The San Francisco 49ers will be gearing up to face the Indianapolis Colts this weekend, and the Colts now have a new another quarterback. His name: Philip Rivers. A quarterback who retired in the 2021 offseason.
This isn’t the first time a team has tried to pull him out of retirement.
Back in 2022, the 49ers had a quarterback injury situation not unlike what the Colts face now. First, Trey Lance went down in Week 2, and Jimmy Garoppolo returned once again as the starting quarterback. Then he broke his foot in Week 13, opening the door for Brock Purdy.
The 49ers immediately needed a Plan…well, whatever letter in the alphabet they were on with quarterbacks in 2022.
“We talked to Philip as soon as Jimmy broke his foot,” Kyle Shanahan said in his Wednesday press conference.
This much is common knowledge. Rivers was reaching out to several teams at the time, after all. The 49ers settled on Josh Johnson, and Purdy took the team to that year’s NFC Championship Game, where both quarterbacks sustained a concussion and an elbow injury, respectively. This left the 49ers quarterback-less and gave the Philadelphia Eagles an easy path to the Super Bowl. Had the 49ers won that game, Rivers may have been considered as the quarterback for the Super Bowl.
There’s a strange alternate reality here to think about, because Shanahan later said in the 2023 offseason that the 49ers were probably going to bring in Rivers if they had advanced to the Super Bowl.
It was this week that Shanahan recalled how involved Rivers was with the 49ers. It dates back to when they lost Garoppolo.
“So, we had no backup,” Shanahan said, recalling the moment when Garoppolo broke his foot. “We also had a rookie [Purdy] who was the last pick in the Draft, and who hadn’t played a snap yet except for the mop-up time that he got, so we weren’t sure where this is going to go. But, we would like to see him go and see how he can do because we think he might do really well. But regardless, we didn’t have anyone after him at the time. So that was when Philip started watching our installs, getting ready for the possibility to come here, and he would’ve if [QB] Brock [Purdy] ever got hurt.”
So that was the plan. While Shanahan said shortly after the NFC Championship loss that he wasn’t sure what the plan was, Rivers was watching installs and had access to the offense, getting ready to be the next in line. As you know, it ultimately never happened.
There’s a sort of weird reality that makes you want to think about all the news in the Super Bowl lead-up if the 49ers had advanced and had Rivers as their quarterback. He hadn’t played a snap in two years, and now he’s coming out of retirement to play in his first Super Bowl. I would have loved to have seen that.
Instead, we’ll remember that the 49ers were trying to get him to play years before the Colts were, except as a last resort. They were going to start Purdy all along, and had Johnson as the backup; either because that was the pecking order, or Rivers didn’t want to come in as backup.
The 49ers losing all their quarterbacks and having to pull a quarterback out of retirement to play in the Super Bowl seems like a situation only fitting for the 49ers.
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