Never Too Late.*

*It is absolutely too late

Dec 10, 2025

Thanks for reading The Dope.

Hey, first of all, no problem. It’s only been five years since Philip Rivers last took a snap in the NFL, and he is only 44 years old, having played, let’s see here, no football at all during that interim, and he has been coaching one of his sons in high school, which is cool, so that’ll probably also protect him from harm, and, you know, insert your own thoughts here.

Go get ‘em, pops!

I mean that literally. Rivers is the father of 10.

(He’s also a grandpa.)

Anyway, I understand what the Indianapolis Colts are up to. They’re straight out of ideas. They’ve got a playoff-competitive team, 8-5 with four games left. They’ve run through eleventy-seven quarterbacks in the last couple of minutes. A bunch of people in the organization know Rivers, who is, umm…available.

At some point somebody’s gotta launch a Hail Mary, right?

Rivers makes all sorts of sense, so long as you don’t count anything I wrote in the first paragraph. He is intimately familiar with the offense, as he and Colts head coach Shane Steichen spent eight years together with the Chargers, four of them when Steichen was the quarterbacks coach. Rivers has been running the same offensive scheme on his kid’s high school team that Steichen uses with the Colts, and he and Steichen have been in contact all season long, trading ideas and plays and whatnot.

And this thing with the Colts is serious. Their QB1, Daniel Jones, tore his right Achilles tendon last Sunday. Backup Anthony Richardson is on injured reserve, and rookie Riley Leonard hurt his knee while filling in for Jones last weekend. If Leonard can’t play at Seattle on Sunday (he’s considered “week to week”), the only QB left on the roster is practice-squadder Brett Rypien.

This is any-port-in-a-storm territory. But how does a father of 10 pull himself away from his family and go back into the grind of the NFL?

Let me ask that another way: How does a father of 10 not pull himself away from his family and go back into the grind of the NFL? The guy needs some rest.

Rivers is certainly dedicated to family-ing, give him that much. And let’s also acknowledge the obvious: He’s a Hall of Fame quarterback who simply hasn’t come up for a vote yet. But I’d no sooner ask Rivers to win me a game right now — with virtually no ramp-up time at all — than I would ask an old salt like Aaron Rodgers, who —

Wait. I’m running out of objections.

This probably isn’t serious. Maybe it is. The Colts seem serious. They worked Rivers out on Monday and signed him Tuesday, which should mean he gets to practice Wednesday. He already knows the system.

He even knows the city! Although you’ve probably forgotten (I had), Rivers played the final season of his long NFL career — before this — as a member of the Indianapolis Colts.

That’s right: Sixteen seasons with the Chargers, and then the dreaded one-year “I’m not ready yet” appendage with the Colts in 2020. But Rivers started all 16 games with Indy, completed 68% of his passes and led the team to an 11-5 mark and a narrow playoff loss in frigid Buffalo.

He was really good, is the point. Of course, he was also five years younger. But come on, how hard can it be? It’s not like the Colts are asking for a miracle.*

(*The Colts are absolutely asking for a miracle.)

What can I say? I’ll watch.