3/26/2023 0 Comments Could philip rivers make a pass![]() ![]() And when Brees severely injured his right shoulder in his last game before free agency, it made his moving on an even more logical step. Taking Rivers was a hint that Brees was not long for the Chargers. San Diego may not have landed Manning, but it had a worthy franchise quarterback - one who threw for nearly 4,500 yards as a senior. But two things were certain about those sidewinding throws: They got where they were going, and they got there more quickly than anyone else’s. Rivers’s unconventional delivery dominated talk about him before the draft. To compensate, his passes were part push, and they stayed that way. Rivers, whose dad was his coach, was a quarterback from the time he could hold a football. Rivers didn’t have Manning’s last name, but his early years were similarly steeped in football. Owners of the first pick in the 2004 draft, the Chargers opted for the North Carolina State quarterback after Eli Manning made no secret of not wanting to play in San Diego. Those two years were spent in relief of Drew Brees, the Chargers’ starting quarterback when Rivers arrived back in 2004. “And those two years at the beginning gave me an extra two on the back end,” he says. He’s 32 now and says he still feels great. In eight seasons as San Diego’s starting quarterback, Rivers has never missed a start, including the 2007 AFC Championship Game, which he played on a torn ACL. His name is never mentioned along with Roethlisberger’s or Andrew Luck’s when people talk about “big” quarterbacks, but even standing here in a pair of brown Crocs, Rivers is an honest 6-foot-5.Īt 228 pounds, he’s sturdy enough to withstand a beating. Rivers is also bigger than you might think. He’s done enough to earn his generation’s title as the best quarterback without a Super Bowl. Same as Peyton, Brees, and every other quarterback comparable to Rivers during his 10 years in the league. Those two have one claim that Rivers doesn’t - each has won a championship. But many would list him third in his own draft class - the famous 2004 group that includes Ben Roethlisberger and Eli Manning. By some measures, Rivers is one of the five best quarterbacks of the past decade. Last season placed Rivers alongside Peyton Manning and Drew Brees, players who have long been his peers, even if he is rarely considered in the same breath. But reentry to the club doesn’t go far enough - not after the season he had a year ago and the seven he put together before that. Rivers ended the year at 69.5 percent.Īfter a two-year banishment, Rivers was again one of the best quarterbacks in football. When the season ended, McCoy’s vision had failed to come true. In nine years, Rivers had never bested 66. Soon after McCoy arrived, he told Peter King he thought Rivers could complete 70 percent of his passes - the sort of endorsement new coaches offer a quarterback in need of revival. Head coach Norv Turner was fired, and Rivers was dropped to the middle class of the quarterback hierarchy. The Chargers had gone from a high-powered offense to living under the auspices of inevitable disaster. Add to that a tie with Mark Sanchez for the league lead in fumbles with 24 over the same stretch. He’d thrown 35 interceptions in 20 - the fourth-worst mark in football. At the end of 2012, his status as a great quarterback had been left for dead. The holdovers were a bridge, designed to return Rivers to the quarterback he’d been for much of his career, and beyond the muck of the past couple seasons. “This has been a lot more about making it the easiest transition we can.” The language of the offense has shifted, as McCoy says, from a system reliant on numbers to one based on words - but certain ideas, code names, and route designs survived. “I have to imagine in other places, coaches come in, and it’s wholesale change - Here’s how we run this offense learn it our way,” Rivers says. What the quarterback thought might devolve into a rookie head coach making his mark - and a point - turned collaborative. ![]() When McCoy and Ken Whisenhunt, then San Diego’s offensive coordinator and now the Tennessee Titans’ head coach, arrived, it meant the only significant schematic change of Rivers’s career. Rivers is talking about the system that head coach Mike McCoy brought with him upon arriving in San Diego last season. Fresh from an August practice and leaning against a wall outside Chargers Park, he’s using it a lot. In his lolling north Alabama accent, the word “ours” makes Philip Rivers sound like a pirate. ![]()
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