I don't click on Deadspin links, so I don't know what they wrote. But a lot of this scorn for the Indy fans comes off as self-righteousness to me.
The majority of fans aren't from the SOSH demographic, where they spend their entire life reading about and analyzing the players on- and off- the field (and with the calm detachment that comes with 6 championships).
The people at an NFL preseason game are there to cheer and boo the chess pieces on the field. They've had five Coorses Light and love their team. They don't care what the players majored in at Stanford or what their investment portfolio looks like. This particular group of fans just learned that the guy they've hitched their wagon to, whose $250 jersey they just bought, who they have been dreaming about delivering them to a Super Bowl, is walking away from the team 10 days before the season. So they booed. Big deal. Andrew Luck probably isn't losing any sleep over it and neither should we.
I say this as someone who has always hated Indianapolis and the Colts. If you need more reasons to hate Colts fans, you haven't been following the Pats for the last 20 years.
I agree completely. If David Price had retired from the Red Sox at the end of spring training in 2016 or 2017, do people think Sox fans wouldn't have booed him? Shit, they were already booing him. If I'm sitting in the old Foxboro Stadium for a preseason game, in 2000, and they put on the 39 inch television that passed for a jumbotron, that Drew Bledsoe announced his retirement, you bet your ass I would have booed him.
This isn't Gronk retiring after winning 3 championships, and having to play football looking like a giant padded bionic man, at one of the most physical positions on the field. Andrew Luck was the highest paid player in the NFL at one point, and proceeded to literally not play football for almost 2 years, while making amassing the GDP of a small country. The team, and the fans stood by and waited for him to come back, and he returned last season and played great. Now, he's got an ankle sprain, and he's done? Fuck that. As a fan, I'd be fucking pissed when just as my team is about to turn the corner from mediocrity to an actual contender, he blows it all up, ten fucking days before the season? GTFO with that. To me, he sounds like a guy who simply didn't enjoy the daily grind anymore, or the bumps and bruises, and training camp bit him in the ass and he quit. He is, of course, well within his rights to do what he wants, but the fans are just as well within their rights to boo him and his decision.
As far as I'm concerned, they all deserve each other. The Colts organization, Andrew Luck and the Colts fans. They can all go back to irrelevance .