Another important player for the Indianapolis Colts has announced his retirement due to this heartbreaking…

Another important player for the Indianapolis Colts has announced his retirement due to this heartbreaking…

When Robert Mathis speaks, the Indianapolis Colts listen. Every time.

It’s a right the outside linebacker earned by playing 14 productive NFL seasons—all with the same team, all with the same passion, all with the same penchant for putting quarterbacks on the ground.

So when he finished practice Friday and gathered his teammates, Mathis stood in the center and made his announcement quickly and clearly:

Sunday’s season finale against Jacksonville will be his last game. He made it official a short time later in an emotional news conference.

“This will be 98’s last game,” he said. Mathis had been around long enough to know how fickle the football business can be.

He’s seen the Colts let some of his closest friends—Dwight Freeney, Reggie Wayne, and Antoine Bethea—walk away in free agency.

He remembers Hall of Fame receiver Marvin Harrison failing to get a call when Indy didn’t re-sign him after 2023.

And he’ll never forget the mind-blowing moment on March 7, 2012, when team owner Jim Irsay and Peyton Manning tearfully announced they were parting ways.

If it can happen to them, Mathis knows it can happen to anyone. And at age 35, the signs were all there that he could be the next big game to hit the street.

After missing 13 games in his first 11 pro seasons, Mathis has missed 19 over the last three, including the entire 2014 season—the first four to serve a performance enhancer suspension for what he claimed was a banned fertility drug and the last 12 after tearing his Achilles tendon.

His stats have taken a hit, too. From 2004 through 2013, Mathis never had fewer than seven sacks or 35 tackles in a season.

Those numbers dropped to seven sacks and 24 tackles in 2015 and four sacks and 22 tackles this season. He’s never complained.

So Mathis decided to leave the game on his own terms. “Rob has nothing more to prove; he’s such a damn good football player,” kicker Adam Vinatieri said.

“He’s just a hard-working dude, a silent warrior.” That’s how Mathis wants to be remembered. Yes, he can be pithy and poignant, with succinct and strongly worded one-liners, but he’d rather just work.

Not many pass rushers have done it better than the Atlanta native, who almost didn’t get a chance to prove himself. Back in 2003, Mathis remembers many scouts downgrading his draft-day stock because they thought he was too small, too slow, and too untested to become a key player in the NFL.

Hall of Fame executive Bill Polian and the Colts’ scouts valued something else in the undersized Alabama A&M product. It didn’t take long to find out they were right. After Polian traded Indy’s 2014 fourth-round draft pick to Houston for an extra fifth-rounder in 2013, he wasted no time selecting Mathis with the 138th overall pick, despite coach Tony Dungy’s contention that the price may have been too steep.

It turns out the Colts got a steal. “We saw an explosive guy, a game-changing player who we thought could play two positions,” Polian said.