Nearly five years ago, on Jan. 9, 2021, Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady threw a touchdown pass in a wild-card playoff game, making Brady, at 43 years, 159 days, the oldest quarterback to throw a postseason touchdown pass in NFL history.
NBC, broadcasting the game, put up a graphic showing a photo of Brady juxtaposed with one of the previous record holder, George Blanda, who was 43 years, 108 days, when he tossed a TD in the 1970 AFC championship game. Brady looked like, well, Brady: a guy who hangs out with supermodels and ingests nothing but electrolytes and wheat germ. Blanda, meanwhile, looked like a guy from the ’70s who ingested nothing but whiskey and raw steak. In sports, old today isn’t as old as old used to be.
On Tuesday, the Indianapolis Colts, in the wake of a devastating Achilles tendon injury to quarterback Daniel Jones, shocked the league by signing 44-year-old Philip Rivers. He retired five years ago and has been coaching high-school football in Alabama. For the moment, Rivers is on the team’s practice squad, but there’s a nonzero chance he could start for the playoff-contending Colts as early as Sunday. The team is weighing whether to go with rookie Riley Leonard, who’s nursing a knee injury. The Colts would have to put Rivers on the team roster by 4 p.m. Saturday for him to be eligible to play Sunday.
The signing of Rivers prompted a lot of “grandpa” jokes. Except they weren’t really jokes, because Rivers is in fact a grandfather. (He married his middle-school sweetheart and has 10 children, increasing his grandfather odds, one supposes.) His last coach before retirement, Frank Reich, told the Athletic that he spent hours with Rivers going over the pros and cons of making a comeback, and that “he can still sling it.”
Rivers will be helped by the fact that he played in Indianapolis coach Shane Steichen’s system when the QB played in San Diego, likely the primary reason Steichen turned to him in the first place: Rivers wouldn’t be starting from scratch with the Colts’ playbook. In today’s NFL, being able to throw the ball hard and understanding all the terminology are the two most important qualities a quarterback can have. Rivers isn’t just any 44-year-old NFL retiree.
If you’re worried about what will happen if Rivers’s creaky body gets flattened by a monster 350-pound defensive lineman literally half his age, well, that’s a reasonable concern. But the way football is played in the NFL now is quite different than it was in George Blanda’s day … or Rivers’s. The league has designed its rules to protect the quarterback from particularly damaging hits; defensive players joke that they could get flagged for breathing too closely to a quarterback.
An amusing thing about being a sports fan is how we think of age in sports in contrast with how we think of it in real life. I have friends still figuring what they want to do when they grow up, but if they were an athlete, they’d be considered a seen-it-all grizzled veteran.
As we get older, it’s both disorienting and encouraging to see athletes our own age still lacing ’em up (I’m just a little older than Rivers). I remember being inspired by Jamie Moyer, the lanky left-hander who was still taking the hill for the Colorado Rockies at age 49: If he can stare down Mike Trout at 49, surely I can start this lawn mower without wrenching my back. We love old athletes, too, because we’ve been watching them our whole lives. I was still in my 20s when Rivers made his NFL debut; it’s almost as if we have grown up together. Seeing him back on the field won’t just remind me of when he was younger: It will remind me of when I was.
So, yeah: It’ll be inspiring to see a fellow old fogie trotting out to the gridiron for one last playoff chase, slinging the pigskin around like the good ole days. It’s the kind of story they make movies about. Unless, of course, one of those 350-pound monsters breaks through the line and, you know, rearranges his spine. Good luck, Philip. Go get ’em. I hope it works out. But if I’m being honest: My whole body is sore just thinking about it.
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