Luck provides good fortune for Stanford

DURHAM, N.C.

Andrew Luck's Heisman Trophy coronation rolled into Wallace Wade Stadium on Saturday and cruised back to Northern California one jewel closer to the crowning.

Stanford University's quarterback, who I'll risk it and say hurls footballs better than any architectural design student who's ever lived, decimated Duke's plucky - but ultimately Duke-like - Blue Devils in a 44-14 victory.

Luck threw for 290 yards and four touchdowns during a rare East Coast Cardinal sighting; Stanford crosses the country for a regular-season game about once every three years.

It was last in North Carolina in 2009, at Wake Forest in Luck's second game. Stanford, 8-5 that season, lost by a touchdown but Luck foreshadowed well you could say; he threw for two touchdowns and completed 68 percent of his passes.

This time, Stanford is sixth-ranked and a national title contender. And Luck is a redshirt junior, last year's Heisman runner-up to Cam Newton and a model for all that's right about a college game too often gone wrong.

So when Luck yielded to his most selfish desires last year, it meant stiff-arming the NFL and returning to Palo Alto for his degree and a final round of college football memories.

"I've only been around a couple of quarterbacks that see everything," Stanford coach David Shaw said. He was referring to nuances in defensive trickery, which Duke actually used early to badger Luck into an interception the Blue Devils returned for a touchdown.

But the first-year head coach fortunate enough to have Luck in his lineup could have meant any of the big pictures in which Luck operates, from classrooms to locker rooms to interview rooms.

By appearances, Luck is confident without condescension, poised without pretense, modest without manipulation. He's also 6-foot-4, 235 pounds and threads bullets to tight ends covered by safeties down the middle of the field, a classic pro connection he and massive Coby Fleener turned into a 60-yard TD.

Far be it from me to suggest - although I guess I am - some real tanking could go on come December by NFL bottom-feeders looking out for No. 1 by jockeying to draft Luck No. 1.

If the phrase "franchise quarterback" hadn't been invented somewhere along the line, you'd be looking at its namesake in Luck.

Yet "not good enough" was among Luck's first comments to the media, moments after the Cardinal - in what Luck vaguely called a recent Stanford tradition - could be heard in its locker room speed-counting to 44, its day's point total.

His unit's halting first half still irked him. He had completed 14 of 21 passes for 185 yards and two touchdowns. And the Cardinal, which even with Luck is a run-first team, had 68 more on the ground. But Stanford led only 17-7 at the half thanks partly to Luck's first interception of the season.

"We're gonna get beat if we continue to play like that."

They didn't, of course. Luck, a 71-percent passer a year ago, hit on 6 of 7 for two TDs after halftime before leaving early in the fourth quarter. And the only throw that went awry went there on purpose - Luck tossed it to a receiver double-covered in the end zone, but to a spot where only his target and not a defender could have caught it.

"Andrew makes a lot of hard throws look easy," Fleener said. "But now you kind of expect that, I guess, when you practice every day with Andrew."

Still, Luck, who was intercepted on eight of 372 throws last year, reminded that he threw that pick under a blitz; "Maybe the pressure did have a correlation to that play," is how he explained it.

And early in the third quarter Luck simply dropped the ball while running from pressure. Fortuitously, it bounced straight back to him in stride, luck that Luck disowned to reporters.

"That's bad football," Luck said. "Just a lack of attention to detail on my part."

Luck as much as anyone in college football is wedded to detail. After all, he is building something great.

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com