It’s a bummer but not shocked

Good thing we signed Carrie. He can play both positions.

Understood.  Any person who finds things that don't make sense to them has the right to fill in the facts with speculation and intuition.  That's called connecting the dots, IMO; and that's a big part of life and understanding things as to move forward with decision making.    The idea that is sometimes common on this forum is that people are often criticized for simply expressing an opinion, even a reasoned one, without facts or data to back it up.  That's unrealistic.  Nobody ever has the all of the facts about something before they need/want to have an opinion.     I like your theory about the pain killer addiction.  There was a selfie of him over in Europe where he looked emaciated compared to his normal 6.4 stocky build we're used to, which is how addicts will appear.  Also, while Ballard took a pretty objective look at the situation, which his is job, Irsay was the voice who seemed to leave the door open.  Jimmy had pain killer issues himself and may have been able to see some familiar signs in Luck's behavior and thought there was a greater possibility Luck might change his mind when things cleared up.   With addiction events, people are nervous about falling back into addiction, and the farther removed they are from the incident the more their confidence grows, which can change their outlook and priorities as time passes.

Per Mike Chappell.       

Not to go diving too far down this particular rabbit hole... but the bolded is a major point of variance for people. What doesn't make sense to one might be completely understandable to another. And some people will latch onto something that they don't immediately understand, and rather than trying to understand it they will assume their lack of understanding means that it fundamentally 'doesn't make sense,' and therefore something else must be up.   So a person's baseline understanding of certain issues, couple with how quickly that person can go from trusting to skeptical has a lot to do with whether they entertain alternative possibilities, and to what extent.