By Zak Keefer
Dec. 9, 2025
Updated Dec. 10, 2025 8:39 am EST
-The Athletic
The text message rolled in Monday night, while Philip Rivers was shaking off the rust in his right arm.
“If this report is true, then I’m all in,” Frank Reich, Rivers’ last coach in the NFL, wrote him. “I have no doubt you can do it.”
The call came Tuesday morning, while the 44-year-old Rivers mulled his decision. He had two radically different options: End his five-year retirement and join an 8-5 Indianapolis Colts team that doesn’t have a healthy quarterback but remains in the thick of the AFC playoff race, or head back home to Alabama, prep for his son’s next high school football season, raise his 10 kids and spend time with his grandson?
On the phone with Reich, Rivers listed the pros, then the cons. The longer the two spoke, the more Reich could tell which way his old quarterback was leaning.
“He really wanted to do it,” Reich said.
Thus, in one of the most stunning un-retirements in league history, Rivers is back in the NFL five years after walking away. He is now most likely the Colts’ best hope of avoiding another gutting late-season collapse.
Rivers threw it well enough in a closed-door workout Monday night at the team facility to bolster the team’s confidence that he can still play, if only for a few weeks. Indianapolis plans to sign Rivers to the practice squad and will see how the next few days of practice go before deciding if he’s capable of suiting up Sunday in Seattle.
“Someone asked me, ‘Can this guy still do it physically? Can he throw it?’” Reich said. “I have no doubt he can still sling it. No doubt.”
Reich, who coached the Colts from 2018-22, just wrapped up his lone season as Stanford’s interim coach.
As of now, Riley Leonard is the only quarterback on the Colts’ active roster, and the sixth-round rookie out of Notre Dame remains “week-to-week,” per coach Shane Steichen, after suffering a knee injury in Sunday’s loss to Jacksonville. On the practice squad, Rivers will join 29-year-old journeyman Brett Rypien, who’s on his eighth team since 2019 and has started four games in his career. If Leonard can’t go on Sunday — and he most likely cannot — Steichen will have to decide between Rivers and Rypien.
An easy call, Reich said, though he’s guessing Rivers will spend a week on the practice squad before making his debut.
“I have no doubt Phil can still play winning football,” Reich said. “Now, it’s a team game, and you got a tough schedule ahead. I don’t know their other quarterbacks well, but from the outside looking in, I do think Philip Rivers gives them the best chance to win the division and get to the playoffs. I really do. I’m not afraid to say that.”
Rivers last played in the NFL in 2020, gutting through a painful foot injury to lead the Colts to an 11-5 record and playoff berth. He was beloved in the locker room, one of the most respected players to come through the building in a decade. Jonathan Taylor called him “Mr. Rivers.” Former linebacker Shaquille Leonard went with “Uncle Phil.” Former left tackle Anthony Castonzo likened Rivers to “a sixth-grade kid ready to play his first day of football.”
General manager Chris Ballard, who pulled the trigger on this move Tuesday, has long praised Rivers’ ability to step in and lead a team still reeling from Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement back to the postseason. That remains the Colts’ most recent trip to the playoffs. Any chance the current team has of making it back could rest on an aging Rivers’ ability to fight off Father Time. Again.
Rivers retired a few weeks after a wild-card loss in Buffalo in January 2021. In the years since, he’s flirted with returning more than once. The Colts called him the following January, gauging his interest in stepping in for starter Carson Wentz, who tested positive for COVID before a Week 17 game against the Raiders. Due largely to league-mandated protocols, the timing didn’t work out, and Rivers never made it back to Indy.
Two years later, before the San Francisco 49ers ran out of healthy quarterbacks in the 2023 NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia, coach Kyle Shanahan began making contingency plans to lure Rivers out of retirement and start for the team in Super Bowl LVIII against the Kansas City Chiefs.
By that point, Rivers had decided: He wasn’t going to chase a comeback, but if a team called, he was willing to listen. He signed a ceremonial one-day contract to retire as a member of the Los Angeles Chargers, for whom he played for 16 years, this summer.
“I think it’s a credit to the Colts to have the boldness to make a move like this,” Reich said. “It’s unconventional. But they know the player, and that’s hard to put a price on.”
