Philip Rivers can’t do it alone. The 44-year-old grandfather’s week 15 return to the Indianapolis Colts in injury relief after four years in retirement, gaining weight and coaching high school football, was a novelty. Then he quarterbacked just well enough to almost upset the playoff-bound Seattle Seahawks and it became the feel-good story of the year.
And it was immediately overshadowed by more injuries, the season-ending torn A.C.L.s of the game’s biggest stars — on defense, Micah Parsons of the Green Bay Packers, the best defensive end in the N.F.L., and on offense Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs, maybe not the best QB in the league anymore, but nearly unbeatable for the past seven years.
With arduous rehab, players can come back from these knee injuries, but still, it’s not guaranteed either of these two will make the start of the 2026 campaign.
And those are just the most famous names.
The very next day, God bless The Athletic and its gung-ho staff firing off chipper newsletters that brighten my inbox every morning, one Mike Jones banged out a piece with a long headline the second half of which said it all, “let’s end the 18-game season talk.”
Going from 16 to 17 games in 2021, ending a 43-year tradition, was bad enough, wrong, unbalanced, unnecessary, an overreach and a money grab, one that an N.F.L. Players Association in disarray somehow allowed to pass. The storied Chicago Bears franchise stood out in voting against it, Allen Robinson, their top wide receiver at the time, sensibly suggesting that “the 16-game season is already grueling enough on the body. It becomes a long year.”
While 18 seems inevitable, what thinking fan wouldn’t go back even to the pre-1978 14-game schedule if it meant the best players could stick around?
It’s a brutal, concussion-riddled, at times crippling sport and a guilty pleasure. Every helmeted head bouncing off the turf after a tackle produces a wince or an averted gaze.
Torn knee ligaments? “Entering week 15, 59 players were on [injured reserve] with such injuries,” Jones wrote, adding that a “popped Achilles tendon” had ended the seasons of 11 more.
And thus it gets harder to justify extending the schedule.
“The football gods are cruel,” Jones admitted. “Or, are they trying to tell us something?”
For a league with more money than God, singular, protecting the quality of the product should be paramount, not seeing it watered down with backups and replacements, even one as likable as Philip Rivers.