he sounded dead set on coaching his son next year. i guess the Colts experience was a big influence on him.
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I think this is just an informational interview for Rivers. Something for maybe after his first two sons graduate high school--he also has a son in ninth grade, who is just getting started on his high school football career. Philip also has a two-year-old son and a grandson close to that age. He said he wants to see one of them be the quarterback and the other his wide receiver while he's their high school football coach.
Five years down the road I can see him being a head coach in the NFL, during the ten-year gap between his ninth-grade son and two-year-old son. I think he was doing a good job with Riley Leonard during his one start for the Colts in Week 18. You could see the positive effect he was having on Riley just by being supportive on the sideline.
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It sounds like Rivers may actually become the Bills Head Coach. He is an impressive man.Comment
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Big mouth Phil is back ?Comment
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Just read this in Albert Breer's latest column.
Philip Rivers
Philip Rivers interviewing for the Bills’ head coaching job isn’t as ludicrous as you think. And it also isn’t the manifestation of some lifelong dream, as far as I can tell.
In the summer of 2019, near the end of Rivers’s decorated 16-year run with the Chargers, I sat with him, and he took me through his timeline for retirement. He acknowledged that when to hang up the cleats isn’t always up to a player. But he also had a personal deadline that he planned to adhere to.
“I know what I’m gonna do when I’m done, which I think I’ve told you—I wanna coach high school football,” he said. “And my oldest boy is gonna be a fifth-grader, so I certainly have a little bit of time. And I don’t really see that as one of those—All right, he’s a 10th-grader, I gotta go right now. I’m not gonna run it right up to that. But he’s a fifth-grader, that leaves you not quite a handful … I really don’t know. I feel great. I love it. I love playing.”
Rivers was on the doorstep of his final season with the team that drafted him. He spent one more year in the NFL after that, as a Colt, and then became the head coach at St. Michael Catholic in Fairhope, Ala. Gunner, his oldest son, was a seventh-grader then. He’s now a junior at St. Michael Catholic, heading into his senior year as the sixth-ranked quarterback recruit nationally in the Class of 2027, with dad as his coach. Rivers has another son, Peter, who’s 14 and could play for his father soon as well.
So why dive back into the NFL as a coach now, were it to happen? A couple of reasons.
First, because his career ended (the first time) amid the COVID-19 season, Rivers never really got a send-off. He was playing in mostly empty stadiums, marking the end of his final memories of the league. Conversely, this year, when he came back to try to save the Colts’ season, he felt the energy of pro football again, and it got his blood flowing. He got to play in a prime-time game against his friend John Lynch’s team. He got to see the reaction of his family and friends. He got to lead an NFL locker room again.
All of this led him to believe he could make it work. He’d been a head coach, albeit at a much, much, much lower level, the past five years. In his later playing years, he served more or less as a coach, imparting his knowledge of the run game and protections. He was at the point where he helped the staff run blitz meetings. All of that applies to the job and would help bridge the preps-to-pros gap with the head coaching experience he does have.
Second, there’s the job that he agreed to interview for, after getting feelers from a few teams. The Bills’ job was different, given the challenge of taking a really good team and making it great (a hump he couldn’t clear as a player), and also because of Josh Allen. Rivers and Allen share an agent, and Allen worked with Rivers, both in the classroom and on the field, in spurts ahead of the 2018 draft. They’ve maintained a relationship, and over that time, it’s become clear what kind of player Allen is.
So Rivers’s hat is in the ring. The next big question will be staffing, but he’s been working on that for a while. He has guys he’s close with from playing (Frank Reich, Chris Harris, Nick Hardwick, etc.), and head coaches he’s stayed in constant communication with (Shane Steichen, Nick Sirianni).
All that said, it’d be a big leap of faith, particularly for a Buffalo team that’s on the cusp.
But, as I see it, this is not the Colts’ Jeff Saturday situation of a few years ago. And if this Bills nibble doesn’t lead to a job, I think there’s still a good chance it’ll eventually happen, because it sure seems like Rivers’s fire for pro football is back.
I didn't realize Rivers worked with Josh Allen before the 2018 NFL Draft. So it's now documented that Rivers has worked with Allen, Drake Maye, Bo Nix, and Riley Leonard. I wonder who else. I think there's definitely a strong possibility that he will be a head coach in the NFL sometime down the road.Comment
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Why Phil is not in the top 100 FA ?
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Gunner Rivers commits to NC ST like Philip did.
Wonder if NC St may be ready to move on from Dave Doern and hire Phil?
https://www.espn.com/college-footbal...fpack-footballComment
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I was asking Ai about Rivers torn ACL and it said he had also torn his meniscus at Indy in the 2007 playoffs and that he did an arthroscopic surgery the next day just to clean out the damaged cartilage enough to play 6 days later, not the full surgery.
He was told all week by doctors that there was no way he could play. He played anyway. And the wild part? Most of his own teammates didn't even know he had a torn ACL that week.
The doctor actually tried to talk him out of it. He suggested to Rivers that they do the right thing and not risk his knee long term for short-term gain. Rivers' response was "you never know when you might get another chance to play in a Championship Game."
Shawne Merriman had two torn knee ligaments in that game.
Antonio Gates couldn't play.
L.T. couldn't play.
It was a 14-12 game in the 4th quarter at 18-0 N.E.
Ai said if everyone was healthy and win that game we would have been 3-4 point favorites over the Giants with Eli who spurned us and we would have won 27-24.
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That is true, it was reported that way later after the game in the offseason.Originally posted by ChargingBolts View PostComment
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