Philip Rivers's Battle Against Father Time Could Be the Story of the NFL Season

The Colts are looking to the 44-year-old quarterback to help revive their season, and we will all be watching.

Philip Rivers last played in an NFL game nearly five years ago. Now, the Colts will look to him to help their current quarterback crisis. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

We don’t need it. We absolutely, positively don’t need it. We are satiated. Satisfied. When the dessert cart rolls by, we can pat our stomachs confidently. This NFL season has been enough. The Chiefs’ dynasty has puffed out of gas. Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow may all miss the playoffs. Myles Garrett may break the single-season sack record on a team that never leads—and his quarterback for the remainder of the season (and possibly for the next five years) is Shedeur Sanders. Everyone is spitting on one another or punching their enemies in the testicles. This is the bizarro, but beautiful Season 2 of The Wire detour the NFL was in desperate need of. 

And yet, it’s impossible to ignore the draw, the pure spectacle that is a 44-year-old Philip Rivers—a real, actual, “Poppy” sweater-wearing, Canasta-playing, matinee-showing-of-Wicked-going grandfather—coming back to try to rescue this Colts season from the brink of ruin. Daniel Jones is gone. Riley Leonard is beat up. Sauce Gardner won’t be back until closer to Christmas. The Colts are so incredibly, endearingly, unquestionably all in this season that it only made sense to perform the NFL equivalent of Gran Torino and bring an old cowboy back into the fire for one last gunfight. 

Two thoughts on the matter:

• This shows, positively, that Cincinnati's ultimate failure to utilize Joe Flacco as a bridge to Joe Burrow is not dissuading teams from a continued—and maybe even irresponsible—use of hopium when even the tiniest sliver of a postseason dream exists. That’s how it should be.

• This shows that the lasting Irsay touch did not leave Indianapolis with Jim. While his ideas weren’t always perfect—hiring Jeff Saturday off television after the in-season canning of a respected head coach remains one of the more offensive decisions in recent memory—they were always full of imagination and elevated a little above the slate gray uniformity of the NFL. With Jim’s blessing, Frank Reich once, in a panic over a rapidly thinning quarterback depth chart, famously texted Andrew Luck the words to a Police song to coax him out of retirement. Working out Rivers in 2025 flexes the same kind of whimsy. And as the NFL delves deeper into a please-count-the-number-of-staples-you-use private equity world, we need more people who think like Irsay did.

While a cadre of NFL insiders cautioned that Tuesday’s workout for Rivers is just that—a test run for a man who may not have laced up a pair of cleats in a while—it’s too perfect for us to resist. The idea is fully formed in our heads. The preconceived narratives—Rivers, somehow traversing four of the best defenses in the NFL to squeeze the Colts into the playoffs—are something out of a movie we have seen a thousand times and would gladly watch again. 

Feel free to dismiss this as the ramblings of someone who is not quite Rivers’s age but cascading in that direction after every jog around the park produces an unholy throb in my Achilles. But when a soon-to-be-40-something LeBron James went unconscious against Serbia in the Olympics, we all felt something. When Justin Verlander continues to factor into MLB free agency and pummel some division-rival upstart with double digit K’s, you tip your cap knowing a little too well how horrendous his body is going to feel the next morning, but how much fun he’s having extending a purpose born in childhood deeper into a fourth decade. 

Maybe Rivers will deliver nothing but the kind of sadness that accompanied Johnny Unitas completing 44% of his passes in a handful of baseball stadium starts for the Chargers. Maybe it offers less in the way of pre-Jets Aaron Rodgers hype but the same kind of three-plays-and-out novella that is over before it starts. (And truly, has Rivers watched the Seahawks’ defense yet this year? My God.)

But, from time to time, we need to remind ourselves that, while age comes with certain limitations and our tendency to plateau mentally and physically, there is value in at least trying to flip the middle finger to the passage of time. 

How’s that for another layer to the 2025 NFL season? A new perspective on our 40s. A new fearlessness. A push to try something fresh instead of pulling on our slippers and sinking ever deeper into that overstuffed recliner.  

On second thought, yes, we’ll take the crème brulée.

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