Stampede Blue
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...
