Colts Robert Mathis: 'I am a Colt. It's part of my DNA.'

INDIANAPOLIS –  "So, what do you want to do with your life?”

Robert Mathis was 17, sitting in the guidance counselor’s office at McNair High School in Atlanta, and he wasn’t budging.

“Play in the NFL,” came his answer.

Sounds like something most 17-year-olds would say. The guidance counselor knew it was a long shot. He begged for a Plan B.

“Play in the NFL,” Mathis shot right back.

That’s Robert Nathan Mathis — short, stubborn, single-minded. The odds never mattered; neither did the naysayers. His was a career built shattering those odds, burying them like the quarterbacks he has so long detested.

Mathis announced Friday that the 209th game of his career — Sunday’s season finale against the Jacksonville Jaguars — would be his last. He is retiring after 14 gilded seasons in Indianapolis, walking away on his own terms with a legacy that ranks him as one of the best players in franchise history.

He is the NFL’s all-time leader in strip-sacks with 46. He is the Colts’ all-time sack king with 122. He is a six-time Pro Bowler, a world champion, seventh in franchise history in games played and one of just four Colts ever to play for the club for 14 seasons. The others? Johnny Unitas. Peyton Manning. Reggie Wayne.

That’s some good company.

“It’s time to step aside,” Mathis said Friday at the team’s West 56th Street facility. “The game’s been good to me. I want to walk away, not limp away. The rest of my body goes to my kids.”

“I am a Colt. I am a blue blood. A bricklayer of Lucas Oil Stadium. I’m here. I’m here forever. It’s part of my DNA.”

He was the undersized high school prospect no college wanted, so he scraped together a VHS tape of highlights and sent it out. Alabama A&M was the only school that offered a scholarship. They wanted him to be an offensive lineman.

He was the defensive end from the tiny school left off the invite list to the 2003 NFL Combine, labeled by scouts as too small and too slow, dismissed by 31 teams. He showed up for his rookie year with the Indianapolis Colts, a fifth-round draft pick no one had ever heard of, a special-teamer no one expected much of.

“I just wanted to make the team,” Mathis admits now.

Make the team? He became an all-time great.

Taken 138th overall in the 2003 draft, Mathis could very well be Bill Polian’s shrewdest pick during his 14 years with the club. The former Colts president traded up with Houston to swipe Mathis in the fifth round, and only after convincing his coach, Tony Dungy, it was a move they had to make.

“I liked Robert, but Bill loved Robert,” former coach Tony Dungy remembers. “I didn’t want to trade the pick. I just wasn’t sure. I told him, ‘Let’s just wait.’ Bill said, ‘No, we’re drafting this kid. We have to have him. He was right.”

So the Colts ended up with Mathis, who became one of the greatest to ever play for the horseshoe. The Texans used the pick on Glenn Earl, who lasted all of 37 games. Advantage: Polian.

"In 2003, he was an undersized diamond-in-the-rough draft pick," said Colts owner Jim Irsay, "and now he is a Hall of Fame candidate and future Colts Ring of Honor Inductee."

After toiling on special teams most of his rookie campaign, Mathis, 6-1 and 245 pounds, exploded in his second and third seasons, ripping a combined 23 sacks. He proved a worthy counterpart to Dwight Freeney, the Colts’ other menacing defensive end, and together they embarrassed offensive linemen for a decade. No. 98 and No. 93 became a quarterback’s worst nightmare.

“Robert has that dog in him,” Freeney said in 2015. “When we entered this league, they said you had to be 6-5, 280 pounds to play our position. If you were smaller, you were some type of hybrid linebacker. Him and I used that as fuel every time we stepped on the field.”

That fuel worked. Today, Freeney and Mathis sit 17th and 18th, respectively, on the NFL’s all-time sack chart.

In recent seasons, no Colt was more respected in the locker room than No. 98, the soft-spoken, lead-by-example-not-by-words defensive captain who bridges the Colts’ past and present. He won with Manning. He won with Andrew Luck. In his 14 seasons, he missed the playoffs just three times. Along with kicker Adam Vinatieri, he is one of the final two remaining players from the club’s Super Bowl XLI championship in February 2007.

He left an indelible mark on a franchise, a locker room, a city.

“The ultimate Colt,” Luck called him.

“The epitome of a great football player, a great teammate and a great human,” punter Pat McAfee said.

“I’m glad I wasn’t a quarterback,” Vinatieri added.

“I guarantee he has walked in this building every single day for 14 years and walked into that locker room and looked up and saw his nameplate still there and jersey number still there and said, ‘I’m going to die before I let somebody take this from me,’” an emotional Chuck Pagano said of Mathis earlier in the week.

Mathis addressed the team following Friday’s practice. Some already knew. Some didn’t. Mathis was himself: Succinct, spirited. “Pin your ears back,” he instructed them. “And let’s get a win on Sunday.”

It was a decision, he admitted, made earlier in the season. His body was speaking to him. He reached out to two close friends, former Colts Reggie Wayne and Edgerrin James, seeking their advice on how to walk away, and when.

“You don’t want to be pushed out,” Mathis said. “Still hate quarterbacks. Still wanna chase them. But my passion for chasing quarterbacks is going to always be there, but my body won’t. (Wayne and James) said, ‘Listen to your body.’ And it’s time to listen to my body.”

It was Pagano who begged Mathis to stay in early 2012, after the Colts reset the franchise, and so many of the pillars Mathis had stacked wins up next to — Manning, Gary Brackett, Jeff Saturday, Dallas Clark — were sent packing. Mathis stayed, rolling the dice on a new regime, a new quarterback and a new era.

“A leap of faith,” Pagano called it.

Mathis shifted from a 4-3 defensive end to a 3-4 rush linebacker and flourished after Pagano arrived, amassing a team record 19.5 sacks in 2013. An Achilles tear cost him his 2014 season; Mathis rehabbed and played in 29 of the Colts’ 32 games the past two seasons. But, finally, Father Time caught up to him. He totaled just 11 sacks in two years. He wasn’t the same.

He walks away Sunday at peace, a rarity in professional sports: the star who never left the city he was drafted in. He’s done it all and won it all. He exits the stadium he helped build as one of the best to ever do it.

“It’ll be weird, not putting on a 98 jersey,” Mathis said Friday. “I am Indy. Indy is me.”

What’s your Plan B? Turns out, Mathis was right.

He never needed one.

Call IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134. Follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

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