INDIANAPOLIS — A thought flashed across the mind of Philip Rivers when he saw Daniel Jones go down last week.
A thought that hadn’t crossed his mind in a while.
Watching Jones limp off the field, knowing the Colts had already lost his primary backup, Anthony Richardson, Rivers let his mind wonder.
“I wonder if Shane will call later,” Rivers remembers thinking.
A call from Shane Steichen isn’t out of the ordinary. The two men talk all the time; Rivers runs a high school version of the Indianapolis offense as the head coach at St. Michaels Catholic High in Fairhope, Ala.
The call Rivers was contemplating would be different.
What he couldn’t know at the time, sitting there and watching the rest of a 36-19 Colts loss to Jacksonville, dropping Indianapolis out of the playoff picture, was that Jones’ backup, Riley Leonard, was hurt, feeling pain in his right knee on the flight home.
Steichen and Ballard started talking.
“We were like, ‘Hey, what are we going to do?’” Steichen said. “Me and Chris were talking, and we were like, ‘Hey, let’s call Philip. See what he says.’”
The Colts are not the first team to call Rivers in a pinch.
Rivers walked away from the game after leading Indianapolis to the playoffs in 2020, deciding it was time for him to hang up his cleats, but he’s been contacted a handful of times, most notably by the 49ers, who had concrete plans to sign Rivers for Super Bowl LVII if they’d been able to get by the Eagles with their quarterback position decimated by injury.
When Rivers retired, he knew he probably had a little more to give the game as a player. That feeling hasn’t left.
“Heck yeah,” Rivers told Steichen and Ballard. “I’m interested.”
The Colts told Rivers to sleep on it. By Monday morning, when Steichen called again, Rivers was ready to start exploring the possibility.
He needed a flight.
“Well, I’ve got to get up there and throw,” Rivers told the Colts. “It’s one thing if I throw the ball here, out back, to a stationary target and it feels pretty good. Maybe y’all will look at it and go, uh uh. I want y’all to be honest.”
Rivers fired the ball around the Indianapolis indoor facility, convincing himself and the Colts that he can still throw the ball well enough.
But he still had reservations. Rivers has made 240 NFL starts; he knows throwing routes to practice-squad receivers with no defensive backs around is nothing like playing in an NFL game. Being able to move in the pocket, adjust his body to get off a throw here or there, take hits from a defender, that’s all a part of playing in the NFL.
His wife, Tiffany, was a little nervous about the physicality of the game. Rivers hasn’t played in five seasons, and he’s admittedly a little heavier than he was when he played. Working out and throwing isn’t the same as playing football.
“For 250 games or whatever it was, that was a risk,” Rivers said. “As you see every week, whether you’re 24 and in the best shape of your life, or you’re 44 and not so sure, anything can happen. … Shoot, if something like that happens, I’ve got a lot of time to recover.”
Rivers has 10 kids, ranging from adult daughters to kids in preschool. The younger ones want to see the dad they’ve heard about; the older kids remember going to games when Rivers was playing.
There were other doubts. The more Rivers thought about it, the more he wanted to play.
“I know there’s risk involved,” Rivers said. “The only way to find out is going for it.”
Rivers made the decision in an Indianapolis hotel room on Tuesday.
“As simple as can be, it’s a coach that I love, an organization that I really enjoy being with, Mr. Irsay believing in me that year in 2020 when it didn’t go so good in 2019, and shoot, the teammates I was able to play with,” Rivers said. “Shoot, 14 of them are still here. … They wanted me. I tried to keep it as simple as that.”
Rivers called Steichen and Ballard with a decision that sounded exactly like him.
“Dadgummit, let’s freaking go,” Rivers said.
A Rivers return now naturally brings up another question.
When Rivers retired at the end of the 2020 season, did he have doubts? If Ballard hadn’t said the Colts planned to evaluate all of their options at quarterback, would Rivers have come back for a second season in Indianapolis, playing in 2021 while a young quarterback sat and learned behind him?
Rivers still believes he made the right decision.
“In my gut, I think the door was going to be wide open,” Rivers said. “I was at peace. I remember where I was walking, on one of these awesome trails I got to know during that COVID year, up north. When I called (then-Colts coach Frank Reich), it was just right. I’m still at peace with when it happened, but I also left knowing I had something left in the tank. That hasn’t weighed on me over the years.”
This feels different.
The Colts believe they need Rivers, believe in his knowledge of an offense he knows intrinsically. Rivers knows Steichen and Ballard and Leonard and the entire building.
When Rivers sat in the team’s quarterback meeting on Tuesday, Steichen was transported back to his days with the Chargers.
“It’s kind of a full-circle moment, to be honest,” Steichen said. “Being back in the meeting room with him, just his energy, his passion for the game, sitting in that QB meeting yesterday talking through things, and his hand gestures and everything he’s got going. He stepped right back into it. I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, nothing’s changed.’ His brain – like I said, he’s one of the smartest players, coaches, I’ve ever been around. The way he sees the game is on a whole different level.”
Rivers has to prove he can play the game physically.
The Colts believe the arm is there. When Rivers took the field for practice in the portion open to the media, there was still zip on Rivers’ passes, but as he knows all too well, playing quarterback in the NFL is about much more than the mind and the arm, even though those are two most important attributes.
“The movement stuff in the pocket, that’s going to be the biggest thing for him,” Steichen said. “Obviously, taking drops in the pocket, feeling the pass rush, all those things.”
The Colts haven’t named Rivers the starter for Sunday’s game in Seattle yet.
Leonard is healthy enough that he practiced Wednesday, and the Colts need to get a full week of practice from Rivers, both for their own evaluation and for his.
But Indianapolis believes it needs somebody who can bring juice to the team, who can give the Colts a chance to do the improbable, shake off the loss of their starting quarterback and make good on a 7-1 start that has been derailed by injuries to their best players, the latest and heaviest blow coming when Jones tore his Achilles tendon in Jacksonville.
When Rivers sat down to watch that game, flying to an NFL city on Monday was the furthest thing from his mind.
“A game I thought I was done playing, certainly,” Rivers said. “I wasn’t really hanging onto any hope of playing again. I thought that ship had sailed.”
Then Jones went down.
“I’m not naive to the challenge that’s ahead at all, but I really keep saying, keep it that simple,” Rivers said. “I know that the NFL is a big deal and this – and it can be whatever it can be, but to me, it’s like, hey, you get to play football, potentially, for four more weeks and maybe then some. And as long as I can live with the results, both good or bad, and go back home and move on, then I was willing to go for it.”
Dadgummit.
Let’s freaking go.
Joel A. Erickson and Nathan Brown cover the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: How Philip Rivers decided to return to the Colts after five years
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