Andrew Luck has instantly been comfortable learning the Colts' offense.

"I was more prepared to learn this offense than I was to learn the offense at Stanford coming out of high school,'' he told me. "At Stanford, I was pretty young, and we had the West Coast with some other things -- the Schembechler influence, and a little bit of the Bear Bryant influence. And as a freshman in college, it was pretty heavy.

"The tough thing here, I'd say, have been the protections. We ran one type of dropback protection at Stanford, but here there's man protection, slide protection, scat protection [no backs kept in, and man blocking by the line]. There's a protection where the TE's staying in, where the RB releases, where the center IDs the MIKE linebacker, when I ID the MIKE linebacker, where this guy's the hot guy, or another receiver's hot ... and I've got to make sure I'm on the same page as the receivers. It's tough.''