Not sure if anyone caught this article last week by Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports, but there was a fascinating quote that was sort of lost in the shuffle.

The focus of the story is former Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck returning to school to finish his degree, thus forbidding him from doing more work with his new team, the Indianapolis Colts.

Buried a few paragraphs down is a quote from second-year tackle Mike Tepper, who told Silver:

I'm told he was calling out plays like he had the whole playbook memorized, and some of the other rookies were looking around like, 'What?' Some of the guys, including the other QBs, were saying that Luck is already better than 25 of the [starting] quarterbacks in the league.

Let's do a little math: 32 quarterbacks minus 25 quarterbacks equals seven quarterbacks. Which means, according to Tepper, Luck is a top-10 quarterback in the NFL without having thrown a pass.

I'm not going to agree or disagree, I just thought it was awfully high praise considering Luck is yet to take a professional snap.

It's not exactly shocking, either, that Luck has tamed the cerebral part of the game so quickly. It's just one of the many things he excels at. It will be fun to follow this season to see how quickly he can translate what's in his head to what's happening on the field.

And so far Luck is playing it exactly how you'd expect him to, with humility and a quiet confidence. Once hammered with questions about whether he can win the Heisman or if Stanford could return to a BCS game, now he's getting the exact opposite line of questioning regarding the Colts chances of winning more than a handful of games. Here's what he told Silver:

In my eyes, you've got a lot of guys like Robert Mathis and Dwight Freeney that didn't miss the playoffs, until this past year, in their whole career," Luck said. "They're winners. What I'm trying to put on my plate is, what can I do to make sure their legacies as winners continue?

And I know that I've seen expectations that we won't do so well -- 'don't expect more than single-digit wins.' Not to discredit anyone, but I have expectations for myself, my parents have expectations for me, and my coaches and teammates have expectations. That's all that matters.

How many times this year did we hear that exact answer -- or variations of it -- from Luck? The only expectations he had to fulfill were those of his teammates, not Heisman voters. The only goals that mattered were those of the people in the locker room, not the public's.

Not sure if Luck is a top-10 quarterback yet. But he's got the sound bite delivery down just fine.