A 44-year-old grandfather who last took a professional snap when GameStop was the hottest stock in America is now preparing to potentially play quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts. It’s the most absurd experiment the NFL has seen in years. It’s almost without precedent in the modern version of the league, and it highlights the sobering reality of a franchise that’s been pushed into full-blown desperation by this season, which managed to be encouraging, and then cruel, and now is nearly lost.
The Colts have signed Philip Rivers, more than 1,800 days since his last professional game, to their practice squad. They’ve completely run out of quarterbacks and seemingly out of better options. The team and its fan base have lived a uniquely tortured existence since Andrew Luck walked away six years ago, and the organization has teetered between plodding and rash ever since. It watched its franchise QB retire in his theoretical prime during the preseason. It’s endured more quarterback turnover in six years than most teams do in a generation. And if you’re a Colts fan, you’ve probably caught yourself repeatedly asking the same half-delusional, half-hopeful question: Do you think Andrew would take the call? As it turns out, another long-retired quarterback answered the phone instead.
If Rivers has three good practices this week, he could be activated to the 53-man roster and start for the Colts on Sunday against the Seahawks in a last-ditch effort to save their quickly collapsing campaign. He’s the last quarterback to have given Indy a complete season of quality play. Rivers announced his retirement in January 2021 and turned down an opportunity to rejoin the NFL and play for the Saints later that year. Which raises a question: Why would he try to return now? If he joins the active roster, he’ll forfeit his chance to join the Hall of Fame in 2026. While he’s already been named a semifinalist for the upcoming class, he wouldn’t be eligible for five more years if he became an active player.
The Return of Philip Rivers
The 44-year-old isn’t just fighting against his age. There’s almost nothing in NFL history that suggests that someone who’s been out of the league this long can effectively pilot a professional offense. But if rookie sixth-round draft pick Riley Leonard is unable to play on Sunday (he’s dealing with a knee injury), there’s no evidence that Brett Rypien—a 2019 undrafted free agent from the practice squad and the only other quarterback who’s currently on the active roster—can run this offense, either.
Only four full-time quarterbacks in league history have started a game after turning 44: Warren Moon, Vinny Testaverde, Tom Brady, and Steve DeBerg. Brady is the only one with anything resembling success at that age, and he wasn’t coming off a five-year hiatus spent coaching high school football. DeBerg is the closest relevant example: A journeyman who retired in 1993, he unretired five years later and made one start for the 1998 Falcons. It went about how you’d expect. He finished 9-of-20 passing and had two turnovers and three sacks in a 28-3 loss. And unlike Rivers, DeBerg had the added advantage of being Atlanta’s backup quarterback all season long.
While signing Rivers could be framed as an outrageous gamble by the Colts, it can’t really be a gamble if there’s nothing left for the franchise to lose. Indianapolis is still technically in the playoff picture at 8-5, but its hopes are fading fast: The Athletic’s postseason simulator gives it just a 20 percent chance of making the field, and it plays four likely playoff teams (the Seahawks, 49ers, Jaguars, and Texans) in the next four weeks.
Take the shock value out of this for a second. How much worse could Rivers be than Max Brosmer, who threw an underhanded pick-six as one of four interceptions in the Vikings’ 26-0 loss to Seattle on November 30? How much worse could he be than undrafted rookie Brady Cook, who went 14-of-30 passing and had two picks for the Jets in Week 14 after Tyrod Taylor got injured? The Bengals traded for the 40-year-old Joe Flacco in October because Jake Browning seemed incapable of running their offense while Joe Burrow was hurt. Basically every week, some team starts a terrible quarterback who was pulled off a practice squad—it’s just not usually an 8-5 team, and not usually a quarterback who hasn’t played pro football in five years.
Remember, this is not even the first time the Colts organization has shocked everyone by pulling a former player from outside the franchise into a key role. Late owner Jim Irsay hired Jeff Saturday off the ESPN set to serve as interim head coach of the 2022 Colts for the final eight games of that season. And the Colts actually won his first game in charge, before losing the final seven in increasingly embarrassing fashion.
When The Athletic ran a fan poll in the preseason, the Colts fan base had the least hope of any in the league. Their optimism level was a staggeringly low 6.8 percent. But then the first nine games went so well that Chris Ballard, Indy’s notoriously risk-averse general manager, traded two future first-round picks to acquire shutdown cornerback Sauce Gardner. Since that trade, the Colts have gone 1-3; Daniel Jones reportedly broke the fibula in his left leg and then tore the Achilles in his right leg while trying to play through the fibula injury; Anthony Richardson, the quarterback the team selected fourth in 2023, has remained out with an orbital bone fracture that happened in a freak pregame accident; and Gardner strained his calf in the first half of Week 13 and has missed the past two games. Ballard pushed all of his chips into the middle of the table at the trade deadline because he had what he thought could be a winning hand. He immediately lost on a bad beat. Signing Rivers is akin to trying to bum a few chips off a friend so that he can keep his place at the table, but he knows full well he’s almost certainly going bust.
When Rivers last played for the Colts in 2020, the team went 11-5 and ranked 11th in EPA per dropback. It’s the most efficient full-season passing offense the Colts have had in the six years since Luck retired in 2019. Indianapolis head coach Shane Steichen worked closely with Rivers when Steichen was on the Chargers coaching staff from 2014 to 2019. They are friends who talk often, and Rivers reportedly ran Steichen’s style of offense as a coach at St. Michael Catholic High School in Alabama. An NFL offense can’t be successful unless there’s a symbiotic relationship between the quarterback and the offensive play caller, and it’s clear that Steichen must trust and know Rivers more than anyone else the Colts could have brought into the organization this week.
From a mental standpoint, it seems possible that Rivers could use his incredible football acumen to quickly adapt to the Colts playbook. But that’s not where the challenge lies. The Colts’ next game comes on the road against the Seahawks, who have one of the league’s top defenses, featuring a ferocious pass rush. Even in 2020, Rivers’s lack of mobility and declining arm strength were issues that the coaching staff had to scheme around. That offense relied on the quick passing game, and Rivers ranked 28th out of 37 quarterbacks in average depth of target. He’ll have to prove in practice that he still has the arm strength to play in the NFL. Then there are concerns about how he’ll respond to getting hit and whether he’s mobile enough to maneuver in the pocket—two questions that wouldn’t be answered until kickoff on Sunday.
Looking Back at Rivers’s Last Time in the League
If Rivers is activated, the Colts game this weekend would become must-see TV. Part of that is because of pure nostalgia; another part is due to morbid curiosity. Just like last year, when we watched Mike Tyson and hoped he would have some juice against Jake Paul, it would be easy to root for Rivers to tap into his old form and give us some iconic trash talk and touchdowns. In Tyson’s case, it took only one round before it became clear that he no longer had the physical ability to compete. With Rivers, it may take only one or two pressured dropbacks. But the Colts may be giving him that opportunity. They adjusted their schedule to get him into a full practice on Wednesday.
No matter how this experiment ends, Rivers’s return for a handful of games to finish the 2025 season serves as the perfect bookend to the Colts’ past five years. A franchise that was a consistent winner for most of the first 20 years of the century has descended into the doldrums of mediocrity for the better part of a decade. But maybe all is not lost. This could, and likely will, blow up immediately in everyone’s faces. But the experiment still matters. The spectacle of Rivers lining up behind center on Sunday afternoon would be not only captivating but also historic.
