Could Seahawks face a 44-year-old grandpa QB Sunday? It’s more than possible now
Wow, the Seahawks’ next game just got a lot more interesting, eh?
Could Seattle be facing a 44-year-old grandpa quarterback, current Hall-of-Fame candidate and sitting head high school football coach who hasn’t played in five years?
It’s like a Disney movie.
And it’s more likely now than it was even yesterday.
Monday’s news that Philip Rivers was trying out for the Indianapolis Colts on his 44th birthday was a huge curiosity. Some laughed.
Tuesday, the Colts reportedly signed the eight-time Pro Bowl quarterback to come out of retirement onto Indianapolis’ practice squad.
The Seahawks (10-3) and Colts (8-5) play Sunday at Lumen Field (1:25 p.m., CBS television, KIRO-7 locally).
At first, it would seem there’s no way Rivers would play in Seattle this weekend. He is going to need time to learn Colts coach Shane Steichen’s offense and ease his way back into the NFL as a backup, right? After all, the quarterback who first played in 2004 for the then-San Diego Chargers last played for the Colts Jan. 9, 2021, in an AFC wild-card playoff game at Buffalo to end the 2020 season.
Rivers has been out of the sport for longer than the majority of the league has been in it (the average career span in the NFL is 3.3 years). Heck, the father of 10 kids who became a grandfather at the age of 42 is now four years older than his new head coach in Indianapolis.
Yet there are reasons to believe Rivers could start Sunday in Seattle.
If he does, he won’t be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, next summer. Rivers is a semifinalist in voting for the Hall’s Class of 2026. If he plays again, his mandatory five-year waiting period between his last game and consideration for the Hall starts over. The fact he’s willing to put off the chance to be inducted into the Hall of Fame for five years shows how series Rivers is about playing.
But in five days, on Sunday against the Seahawks?
Philip Rivers knows the Colts’ system
Rivers actually doesn’t need all that much spin up on Steichen’s Colts offense. He played for Steichen for six years with the Chargers.
Steichen’s first NFL coaching job was with the Chargers in 2011-12 as a defensive assistant. From 2014-19, Steichen coached on the Chargers offense Rivers ran. That included in 2016-19, when Steichen was Rivers’ quarterbacks coach and spending most minutes of every football work day with him. In 2019 Steichen became the offensive coordinator and play caller for Rivers. That was the QB’s final season with the Chargers before he played his (supposedly, until now) final NFL season for the Colts in 2020.
And it’s not that Rivers has just been sitting on his couch away from the sport the last five years. He’s been spinning passes with the players he’s been coaching in high school. That includes his son Gunnar, whom Rivals.com ranked as the No. 2 recruit in Alabama. Rivers is the head coach at St. Michael Catholic in Fairhope, Alabama. His team with his son as starting quarterback just finished a 13-1 season with a loss in the Alabama Class 4A state playoffs.
In fact, Rivers was running and coaching Steichen’s offense for St. Michael Catholic this high-school season that just ended Nov. 28. Former NFL star and current CBS television analyst J.J. Watt posted that fact online Tuesday, among what he wrote was a “fun fact learned in production meetings.”
“He and Shane Steichen spoke weekly about it, discussing plays and even film,” Watt wrote on X/Twitter Tuesday. “So familiarity with the scheme should be no problem whatsoever.”
“Philip Rivers is about to be must see TV. This is phenomenal content,” Watt also wrote.
The Colts were reportedly blown away with the zip Rivers still had on his passes in his tryout in Indiana on Monday night. So it’s not that he needs a ton of time to get his arm in shape to play.
Plus — as suggested by the Colts even considering to sign Rivers — they have a desperate need at quarterback.
Daniel Jones, the QB who led Indianapolis to a 7-1 start, ruptured an Achilles tendon this past weekend in the team’s loss to Jacksonville. The Colts’ fourth defeat in five games dropped them out of first place in the AFC South, a game behind the Jaguars with four games left.
Anthony Richardson, the fourth pick in the 2023 draft, is on injured reserve with an orbital-bone fracture. Steichen said Richardson will remain on IR through this week, at least.
That leaves rookie Riley Leonard from Notre Dame and Brett Rypien as the Colts’ only QBs. Rypien is on the practice squad. He is a Shadle Park High School graduate and Spokane native, the nephew of former Washington State and Super Bowl-champion QB Mark Rypien.
Leonard finished the Colts’ loss to the Jaguars last weekend after Jones got hurt. Then Leonard injured his knee. The team says the rookie sixth-round pick’s status is week to week. The unofficial depth chart Indianapolis produced Tuesday for the Seattle game has Leonard, and only Leonard, at quarterback.
And that’s how the Colts got to Grandpa Rivers.
They appear to be choosing this week between a banged-up rookie who would be making his first NFL start, a mothballed journeyman off the practice squad or a semifinalist for the Hall of Fame.
With those as the options, whom would you choose?
Seahawks vs. quarterbacks
No matter who starts for the Colts, it will be the fourth consecutive game the Seahawks will face either a rookie or a backup quarterback, or both.
No wonder their defense has been dominant recently.
They beat rookie Cam Ward in Tennessee last month, handily until the very end. ‘
The next week they completely battered and befuddled Max Brosmer into four interceptions with four sacks in trashing Minnesota for Seattle’s first shutout in 15 years.
Last weekend they made 37-year-old backup Kirk Cousins look older than Rivers in smashing the Falcons in Atlanta.
The Seahawks haven’t allowed a touchdown in nine quarters through two full games. With Pro Bowl cornerback Devon Witherspoon and do-it-all rookie Nick Emmanwori excelling in particular, coach Mike Macdonald’s defense has created eight turnovers in the last two games. That’s how Seattle has put itself in position where wins in their final four regular-season games will give them the NFC West title and top seed in the conference’s playoffs.
The News Tribune asked Macdonald on Monday, before news of Rivers’ tryout with the Colts broke, what of his defense he designs to most confuse and challenge quarterbacks.
“I know this is probably not the answer you’re looking for, but we’re really trying to just play our defense the best we can,” regardless of the opposing QB, Macdonald said. “One thing that we do is that we’re in shell a lot.”
That is, Cover 2 and variations with two and sometimes three safeties deep over the top in a “shell” behind cornerbacks covering shorter routes. Macdonald’s confusion comes in how often he varies that shell coverage. It’s also in how much he moves Emmanwori and Witherspoon around the defense and in how often he blitzes and fakes blitzes, often relying on what’s been a dominant defensive line to create pressure on QBs.
“We pick our spots to pressure and pick our spots to play man coverage, and change fronts sometimes,” Macdonald said.
“It’s actually more challenging going against a rookie quarterback that hasn’t played that much because you’re not really sure what they’re good at or what they’re not going to be good at. It’s like playing a team for the first time in the season. You have to go back to your fundamentals and just trust that what you do is going to be good enough against those guys. “I think if you start hunting or making things up on rookie quarterbacks, you’re making it more than it is.
“It’s really about how well we go execute our plan based off of their system and the types of plays that we expect them to run.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2025 at 1:04 PM.
