If it's indistinguishable to you, then you must get really mad at SNL's fake commercials.

And Andrew Luck could have sat out on IR and made his money that way too.

If you ever wonder why the country is in the state it is, consider the person who took your sarcastic post seriously has twice as many stars as you.

Of course this isn’t real. I thought we were smarter than that here.

They’re probably hoping he un-retires next year after his small little bone recovery and he’s feeling good. Better chance of that if he’s not pissed that they took all the money back.

Agreed. It’s just a stupid name for it.  They don’t call a book advance an Idea Bonus. 

I mean, I’m pretty sure a bigger reason is that the Pats won it 15 years ago.

Maybe, just maybe you shoudn’t write something as dismissive as that under a username like IceeFascism.

It’s called a signing bonus, it’s more an advance on salary designed to manipulate the cap.

A screenshot from Indiana’s Wikipedia page:

They could have easily hid behind the “it’s what the contract says!” and “we can use that money on new players!” and the fans would’ve fallen in line.

That’s a great idea, but it’s getting awfully crowded up in those rafters.

The Detroit Lions are sore losers even in articles where they aren’t the topic. Now that’s on-point marketing for you.  You can’t buy bad publicity like that; you have to charge for it.

They may hang a banner in from the rafters for this PR win.

And then the Colts get a PR win? Devious, and definitely plausible.

I think that this is a gamble that Luck might actually want to play again some day. If they burn bridges with him now, it would guarantee that he’d never come back as a Colt. This way, he just might.

+1 delayed payoff (or payout?)

I’ve always hated how they can take back some of the signing bonus.

“Sure, we could have demanded he pay us the money back. But that didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Andrew was more than just our quarterback, he was the person we rallied around after we let Peyton Manning go He brought us together: our present, our future and our glorious past. From our point of view, he helped…

Or perhaps his agent used the leverage of him potentially sitting out the whole year on IR with the calf issue to come to a reasonable compromise? I don’t know that attributing this all to the generosity of the Colts is warranted.