having coaches point out exactly what he did wrong. Analysts and the media, too, not to mention constantly assessing himself and his performance. So yeah, it worked out.”

Naturally, the honest feedback flies both ways. This winter, while meeting with a player about the transfer portal, Luck thought Fisher could have chosen a different word to deliver a point. They talked about it afterward. Fisher agreed right away. They moved on to the next thing.

It’s not a novel approach — or at least it shouldn’t be. But Luck feels it’s critical for the culture he wants, especially for when they build out a front office beyond just the two of them. Maybe they’ll start taping their brainstorming sessions and reviewing them in the Andrew Luck Auditorium. And if Luck has his way, maybe one of those brainstorming sessions will be for that room’s new name.