Why more than just Indianapolis is rooting for Colts' QB Philip Rivers in NFL playoffs

They want it for him so bad, it hurts. Just thinking about it stresses Charlie Whitehurst out. Philip Rivers playing in his first Super Bowl? He wouldn’t even be able to enjoy it. 

“I mean if the Colts won, it’d be fun, but I’d have to have a few drinks just to watch that game,” said Rivers’ longtime friend and former backup quarterback. “That would  probably be the most stressed out game I could possibly watch.”

Whitehurst isn’t alone. When the Colts begin their playoff push Saturday afternoon in Buffalo, it won’t just be Indianapolis cheering on the Colts. The city of San Diego and so many former Chargers will be standing nervously alongside them. 

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Nick Hardwick doesn’t drink, but if Rivers were playing in the Super Bowl, “I would probably want to -- just to ease the nerves a little,” he said.

Hardwick already paces his house every week, anxiously watching Rivers during the regular season. He snapped a football to Rivers for 11 seasons before he retired in 2015, but he’s seen every single snap Rivers has taken since. He was a nervous wreck watching Colts backup offensive linemen trying to protect his best friend during the Colts’ Week 16 collapse in Pittsburgh. The Super Bowl? Forget it, Hardwick said. He’d be an emotional mess the whole night. 

“Imagine you’re watching your best friend in a prize fight,” Hardwick said. “I’d just want him to win so bad. …  I think all of us former players, on both sides of the ball, not only were we playing with him, but we were also playing for him. He’s that special of a human being. All these years of not being on the same field as him, it would still feel just as good to see him win a championship, because that’s who you were playing for in the first place.”

Antonio Gates isn’t ashamed to admit he’d probably cry watching Rivers celebrate a Super Bowl championship. The retired future hall-of-fame tight end, and longtime Rivers teammate, remembers so many conversations -- too many -- sitting with Rivers in the locker room after their last loss of the year, lamenting what could have been. If only things had broken the Chargers way. One time. 

It never happened for them, but if Rivers won it this year, Gates would feel as if he were there, somehow a part of it. 

“If he was to win it, I’ll just tell you, it will probably bring a lot of joy to myself, because of how hard we worked for 14 years. … It’d be like, ‘Wow, we finally did it.’ I know I wouldn’t really be a part of it, but I’ve known what he’s been through over the years, how we worked, how we fought, how we gave all we had, and it was just never enough."

“Put it this way: To see him get that, I know what it would mean to him, because I know what it would have meant to me.” 

Many San Diegans -- robbed of their hometown team when the franchise moved to Los Angeles -- would feel the same way, Hardwick suspects. It’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there how much that city loved Rivers, he said. How much they still love him. 

Without their own team to root for, many San Diegans have adopted Rivers’ new team -- the Colts -- as their favorite in 2020. No matter the uniform, they want to see their beloved trash-talking gunslinger finally chase down the dream that has eluded him for so long: a championship. 

A Super Bowl victory, Hardwick said, might even repair some of the damage so many of those abandoned fans felt after losing all those playoffs games, then losing their team. 

“I think a lot of San Diegans would feel very complete if Philip Rivers were able to win a championship,” Hardwick said. 

It’ll be all of them, longtime Chargers backup Billy Volek said confidently. He doesn’t see how it couldn’t be. Rivers meant too much to that franchise and to that city for too long for all of them not to be standing in his corner during what he hopes is a long Colts playoff run. 

“We’ll all be rooting for him,” Volek said. “Teammates, fans … Hopefully he wins one for all of us this year.” 

The battle scars of Rivers, San Diego

They didn’t know how to go home. At least they didn’t want to. 

At the end of so many Chargers seasons, Eric Weddle and Philip Rivers would hang around the facility -- the last ones there. They didn’t want their seasons to be over, so they stayed to try and make it last a little longer. They dissected what went wrong, why they had fallen short. Inevitably, the retired All-Pro safety said, those conversations with Rivers would always spin positive. What they could do better next year; how they could turn themselves into contenders again. It was motivation, and it fueled their offseasons, driving one another to come back better.

But the truth, Weddle said, is the pain of those championship-less seasons, never leaves -- neither the city, nor the players themselves. 

All of them can recount the painful defeats, some in all-too-vivid detail.

For Gates, 2006 tops them all.  

“Our training camp practices were like the Pro Bowl,” he said. “We had Pro Bowlers everywhere. At every position. It was Pro Bowlers against Pro Bowlers. I was going against Eric Weddle. (Antonio) Cromartie was going against Vincent Jackson. Lorenzo Neal was going against Shawn Merriman. It was the craziest thing. Kris Dielman and Nick Hardwick were going against Jamal Williams. These are phenomenal players against phenomenal players.”

The 14-2, top-seeded Chargers sent 11 players to the Pro Bowl that season, second-most all-time.

