With Andrew Luck announcing his shocking retirement from the NFL at the young age of 29, you start shuffling through your mind trying to think of other players who surprisingly retired very early.
Obviously, there is a long list of those guys in the NFL. Jim Brown. Barry Sanders. Calvin Johnson. Patrick Willis. The list goes on and on.
But when you start getting into other sports, like the NBA, it's harder to find those guys.
However, there were some retirements in basketball that certainly rocked the landscape, so here are five of them:
Darren Collison surely would have been signed by some team this summer. While he is far from a star, he is a decent point guard and a very solid rotation player who could absolutely get consistent minutes on a contender.
But Collison decided to pursue his faith and his family and called it quits at age 31 back in June.
The decision also happened to come right at the unofficial start of free agency, so it's entirely possible that Collison was wrestling with it for a while before ultimately deciding that basketball was no longer for him.
Collison spent 10 years in the NBA, playing for six different franchises. He finishes up his pro basketball career with lifetime averages of 12.5 points, five assists and 1.2 steals per game while shooting 47.1 percent from the floor, 39.4 percent from three-point range and 85.3 percent from the free-throw line.
He last appeared with the Indiana Pacers, where he spent the final two seasons of his NBA tenure.
4. Brandon Roy
This one was probably more sad than shocking, as it was a case of injuries eating away what should have been a very successful NBA career.
Brandon Roy entered the NBA with the Portland Trail Blazers in 2006 and instantly became one of the smoothest scorers in the league. By his third season, he was already registering 22.6 points per game while making 48 percent of his field-goal attempts, 37.7 percent of his long-distance tries and 82.4 percent of his foul shots.
But then, knee injuries started to hit.
Roy played in just 65 games during the 2009-10 campaign, and in the playoffs, he attempted to come back from knee surgery, which may have been a fatal decision.
From that point on, Brandon Roy battled constant knee issues, appearing in only 47 contests in the 2010-11 season before announcing his retirement. He tried making a comeback with the Minnesota Timberwolves a couple of years later, but it lasted just five games.
Brandon Roy ended his NBA career averaging 18.8 points, 4.7 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game. Solid numbers, but his time in the league should have been much more fruitful, and certainly much longer.
3. Isiah Thomas
Isiah Thomas is widely considered one of the best players to ever play the game, but his career actually wasn't that long.
He retired 13 years into his NBA tenure at the young age of 32 as a result of a torn Achilles he suffered during the 1993-94 campaign, which also happened to be the only season in his career that he did not make an All-Star appearance.
By now, we know how devastating Achilles injuries are, which was why there was so much trepidation surrounding Kevin Durant heading into free agency earlier this summer.
But remember: with Thomas, it wasn't just the Achilles; it was also persistent ankle injuries, so those two things together forced him out of basketball far sooner than he would have liked.
Thomas led the Detroit Pistons to two championships and ended his career with averages of 19.2 points, 9.3 assists and 1.9 steals per game. He also made the Hall of Fame to boot.
Back in November 1991, Magic Johnson shockingly announced to the world that he was HIV-positive and that he would be retiring immediately.
This came on the heels of Johnson leading the Los Angeles Lakers to the NBA Finals in 1991, where they ultimately lost to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.
While Magic Johnson may not have been as dominant as he was in the mid '80s at that time, he was still a terrific player and was coming off of an All-Star season in which he recorded 19.4 points, 12.5 assists and seven rebounds a night, so, yeah; he was still elite.
Magic Johnson was out of the NBA for four years before deciding to make a brief comeback during the 1995-96 campaign, playing in 32 games and posting 14.6 points, 6.9 assists and 5.7 boards per game before hanging it up for good.
Johnson won five championships during his career and is generally considered one of the top five players to ever play the game, boasting lifetime averages of 19.5 points, 11.2 assists and 7.2 rebounds while shooting 52 percent from the field.
1. Michael Jordan
That brings us to the most surprising retirement of all.
Shortly before the 1993-94 NBA season, Michael Jordan suddenly announced his retirement, citing his desire to follow in his father's footsteps and play baseball as his reasoning for his departure.
Jordan played minor-league baseball for the Chicago White Sox and actually played in an exhibition game against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, but things did not exactly work out in that arena.
The GOAT then returned to the NBA late in the 1995-96 campaign, but clearly was not in game shape, as the Bulls actually lost to the Orlando Magic in the playoffs.
But the following year, Jordan came back with a vengeance, and this time, Chicago swept Orlando in the postseason on its way to a championship, which began the team's second three-peat.
Remember: the Bulls had won three straight championships right before Michael Jordan announced his initial retirement.
To this day, people wonder why MJ really retired in 1993. Was it actually because he wanted to play baseball? Was he actually suspended by the NBA because of gambling issues?
We may never know for sure, but what we do know is that it was the most jarring retirement in league history.
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