The 2025 NFL regular season comes to an end with Week 18 on Sunday, and one of the biggest storylines of the campaign was 44-year-old Philip Rivers coming out of a five-year retirement to start at quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts. Rivers delayed a possible Hall of Fame induction another five years by leaving retirement, and while he went 0–3 as a starter and didn’t save Indy’s season, he surely provided inspiration for many out there.
However, everyone in Indy, from the fans to the team to Rivers, knows that this inspirational story has an end date to it. Rivers won’t be returning to the Colts, or any other NFL team, in the 2026 NFL season, as he’s likely to be back home in Alabama performing his prior job coaching high school football.
So, who will be the Colts’ starting quarterback in 2026? Rivers only got the call to return after Daniel Jones tore his Achilles tendon in early December, which is an injury that can take upwards of a year to fully rehab. Even with that, Rivers believes the job should be Jones’s next season, as he endorsed the former New York Giant as the one who should lead the Colts in 2026.
Rivers and Jones played at rival Atlantic Coast Conference programs with North Carolina State and Duke, respectively, about 15 years apart, but Rivers said he didn’t know the latter prior to joining the Colts. Rivers also revealed that, despite the injury and accompanying rehabilitation, Jones has been in every quarterback meeting since Rivers left retirement.
As Rivers said, Jones was having a great year—the best of his career—prior to getting hurt. He was an early-season MVP candidate as the Colts started out 7–1. Then he first suffered a fracture in his leg, which caused his play to tail off and the Colts as a whole to decline. Indy went just 1–4 over Jones’s last four starts, and one could tell from Jones’s performance that he clearly wasn’t healthy.
Rivers’s endorsement says a lot about Anthony Richardson, the person that many hoped would be the face of the franchise when he was drafted fourth overall in 2023. The injury-plagued quarterback has started just 15 of a possible 50 games since entering the NFL, and he has more picks than touchdown passes in his career.
Richardson, who lost the starting QB job to Jones in training camp, suffered a freak pre-game injury earlier this season, which was also a reason why the Colts reached out to Rivers. The former Florida star has been on injured reserve since October and will not play in Week 18.
Who will be under center for the Colts in their final game of the season is rookie Riley Leonard, who has ties to both Jones and Rivers. Like Jones, Leonard also went to Duke, but his ties to Rivers run even deeper. Leonard was raised in Fairhope, Alabama, and it just so happens that the high school team that Rivers was coaching prior to leaving retirement is located in Fairhope. The two have a relationship that dates back years, as Rivers even helped train Leonard during offseason workout sessions prior to the rookie becoming a professional.
Leonard, though, is a sixth-round rookie, while the likes of Rivers, Jones, and Richardson were all first-rounders. Sixth-round quarterbacks are fortunate to even garner one start in their careers, so Leonard isn’t the future for Indy, and in Rivers’s eyes, neither is Richardson.
Rivers will assume backup duties for Leonard in Sunday’s finale versus the Houston Texans. It will be the final game of his comeback, and of his career, as Rivers confirmed that he’s retiring for good after Sunday.