What should ease Rivers’ transition this week is his comfort with Steichen, whom he worked with for six years with the Chargers. Steichen’s scheme in Indianapolis is an offshoot of the one Reich first built in San Diego, the one Rivers ran for years, likely with similar terminology and variations, plus a few of Steichen’s tweaks.
“Phil was always a pocket passer, anyway,” Reich says. “And there’s no one better at playing the game within the game, of figuring out stuff at the line of scrimmage and knowing how to attack a defense.”
Getting up to speed with the mental part of it, Reich pointed out, shouldn’t be much of a challenge. The Colts don’t need to change playbooks or play calls.
“It’ll be familiar for Philip,” Reich said. “It’ll be easy. I have zero concern about that.”
“As an offensive staff, we take pride in adapting to our players and putting them in position to have success,” offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said Tuesday, dodging questions about Rivers’ arrival. “That’s the name of the game for us. That’s the name of the game in the NFL for everybody.”
Familiarity was a factor. Some of Rivers’ former teammates are still on the roster. Taylor and Michael Pittman, Jr. were rookies during Rivers’ lone season in Indianapolis. Quenton Nelson and Braden Smith were in their third years, Kenny Moore II his fourth.
A sterling 7-1 start that had Indianapolis the talk of the NFL has bled into an 8-5 record with a brutal four-game stretch remaining. Daniel Jones is done for the year with a torn Achilles, and backup Anthony Richardson remains on injured reserve after suffering an orbital fracture in his eye in October. In the NFL, this is the definition of desperate times, desperate measures.
Enter Uncle Phil, a late-season prayer if there ever was one.
“We know it’s a crazy game and anything could happen, but in that anything … there’s a lot of good, because he’s a great player,” Reich said. “There’s no guarantee it’s a storybook ending. But I give Philip a lot of credit for having the courage just to say yes to something like this.”
The Colts, too, are risking plenty, likely putting their season in the hands of a player older than both his coach and coordinator. This could go horrendously wrong. Ballard knows the season is on the line, and maybe his job, as well. Signing a 44-year-old quarterback who hasn’t played in five years is some type of gamble. A bigger one would’ve been to sit back and do nothing at all.
Dec. 9, 2025
Updated Dec. 10, 2025 8:39 am EST
-The Athletic
The text message rolled in Monday night, while Philip Rivers was shaking off the rust in his right arm.
“If this report is true, then I’m all in,” Frank Reich, Rivers’ last coach in the NFL, wrote him. “I have no doubt you can do it.”
The call came Tuesday morning, while the 44-year-old Rivers mulled his decision. He had two radically different options: End his five-year retirement and join an 8-5 Indianapolis Colts team that doesn’t have a healthy quarterback but remains in the thick of the AFC playoff race, or head back home to Alabama, prep for his son’s next high school football season, raise his 10 kids and spend time with his grandson?
On the phone with Reich, Rivers listed the pros, then the cons. The longer the two spoke, the more Reich could tell which way his old quarterback was leaning.
“He really wanted to do it,” Reich said.
Thus, in one of the most stunning un-retirements in league history, Rivers is back in the NFL five years after walking away. He is now most likely the Colts’ best hope of avoiding another gutting late-season collapse.
Rivers threw it well enough in a closed-door workout Monday night at the team facility to bolster the team’s confidence that he can still play, if only for a few weeks. Indianapolis plans to sign Rivers to the practice squad and will see how the next few days of practice go before deciding if he’s capable of suiting up Sunday in Seattle.
“Someone asked me, ‘Can this guy still do it physically? Can he throw it?’” Reich said. “I have no doubt he can still sling it. No doubt.”
Reich, who coached the Colts from 2018-22, just wrapped up his lone season as Stanford’s interim coach.
As of now, Riley Leonard is the only quarterback on the Colts’ active roster, and the sixth-round rookie out of Notre Dame remains “week-to-week,” per coach Shane Steichen, after suffering a knee injury in Sunday’s loss to Jacksonville. On the practice squad, Rivers will join 29-year-old journeyman Brett Rypien, who’s on his eighth team since 2019 and has started four games in his career. If Leonard can’t go on Sunday — and he most likely cannot — Steichen will have to decide between Rivers and Rypien.
An easy call, Reich said, though he’s guessing Rivers will spend a week on the practice squad before making his debut.
