Andrew Luck on Loss to Patriots: "You Do Feel Deflated"

The talk of the NFL recently has been about Deflategate, which is the question of whether or not the New England Patriots cheated by under inflating their footballs in the AFC Championship game against the Colts.

To their credit, the Colts have, for the most part, been quiet about it.  Tight end Dwayne Allen said that "they could have played with soap for balls and beat us." Other Colts, such as head coach Chuck Pagano, didn't comment on the situation.

Last night at the Pro Bowl draft, Colts' quarterback Andrew Luck spoke to the media after being selected first overall, and he made a couple of references that could easily be taken as poking fun at Deflategate.  The funny thing, though?  He didn't mean to.

"The energy is sort of sucked out of you, you do feel deflated," Luck said when asked about the loss to the Patriots.  Some of the media gathered around the quarterback started laughing, at which point Luck realized the word he had used.  "Aw, shoot," he said, clearly not having meant to enter into the Deflategate discussion.

Luck was then asked for his thoughts on the Deflategate controversy, seeing as the Patriots were playing the Colts when they allegedly played with under inflated footballs.  "I don't know," he said.  "Things in the media tend to be blown out of proportion a little bit.  It's the nature in where we are today in society. You can't take anything away from them being a heck of a team and they are a good football team."

Luck added that every quarterback has his own preference for the footballs but that the Colts' equipment managers handle the team's footballs - in other words, it's not him.

Colts kicker Adam Vinatieri, a former Patriot, also weighed in when asked about the controversy.  He noted that the decisions were above his pay grade and that he doesn't know what happened and what didn't happen, but he said that it's an issue of fairness.  "Everybody should be able to kick the same ball, throw the same ball, (there) shouldn't be differences where that is concerned," Vinatieri said.

For the most part, the Colts are doing a great job of just avoiding the discussion altogether.  Guys like Andrew Luck and Adam Vinatieri weighed in when asked about it, and others have done the same on twitter, but the Colts ultimately realize that they were flat out eat by the Patriots and that the under inflated footballs weren't the reason for it.  There's a common misconception going around that the Colts are the ones complaining about this, but that's not the case at all.  They notified the league about it on Sunday night, but other than that they are staying as far away from it as possible - other than Luck accidentally using the word "deflated."