I was happy to see that Philip Rivers got a new job the other day. If you’re a fan of NFL football, you’ve probably heard of him.
Rivers entered the league back in 2004, when he was drafted by the San Diego Chargers out of North Carolina State. As a senior, he’d led the nation in passing yardage. By the time of the draft, he and his wife, Tiffany, who’d been high school sweethearts, were parents of a daughter, Halle, the first of ten children. Her dad became the Chargers’ starting quarterback in the 2006 season and quickly rose to be one of the league’s elite QBs. Over the course of 16 seasons with the Chargers, Rivers was named to the Pro Bowl eight times. He ended his career–or so he thought–with the Indianapolis Colts in 2020.
And now, he’s back. Rivers just turned 44, and he’s also a grandfather. The Colts reached out to him after their starting quarterback, Daniel Jones, suffered a season-ending injury in a game last Sunday, leaving only a journeyman veteran, Brett Rypien, and a rookie, Riley Leonard, on the team’s roster to play its most important position. (And Leonard is dealing with a knee injury.) The Colts had already lost promising third-year signal-caller Anthony Richardson to a freak accident early in the season; he’d suffered an orbital bone fracture in the face when an elastic band he was working with during pregame warmups got loose.
Although he never played on a Super Bowl champion, Rivers had a stellar career by any measure. He finished among the league’s all-time best in several passing statistics. He’s sixth in career touchdown passes, behind two current Hall of Famers (Peyton Manning, Brett Favre) and three others who’ll be in the Hall someday (Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees and the number-1 guy, Tom Brady). He’s 7th on the passing yardage list, behind those five guys and Steelers great Ben Roethlisberger, whom Rivers might just catch this season, being only 648 yards behind. Rivers also made a lot of money, as star quarterbacks always do; in his only season with the Colts, he earned $25 million. And now, he’s back.
The Colts are 8-5 and on the brink of being eliminated from playoff contention with four games to play, starting with a very tough road trip to Seattle this Sunday. They’ve lost three in a row as they head west and by any reasonable estimate, they need to win two of their last four to have a shot at the post-season. Can Rivers get them there? As of this writing, the Colts haven’t yet announced their starter for the Seahawks game.
Personally, I hope Rivers gets the nod. He must still be in pretty good football shape, otherwise the Colts wouldn’t have signed him. There are other quarterbacks out there to be had, all of them younger. None of them are named Philip Rivers, of course, nor do any of them have the connections Rivers still has to the Colts coaching staff and players. If he does start a game this season, he’ll tie for second-oldest NFL starter ever, behind Brady (45 when he played his final game in 2021) and even with Steve DeBerg, Vinny Testaverde and Warren Moon. Rodgers is the oldest player in the league right now at 42.
All told, only eight players in NFL history have appeared in a game at an age older than 44. The greatest graybeard of them all? That would be George Blanda, who was a quarterback and kicker for 26 seasons, playing his final game in 1975. Blanda broke in with the Chicago Bears in 1949, retired in ’59 and came back a year later to lead the Houston Oilers to the first-ever American Football League title. After seven seasons with the Oilers, he went to Oakland and played with the Raiders for the rest of his career. All told, he was on three AFL title teams and played in one Super Bowl.
What Rivers is doing is hard…really hard.
It’s not easy getting to the NFL–ask any 21-year-old coming out of college. When you’re in your 40s, it’s that much harder. No matter how much of a gym rat you are–Brady’s off-season workouts were legendary–the body simply isn’t the same at 44 as it was at 24. Study after study shows that a typical man’s body starts to decline in strength by his late 30s. Rodgers, for example, has had to deal with injuries the past couple seasons; a torn Achilles tendon cost him virtually an entire season with the Jets in 2023, and he’s dealt with a fractured wrist this year with the Steelers. Tiger Woods, who dominated the professional golf world in his 20s and early 30s, turns 50 at the end of this month and has had back problems for years, although he recovered from an early series of surgeries to win the Masters in 2019. On the basketball court, LeBron James is now in his record-setting 23rd NBA season, although he too has missed some time this year due to injury. On the ice, Gordie Howe was 52 when he played for the Hartford Whalers in 1980; among currently- or recently-active NHL players, the oldest were Marc-Andre Fleury, who retired after the ’24-25 season at 40, and Wisconsin native Ryan Suter, who’s currently 40 but still looking for a team to sign him for the rest of this season. In baseball, a handful of pitchers were still active in their early- to mid-40s during the 2025 season, most notably Justin Verlander, at 42 a future Hall of Famer who says he wants to keep playing in 2026.
Even those of us who were athletes in high school and then played city-league ball for a while know what it’s like to have age creep up on us. I quit playing basketball at 37 thanks to creaky knees; although both were eventually replaced, by then I was in my mid-50s and competitive basketball was long in my rear-view mirror. Today, I can shoot free throws, and that’s about it. I look at the rim and remember how it was to dunk a basketball through one of them. Trying such a thing now would not end well. I began martial arts training at age 44 in 2001 and trained regularly into my early 60s, but in recent years my erratic radio work schedule kept me from establishing a regular pattern of visits to Brown’s Karate Academy in Barron, and my foot surgeries last year sealed the deal. I don’t quite have the balance anymore that any martial artist must have on the mat–every martial art relies first and foremost on footwork, as Bruce Lee said–and my last attempt at training, a couple months ago, really drilled the point home, unfortunately.