“The most memorable game for me was the one with three interceptions of Tom Brady,” Gates said of the Chargers 24-21 loss to the Patriots in the divisional round. “And we just fumbled it right back. We were at home. That was our game.”

The Chargers lost three fumbles that day, but the one that torments Gates to this day was the final interception of Brady. The play lives infamously in Chargers lore. 

With a 21-13 lead and less than seven minutes to go in the game, Chargers safety Marlon McCree intercepted Brady on a fourth down near midfield, putting the Chargers in position to ice the game. But instead of going to the turf -- “I was screaming at him to go down,” Gates said -- he tried to return the interception. Patriots receiver Troy Brown stripped McCree and New England recovered the fumble. It was the break Brady needed, as he marched the Patriots down for a game-tying touchdown and two-point conversion. The Patriots kicked a field goal on their next possession, and Chargers Pro Bowler Nate Kaeding missed a 54-yarder with eight seconds left. 

“We always found a way (to lose),” Gates said. “Something always happened.”

Hardwick remembers 2008, when the 4-8 Chargers rallied to win their final four games, sneaked into the playoffs and stunned Manning’s Colts in the wild-card round. He and the rest of the Chargers became convinced they were a team of destiny. 

“We got our teeth kicked in the next week in Pittsburgh (35-24),” Hardwick recalled. “We ran one offensive play in the third quarter (a Rivers interception).”

Weddle remembers 2009, the loaded 13-3 Chargers falling at home to Rex Ryan’s upstart New York Jets (9-7). They led 7-3 going into the fourth quarter and fell apart. Rivers threw two second-half interceptions, and Kaeding missed three field goals that day. 

“That was an amazing season,” Weddle said. “Just couldn’t capitalize.” 

They all remember the 2007 AFC Championship game, Rivers playing on a torn ACL, Gates through a dislocated toe, Hardwick and Neal coming off surgery; Merriman putting off major surgery, and Hall of Fame running back LaDanian Tomlinson trying to gut out an MCL sprain that rendered him ineffective before he pulled himself after two carries.

The Chargers scored four times that game, the Patriots just three. But San Diego’s were all field goals and New England’s all touchdowns. Despite intercepting Brady three times yet again, they fell 21-12. 

All of the playoff defeats, and for Rivers there have been six, leave scars that will never heal -- for the players and the tormented city of San Diego, which never saw a Super Bowl champion before the team left. 

“I don’t think (that pain) ever leaves you,” Weddle said. “You never forget the feeling of your season being over.” 

The legacy question

The poster hung in his room as a kid. Dan Marino, Miami Dolphins legend. The greatest who never …

It’s an unfair legacy, frankly. Marino helped revolutionize the sport. He paved the way for passers like Manning and Rivers, Brees and Brady. But he never won the big one. 

That fact invariably comes up in any conversation about Marino -- just as it inevitably will with Rivers should he walk away from the game without a championship. In 17 seasons, Marino reached the playoffs 10 times, the Super Bowl only once, and couldn’t capitalize. In Rivers’ 16 seasons, he’s now reached the playoffs seven times and has never been to the Super Bowl. 

What Rivers has done this season is surpassed Marino in the two most meaningful passing categories: touchdowns (421-420) and yards (63,440-61,361). 

Different eras and all of that, but nonetheless impressive. Hall-of-fame-worthy almost certainly. But it’s strange how similar their career trajectories are: Marino retired 8-10 in the postseason with a career passer rating of 77.1 in those games. Rivers is 5-6 with a passer rating 84.2. 

It’s patently wrong to label either as choke-artists in the postseason -- they both have played some great games -- but there’s no doubt they haven’t been quite as good in the playoffs as they were during the regular season, particularly Rivers. 

A statistical dropoff is expected due to improved competition in the postseason, but of the 20 quarterbacks who have thrown for at least 40,000 regular season yards and 1,000 in the playoffs, Rivers ranks 18th with a 10.9-point drop in passer rating. The average quarterback drops 4.0 points.

However, those numbers will be meaningless, a trivial data point in his hall-of-fame career, if he leads the Colts to glory this season. And if it doesn’t happen -- this year or in the near future -- critics will have their cause for wanting to keep him out of the hall of fame. 

But don’t expect Rivers himself to look back and rue his career. To have regrets. Winning a championship has always been his ultimate goal, the one thing he hasn’t done, but it won’t haunt him. It won’t define him. 

And a championship won’t make or break his legacy. 

Weddle wants him to win one because he’s the ultimate competitor. Because that’s why he thinks Rivers is still out there.

“That’s why you play,” Weddle said. “That’s why you do everything, not for the individual accolades. Not for the Pro Bowls or stats or any of the other stuff. You play to win a championship. It would just be something super special to him. But at the end of the day, whenever he hangs it up, he won’t lament his career because he didn’t win a Super Bowl.”