Familiarity between Philip Rivers and the Colts warrants such a move

Indianapolis, IN — There’s almost no way to shake the Philip Rivers signing as being the definitive best possible option moving forward, yet somehow the familiarity between him and this current Indianapolis Colts team suggests that maybe it is. The initial absurdity of such a move is undeniably valid, but when you peel back the onion, you see that moving to a 44-year-old quarterback who’s been retired for half a decade isn’t the wildest decision ever.

Will turning to a quarterback who is older than thirteen NFL head coaches, including his own, be crazy, no matter that? Understandable if so.

Los Angeles Chargers safety Derwin James, like most people, instinctively laughed at the idea of Philip Rivers returning to the fray before eventually concluding that Rivers will be fine thanks to what made him great during his original playing days.

“I’d seen that, and I was like, ‘Whoa!’ I looked at that on the TV like, ‘Whoa, what’s Phil doing?” James said to SI.com’s Gilberto Manzano about his initial reaction to the news before giving a more serious take. “I’ve got a lot of respect for Phil. He’s always got it. As long as he’s got that mind and that arm, he’ll be alright.”

James was teammates with him for two seasons (2018-2020), but Rivers’s familiarity with the Chargers cuts much deeper. It’s no secret that Colts head coach Shane Steichen crossed paths with Rivers on the Chargers, but some might be surprised to find out just how familiar they are with each other.

Starting his NFL coaching career as the Chargers’ defensive assistant coach from 2011-13, Shane Steichen didn’t have the same amount of opportunity to mesh with Rivers, on both a human and football level, that he did in a separate role later on. From 2014 to 2020, Steichen would go from Offensive Quality Control Coach (2014-16) to QBs Coach (2016-20), before eventually being named the interim OC in 2019. This timeframe allowed Steichen and Rivers to build their own rapport of sorts, with their final goodbye coming ahead of the 2020 COVID-19 season being a new chapter as Rivers left the Chargers for the Colts and Steichen became a first-time offensive coordinator in Los Angeles.

Or so they thought.

People who have continued following the NFL are aware of Shane Steichen’s upward trajectory since being a successful offensive coordinator in Philadelphia before taking his first head coaching job in Indianapolis, whereas most haven’t kept tabs on Philip Rivers since he retired.

Now that it’s important to know, Rivers indeed had been coaching high school football at St. Michael Catholic High School in Fairhope, Alabama, since retiring after the 2020 season. His team just wrapped up their season, the #2-ranked team in 4A Region 1, finishing 13-1 after being eliminated in the third round of the Alabama 4A Playoffs. The wildest wrinkle of the already bizarre story, however, is that the offense that Rivers runs is similar to that of Steichen’s current NFL version. In fact, they’re running the same offense, down to the play call.

“I do keep in contact with Shane [Steichen] a little more because we’re running the same offense. I gave Gunner [Rivers] — his son and HS QB — a play off the call sheet, and he was like ‘dang!’ because we ran that play two weeks ago in the semifinal game.”

Even future Hall of Famer and current broadcaster J.J. Watt took the opportunity to add additional insight to how this marriage between Philip Rivers and Shane Steichen can be a seamless transition when it comes to the Xs and Os of the offense, mentioning how Rivers and Steichen spoke weekly about the offense in question, discussing plays and film as a whole.

While it’s more than valid to question 44-year-old Philip Rivers’s physical limitations, his understanding of the offense at play as well as his familiarity with multiple involved parties — players, coaches, staff, etc. — points to valid reasoning of its own. Even he is aware of the laundry list of reasons as to why he shouldn’t put the pads back on, but he offered a perspective that almost singlehandedly justifies why this move was entertained at all.

“I know it’s tough. I know five years is a long time — believe me, that weighed on me a lot,” Rivers would begin explaining himself. “It is also a game that I played a long time ago and stayed in the last five years. I know that high school ball is different, but staying involved in the game [of football]. And I’ve watched the Colts and the Chargers every Sunday, about every snap, and I watch about every game there is. I know that’s not NFL preparing to play quarterback, I know that’s a far stretch from that, but it’s not like I just shut football down and am trying to pick it back up.”

As Rivers explains, this move undeniably feels bizarre on the surface, but once you break down the overall familiarity involved, the pieces of the puzzle somehow fit. This isn’t to suggest that a Super Bowl is imminent, but rather to showcase how the move in question can genuinely be viewed as a smart football move as opposed to being billed as newfound cinema amidst trying times.

Former longtime Colts center and infamous interim head coach Jeff Saturday recently offered his own perspective, likening the move to his brief coaching tenure in the 2022 regular season.

“I equate this to me coaching…I didn’t know a soul,” a flabbergasted Jeff Saturday went on. “He’s gonna walk in and not know a soul…”

While Saturday may be on to something in regards to the shell-shocking nature of both reports, he could not be more wrong when it comes to Philip Rivers’s familiarity with the roster in question. When Saturday returned to an NFL team on a whim, there was not a single rostered player with whom he shared a field, nor did he have any legitimate coaching experience. That checks out, and while you’d think it would for the most part in Rivers’s case, given it’s been half a decade, this Colts team, more specifically its offense, is largely comprised of the same key contributors that Rivers went to the playoffs alongside back in his final season in 2022.

Philip Rivers returns to an offense five years later that still features Jonathan Taylor, Quenton Nelson, and Michael Pittman Jr., offering a sense of normalcy from the jump. Other longtime Colts, such as Braden Smith (concussion protocol), DeForest Buckner, Kenny Moore II, Mo Alie-Cox, and Grover Stewart, also remain from that 2020 playoff team.

There’s still a chance that rookie quarterback Riley Leonard (knee) can play on Sunday, though it seems unlikely that this move for Philip Rivers was done solely for insurance purposes. Nobody is expecting Rivers to return to form and replicate an unforeseen comeback like the Colts pulled off with Andrew Luck back in 2018, but there is some belief that if anybody could help save the season, it’s him.