The Grandfather Quarterback: Philip Rivers’ Surprising Career Comeback With the Indianapolis Colts

Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor who studies failure and risk-taking, categorizes Rivers’ comeback as “intelligent failure” — a risk taken “in new territory, in pursuit of a worthy goal, informed by experience.”

For older professionals, she explains, “the research suggests the greater danger is not failing publicly in a well-designed, mission-aligned risk but avoiding meaningful risk altogether. Avoidance shrinks one’s learning zone, invites stagnation and sends a signal to others that preserving reputation is more important than discovery or contribution.”

Simplify without dumbing down

Rivers brought NFL-level complexity to St. Michael Catholic. Players confirmed that Rivers “would routinely use NFL clips to illustrate plays and how they should be blocked and how routes should be run,” according to Fox Sports.

But here’s what’s remarkable: He made it work with teenagers — not by insisting they do it his way but by engaging them in discovery. Noah Moss, a senior running back at St. Michael Catholic, who signed with N.C. State, told reporters, “It’s cool to know we’re running real plays. A lot of high schools just draw things up in the dirt, but it’s beneficial for us guys that are going on to play at the next level.”

The key wasn’t that Rivers imposed NFL methods on high schoolers. It’s that he used sophisticated concepts as a teaching tool, showing film and asking questions rather than dictating answers. Simon Cortopassi, the defensive coordinator at St. Michael Catholic, told Fox Sports that Rivers would say things like “Simon, we’ve got to tweak this” — collaborating rather than commanding, even though he had exponentially more experience.

Chip Espinoza, the dean of strategy and innovation at Vanguard University of Southern California, warns against what he calls the “bias of experience” — the belief that “the way I did it or we did it back in the day is the blueprint for everyone else.” Rivers avoided this trap by bringing the principles of NFL offense without insisting on NFL execution. He adapted the complexity to fit his players’ developmental stage. 

“Younger people love to be engaged in discovery, not told the answer,” Espinoza says. Rivers modeled this “learning with” approach: Here’s how pros do it; now let’s figure out how you can do it, given where you are.

Rivers played for the Colts in 2020 before retiring, but the 44-year-old grandfather returned to the field for the Week 15 game against the Seattle Seahawks on Dec. 14, 2025, in Seattle, Washington.

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Your vocabulary reveals your values

Rivers never swears. Not in frustration, not in celebration, not ever. Five years coaching teenagers didn’t change that. “He’ll never say a cuss word. It’s the funniest thing,” center Maddox Caldwell told Fox Sports. “I’ve heard every other word besides a curse word come out of Coach Rivers’ mouth. ‘Jiminy Cricket’ is one of his favorites. ‘Darn it.’ He’ll get as close as you can without saying a curse word. He says ‘stinking’ a lot.”

The quirk became contagious. Caldwell admitted, “I’m around him so much, all of a sudden, I’m saying ‘stinking’ in my daily life. My family’s calling me out for it. ’Why are you saying ‘stinking’ so much?’ It’s because Coach Rivers says ‘stinking’ for everything.”

Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who studies cursing, notes that language contagion in groups “depends on the authority figure’s favorability and the desire of those underlings who need to identify with them.” Rivers’ players didn’t adopt “stinking” because he mandated it. They absorbed it because they wanted to emulate someone they respected. 

Let failure be part of the lesson

After the Colts lost 18–16 to Seattle, Rivers spoke to his high school players. According to Yahoo! Sports, Rivers told them: “You can be all about it, and you can go after something and I can stand here to say, ‘It doesn’t always work out.’ It doesn’t mean you’re going to win, because there’s a lot of other teams that are doing it, too.”

This is the opposite of how many older workers handle failure. We hide it, minimize it, or blame it on someone else. Rivers did something rarer: He modeled it. “Maybe it will inspire or teach them not to run or be scared of what may or may not happen,” he said in his emotional postgame press conference. “Hopefully, certainly, I think of my sons and those ballplayers that I’m in charge of at the school, that they’ll see, ‘Crap, Coach wasn’t scared.’ There is doubt, and it’s real.”

The lesson wasn’t “I succeeded.” The lesson was “I tried.” Rivers had completed 18 of 27 passes for 120 yards and a touchdown in his first game in 1,800 days. He’d kept the Colts competitive against one of the NFL’s best defenses. But the scoreboard said loss. And he let his players see him reckon with that reality publicly, tearfully, honestly.

Edmondson explains why Rivers’ transparency matters: “It is more powerful for leaders to model failure — more accurately, to model risk-taking and failure tolerance — openly than to speak abstractly about resilience, because it is the actual behavior of leaders that constitutes the data people use to infer what is truly valued and acceptable,” she says. “Not what you say but what you do.”

When Rivers framed his loss not as embarrassment but as evidence that “trying matters even when outcomes are uncertain,” he normalized intelligent risk-taking. “This is exactly the message younger people need to feel safe raising ideas, asking questions, acknowledging failures and stretching beyond their comfort zones,” Edmondson says.

Know when you’re the bridge, not the destination

Rivers keeps saying he’s not here to save the season. “He’s here to be a great leader, a great teammate, go out there, operate the offense, get us in and out of the right plays,” Steichen told ESPN. “That’s the process, and that’s the way he’s taken it.”

Rivers understands his role is transitional. He isn’t building a new dynasty. He’s holding the fort. And he’s comfortable with that because five years of coaching taught him that sometimes the most critical work is unglamorous maintenance.

He mowed the football field for five years. This potential NFL Hall of Famer wasn’t even the athletic director. He was listed on the school website “right there with the school nurse and the driver’s ed teacher, complete with yearbook photo and school email address,” according to Fox Sports.

Cortopassi said there were three other times Rivers contemplated returning to the NFL over the past five years, but “Monday felt a little different.” Why? Because this time, it wasn’t about Rivers. It was about a specific team with a particular need that matched his exact skill set.

Bruce Tulgan, author of It’s Okay to Be the Boss and CEO of RainmakerThinking, a consulting and training firm, says that “bridge leaders” like Rivers succeed when they understand their role from the start. “Everything flows from there,” Tulgan explains. Rivers did precisely this — he knew he was there for three weeks, maybe four, to stabilize a desperate situation. “One of the gifts of interim leadership is it allows the leader to set aside ego because you’re also setting aside [that] career ladder,” Tulgan says. 

Rivers could have demanded to be the permanent solution or walked away entirely. Instead, he said: I can help for these three weeks, then I’ll go back to Alabama. Sometimes the most valuable contribution is showing up for the crisis, doing excellent work, and then gracefully stepping aside when the emergency ends. That’s maturity.