Can Philip Rivers Defeat Time?

It has been reported that the Indianapolis Colts are meeting with Philip Rivers to see if they can coax him out of retirement. Alex Katson has thoughts.

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Philip Rivers retired as a Los Angeles Charger on July 21 of this year.

The timing was odd. Rivers hadn’t played a snap of NFL football — hadn’t even been on a roster — since 2020. His “official” retirement came in the first year of his eligibility for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Both Rivers and Chargers president of football operations John Spanos made it clear that his retirement ceremony had been in the works for a number of years.

“It’s really, in the past handful of years, been my desire [to retire] as a Charger. It was more so the timing,” Rivers told Chargers.com.

“He made it known back then he wanted to retire a Charger, and I obviously expressed that we would love that to happen as soon as he was ready. I think we both knew this day was coming for a few years now, but the key thing that I expressed to Philip was that I wanted the timing to be something he was good with. He had to be ready to close that door,” Spanos said in that same article.

“He’s such a competitive guy, so I’m sure the possibility of still playing might have existed for him,” Spanos said.

The timing. The possibility.

Probably the same things Rivers thought about on his 44th birthday on Monday, when it was reported that he was taking a visit to Indianapolis to try to save the team he had most recently played for.

The Timing

Rivers’ prolific fatherhood is well-documented. He has ten children — seven daughters and three sons. His oldest, Halle, was born on July 6, 2002. Colts center Tanor Bortolini, a second-year player who Rivers would be taking snaps from if he starts a game this season, was born two and a half weeks earlier, on June 18, 2002.

There are ten NFL players who were not alive when Rivers walked across the stage on April 24, 2004 as a New York Giant. Rivers will see one of them, Jaguars running back LeQuint Allen Jr., in Week 17. Another, 49ers edge rusher Mykel Williams, may be in the building in Week 16 but is currently on injured reserve.

By the way, Halle has a son. He was born in 2023, the same year Rivers and his wife, Tiffany, had their 10th child, Andrew. You might assume that Rivers would be the first grandfather to play in the NFL, should he suit up, and that feels like a fair guess.

Except that 40-year-old Brett Favre achieved that milestone in 2010 while playing for the Vikings. Favre is the only contemporary football player in that club, however, and while it’s a safe bet given the state of the league in its embryonic years that there may be another, such records are lost to history and are left as an exercise for a Jon Bois-like reader.

This picture is 20 years old. Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

The current oldest player in the league is Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who turned 42 last week. Rivers is almost two full years older than that and would enter a three-way tie with Vinny Testaverde and Warren Moon as the tenth-oldest player to ever suit up for an NFL game, should the Colts actually turn to him this season. The four oldest are all kickers. Fifth is Tom Brady. Eliminate kickers and elevate Brady to the top spot, and Rivers, Moon, and Testaverde would be tied for fourth.

Surely this cannot be a fruitful endeavor. Rivers finally closed the book in July. One of the sport’s ultimate competitors finally gave up the ghost. Surely, for as barren as the quarterback market is post-trade deadline, there must be a better option than a 44-year-old who has not been on an NFL field in five years.

Besides, we don’t really know for certain if Rivers is even in shape. He’s been busy serving as the head coach at St. Michael Catholic in Fairhope, Alabama, where his son, Gunner, is the quarterback (Gunner is a four-star recruit in the class of 2027 who 247Sports compared to… his dad).

St. Michael’s season is already over, in case you were wondering. Rivers’ squad lost to Jackson in the AHSAA Class 4A semifinals the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

But do you think that a man so embedded in the fabric of the sport isn’t ripping throws alongside his son on that field in Fairhope? Could Philip Rivers, the ever-exuberant trash talker who said that the atmosphere at Arrowhead and Mile High felt the same to him as the one in his backyard in Decatur, Alabama, ever really set the ball down and watch?

Clearly not. At least not yet.

Is Taylor Heinicke that bad? Dorian Thompson-Robinson doesn’t move you? Ben DiNucci, Nate Sudfeld, Tim Boyle? Maybe take a chance on a young passer like former Colt Jason Bean, Desmond Ridder, Hendon Hooker?

No? None of that inspires you?

I guess that’s fair.

The Possibility

That possibility that Spanos mentioned in July is not ill-founded. 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, who may now see Rivers on the opposite sideline in Week 16, has said before that Rivers was San Francisco’s ultimate fallback plan in 2023 if they had beaten the Eagles in the NFC Championship and advanced to the Super Bowl, a game Rivers has never made it to.

To have Rivers on the radar at that point was less unfathomable, but still mind-boggling. He had not played in two full seasons by then, but the 49ers were, of course, without many other options.

Trey Lance had already broken his ankle, the nail in the coffin for his tenure as San Francisco’s starting quarterback. Jimmy Garoppolo broke his foot in December, paving the way for Brock Purdy to take over and run away with the job for the years to come. But Purdy tore his UCL on the opening drive against the Eagles, returning in the second half after fourth-stringer Josh Johnson was concussed. Purdy was incapable of throwing the ball for the remainder of the game.

Nearly three years later, the Colts find themselves in a similar and perhaps even less likely situation, considering that the 49ers’ passers all at least were injured on the field.