By Steve Delahoyde on January 21, 2011 7:01 AM

If you haven’t been following the sports pages lately, particularly with regard to college football players readying themselves for the NFL draft, you might have missed the story capturing lots of news outlets’ and blogs’ attention in the form of Stanford‘s quarterback, Andrew Luck. A finalist for the coveted Heisman Trophy, the star player surprised many by announcing that he wasn’t going to throw himself into the draft so that he could finished his last two years of school. His major? Architecture. While an immediate career in professional football might have earned him in the tens of millions of dollars, the industry he’s decided to stick with for the time being has had one of its rockiest patches of the last few decades and is only now slowly (very slowly) starting to inch its way back toward recovery. Hundreds of critics have weighed in over the last couple of weeks (Luck made the announcement on the 6th), with some siding with the player/student, some taking the middle road, and others not just writing negative pieces about him, but often even leading with their disbelief, like in this piece entitled “Andrew Luck is an Idiot.” So divided are people over his decision that even Archinect‘s comments section about the news were fairly evenly split. And who knows in the end? Maybe the decision was helped to boost press, or give him another shot at the Heisman, or maybe he really does want an Architecture degree (though how far one at the undergraduate level will take him in the profession is another conversation entirely). In the end, it’s an interesting story, and if you want to spend the rest of the day reading a million opinions about it, we encourage you search his name in Google News, because there are more than a few out there.