But there’s still a lot I can do out there. I can still shovel my outside staircases and deck, for example. The other day, after our first serious snowfall of the year left about 4 inches of powdery white stuff on the deck, I shoveled it clean and then measured the amount by cubic foot: the result was nearly a half-ton of snow that I’d cleared in less than a half-hour. Score one for the old guy!
And there are other forms of physical activity, which shall remain nameless, in which I’ve been able to continue participating. 😉
My uncle Dennis Carpenter, who lives in Cuba City down in Grant County, was out in the deer stand when the hunting season opened last month. He turned 81 in July. Clint Eastwood, as I’ve noted in a previous post, is still making movies at 95. This morning, I began a stretch of 6 consecutive weekdays helming the morning radio show on WJMC-FM, leaving the house by 5am and working in the studio from about 5:45 to 9, when I turn the board over to the computer. Tonight, I’ll be at the Rice Lake High School gym, calling a basketball game. The first one of those that I did on a real radio station was back around 1977, when I was in college at UW-Platteville. How much longer will I do radio work? Well, I never would’ve dreamed I’d still be on the air at 69, but here I am.
And there’s Philip Rivers down in Indianapolis, getting ready to put on the iconic white helmet with the horseshoe logo once again. Some truly great quarterbacks have worn that helmet, starting with Johnny Unitas and going into the 21st century with Peyton Manning. Together, those two led the Colts to five NFL championships. Can Rivers and the Colts get to the Super Bowl this year? His teammates are pretty stoked by his comeback: How Colts’ locker room is reacting to return of Philip Rivers. Jones, who came over from the Giants on a one-year, $14 million deal, was looking like the guy who might get Indy into the big game for the first time since Manning was at the helm in 2009. But Jones is out for the year, and it remains to be seen if the Colts will bring him back in 2026. In the meantime, maybe Rivers, who broke into the NFL before some of his current teammates were born, will get a chance. I hope he does, and while I’m wishing, how about the Packers against the Colts in Super Bowl 60? Budding young star QB Jordan Love leading the Pack against the oldest guy in the league and his Colts. It could be even bigger than those classic Bart Starr-vs-Johnny U games in the ’60s. If it’s Love-vs-Rivers for the title, I’ll have a hard time deciding who to root for.
But hey, let’s be honest: I’ll be pulling for the old guy.
UPDATE: It’s Sunday, and Rivers did indeed get the start in Seattle. A storybook ending would’ve had the NFL’s only grandfather leading the Colts to a last-second victory…and it almost happened. Rivers played pretty well, considering it was his first game in five years and he’d had less than a week of practice: 18 of 27 passing for 120 yards and one touchdown, with one interception. His line did a fine job protecting him, yielding only one sack to one of the league’s top defenses. Up 13-6 at halftime, the Colts couldn’t muster much offense after that, but still took a 16-15 lead on a 60-yard field goal by Blake Grupe with 42 seconds to play. After returning the Indy kickoff to the 37, Seattle’s Sam Darnold, who was only seven years old when Rivers threw his first NFL pass, completed one of his own for 17 yards to the Colt 46. After an incompletion, an 8-yard pass moved the ball to the 38 with 25 seconds left. Darnold spiked the ball, using up only three seconds, and then Jason Myers kicked a 56-yard field goal to give Seattle the lead, 18-16. On the first play after the kickoff, with only 11 seconds to go, Rivers was picked off over the middle to clinch it for the Seahawks.
Despite the loss, Rivers will certainly be one of the hot topics among NFL fans, writers and commentators over the next week, and what do you know, the Colts and their grandpa QB will be on Monday Night Football, hosting San Francisco on December 22nd. Now 8-6, the Colts are a game behind Houston for the final AFC playoff berth with three to play, including a showdown with the Texans in Houston to close the season. Can Rivers get his team to the playoffs for the 8th time in his career? His closest approach to a Super Bowl was back in 2007, when he took the Chargers to New England and lost to the unbeaten Patriots, 21-12. (Ironically, to get to that game, Rivers and the Chargers had gone into Indianapolis and beaten the Colts, 28-24. Rivers left that game with an injury in the 4th quarter, but came back to play against New England, although he couldn’t get San Diego into the end zone.)
Sometimes, athletes hang on too long. I was in high school when the great Willie Mays played his last season at age 42, struggling after fly balls in center field for the New York Mets. He hit only .211 with six home runs in 66 regular season games, then went 2-for-7 in the World Series. Brett Favre, who might very well have retired if he’d been able to get the Packers to the Super Bowl the same season Brady and the Patriots beat Rivers and the Chargers, hung on for three more seasons, his last game ending with a crushing sack on a frozen field in Minnesota. Very few professional athletes end their careers on top, before the inevitable physical decline. Among those who did were John Elway (38) and Peyton Manning (39), who won Super Bowls and then retired, and NBA great Bill Russell, capping his stellar career in 1969 at 35 by leading the Boston Celtics to their 11th title in his 13 seasons. The list of superstars who stayed too long is a lot longer. Which list will Philip Rivers join at the end of this season? We’re about to find out.
A Strenuous Writer's Life 