“I have no doubt Phil can still play winning football,” Reich said. “Now, it’s a team game, and you got a tough schedule ahead. I don’t know their other quarterbacks well, but from the outside looking in, I do think Philip Rivers gives them the best chance to win the division and get to the playoffs. I really do. I’m not afraid to say that.”
Rivers last played in the NFL in 2020, gutting through a painful foot injury to lead the Colts to an 11-5 record and playoff berth. He was beloved in the locker room, one of the most respected players to come through the building in a decade. Jonathan Taylor called him “Mr. Rivers.” Former linebacker Shaquille Leonard went with “Uncle Phil.” Former left tackle Anthony Castonzo likened Rivers to “a sixth-grade kid ready to play his first day of football.”
General manager Chris Ballard, who pulled the trigger on this move Tuesday, has long praised Rivers’ ability to step in and lead a team still reeling from Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement back to the postseason. That remains the Colts’ most recent trip to the playoffs. Any chance the current team has of making it back could rest on an aging Rivers’ ability to fight off Father Time. Again.
Rivers retired a few weeks after a wild-card loss in Buffalo in January 2021. In the years since, he’s flirted with returning more than once. The Colts called him the following January, gauging his interest in stepping in for starter Carson Wentz, who tested positive for COVID before a Week 17 game against the Raiders. Due largely to league-mandated protocols, the timing didn’t work out, and Rivers never made it back to Indy.
Two years later, before the San Francisco 49ers ran out of healthy quarterbacks in the 2023 NFC Championship Game in Philadelphia, coach Kyle Shanahan began making contingency plans to lure Rivers out of retirement and start for the team in Super Bowl LVIII against the Kansas City Chiefs.
By that point, Rivers had decided: He wasn’t going to chase a comeback, but if a team called, he was willing to listen. He signed a ceremonial one-day contract to retire as a member of the Los Angeles Chargers, for whom he played for 16 years, this summer.
“I think it’s a credit to the Colts to have the boldness to make a move like this,” Reich said. “It’s unconventional. But they know the player, and that’s hard to put a price on.”
What should ease Rivers’ transition this week is his comfort with Steichen, whom he worked with for six years with the Chargers. Steichen’s scheme in Indianapolis is an offshoot of the one Reich first built in San Diego, the one Rivers ran for years, likely with similar terminology and variations, plus a few of Steichen’s tweaks.
“Phil was always a pocket passer, anyway,” Reich says. “And there’s no one better at playing the game within the game, of figuring out stuff at the line of scrimmage and knowing how to attack a defense.”
Getting up to speed with the mental part of it, Reich pointed out, shouldn’t be much of a challenge. The Colts don’t need to change playbooks or play calls.
“It’ll be familiar for Philip,” Reich said. “It’ll be easy. I have zero concern about that.”
“As an offensive staff, we take pride in adapting to our players and putting them in position to have success,” offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said Tuesday, dodging questions about Rivers’ arrival. “That’s the name of the game for us. That’s the name of the game in the NFL for everybody.”
Familiarity was a factor. Some of Rivers’ former teammates are still on the roster. Taylor and Michael Pittman, Jr. were rookies during Rivers’ lone season in Indianapolis. Quenton Nelson and Braden Smith were in their third years, Kenny Moore II his fourth.
A sterling 7-1 start that had Indianapolis the talk of the NFL has bled into an 8-5 record with a brutal four-game stretch remaining. Daniel Jones is done for the year with a torn Achilles, and backup Anthony Richardson remains on injured reserve after suffering an orbital fracture in his eye in October. In the NFL, this is the definition of desperate times, desperate measures.
Enter Uncle Phil, a late-season prayer if there ever was one.
“We know it’s a crazy game and anything could happen, but in that anything … there’s a lot of good, because he’s a great player,” Reich said. “There’s no guarantee it’s a storybook ending. But I give Philip a lot of credit for having the courage just to say yes to something like this.”
The Colts, too, are risking plenty, likely putting their season in the hands of a player older than both his coach and coordinator. This could go horrendously wrong. Ballard knows the season is on the line, and maybe his job, as well. Signing a 44-year-old quarterback who hasn’t played in five years is some type of gamble. A bigger one would’ve been to sit back and do nothing at all.
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