The Colts did it. After beginning the season with a record of 8–2, Indianapolis has now been eliminated from the playoffs. It's a pretty exclusive circle of hell, where they've landed: Since 1990, when the NFL playoffs expanded to 12 teams, only three teams have missed the field after such a strong start, and it certainly goes without saying that the Colts are the first to manage this fall since the playoffs expanded further, to 14 teams, in 2020. Fate pulled some incredible horseshit to produce this outcome, without even getting into Indianapolis's miserable quarterback situation: The Colts' ongoing losing streak, run to six games after Sunday's 23–17 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars, coincides with a combined 15 consecutive wins (!) by the two teams now ahead of them in the AFC South. The universe wanted to be absolutely clear about this: The Colts could not be allowed to carry so much as a vague waft of relevance into the new year.
One fellow who is not going to let this wretched and historic collapse ruin his good time is old man Philip Rivers. "Other than us not winning," said an upbeat Rivers after his team's latest loss, "it's been an absolute blast for three weeks." Included in that "blast" was Rivers tossing a horrible fourth-quarter interception Sunday that eventually set up Jacksonville's go-ahead field goal. The pick cannot really be described as any very serious form of "backbreaking," for the simple reason that the Colts were officially eliminated from playoff contention Saturday, when the Houston Texans beat the Chargers in Los Angeles. That Rivers, who was already old by professional-athlete standards when he retired way back in 2021, was even out there Sunday, slinging it around for the no-hope Colts, is a kind of personal moral victory. "It's been absolutely awesome," insisted Rivers Sunday afternoon. I'm not sure the satisfaction and delight are quite shared by those teammates of his who were around before the beginning of this hateful second-half swoon.
The Rivers experiment could've gone worse. He was rusty and entirely immobile, of course, which led to some lowlights, but Rivers was generally a long way from catastrophic back there. He completed 63 percent of his passes for 544 yards, and he threw more touchdowns (four) than interceptions (three), and despite footwork in the pocket that was uncomfortably like that of Pappy O'Daniel dancing to the Soggy Bottom Boys, he was only sacked five times in three games. You would not consider this level of performance acceptable from, say, a fourth-year blue-chipper, but you make certain allowances for an old mummy hauled out of an Alabama mausoleum and reanimated by sheer desperation for an otherwise entirely hopeless closing sprint. The Colts came within a score of upsetting the Seahawks and Jaguars, and though they were pretty well pancaked by the 49ers, that was largely not the fault of their ancient quarterback, who had his best and most normal game in the 21-point loss.
Sunday's loss will probably be Rivers's last as a starting quarterback, at least this season: ESPN says Indianapolis is considering starting rookie Riley Leonard for their season finale at Houston. With nothing in the postseason to play for, head coach Shane Steichen can at least evaluate a quarterback with a shot in hell of factoring into the team's future. Rivers, a coach himself, otherwise rejects any consideration of whether a game has meaning outside of itself: "Those games we played in the backyard when we were 10 years old weren't meaningless, right? Nobody gave a rip about those," he explained, by way of congratulating himself and his teammates for competing enthusiastically across the lost portion of this soured campaign. "But you went home crying or you went home happy ... that's the philosophy of everything matters. Everything we do matters."
Of course, it's a lot easier to block out circumstances and context when it's essentially a three-week football camp. It's easy come, easy go for Rivers. "I got three bonus games that I never saw coming, and couldn't be more thankful that I got an opportunity," he said Sunday. This is probably the healthiest attitude a person in his position can have, and might be the only sensible way to approach a challenge of this magnitude. Nevertheless I imagine experiencing a certain painful and perhaps infuriating dissonance, if I were one of Rivers's temporary teammates, having just endured a run of misfortune and failure the likes of which only a handful of teams have experienced in the professional history of the sport.
You don't put your season onto the shoulders of a 44-year-old high-school coach without having first considered and ruled out a lot of other doomed and insane-seeming ideas. Numbers and history suggest that this collapse was improbable—The Athletic's Playoff Simulator gadget once gave the Colts a 98 percent chance of making the playoffs—but realistically, from the moment of Daniel Jones's leg kerplosion, Indianapolis needed cosmic intervention in order to avoid this outcome, which is why Barry Petchesky felt so confident dismissing them altogether three weeks ago. The universe, reliably indifferent to charges of cruelty, declined to give Indianapolis a single break. That's got to sting like hell, at least for those Colts players who committed more than a few weeks of juice to the endeavor. For the ones who were otherwise fishing and grandparenting and leading a high-school squad, it's all gravy. "If this was the last one, shoot," said a perpetually upbeat Rivers. "I told you guys I wasn't gonna have any regrets coming back, and I don't."
