FormerBolt

Rivers didn't fail to come back against the Steelers. The game was stolen by the referees. It was a decision they made to save a franchise that earns big dollars for the NFL. The Colts also beat the Bills basically--- except the coach snapped defeat out of the jaws of victory.

The topic of this thread is disingenuous. Its originator is suggesting the Colts playoff implosion is on Rivers. But the reality is that Rivers did what he was hired to do all year, including in the playoff game. Rivers did not let the Colts down. It was the rest of the team that failed him ang its fans. There was a 33 yard field goal that should've been made and wasn't. .Five or six perfectly thrown passes that were dropped and 4 points left on the board by a coach who wouldn't kick a field goal when he could and who went for two points after a td when he should've stayed with one. Tom Brady rarely, if ever, has had to deal with ineprifude on the teams of which he has been a member. For Rivers, it was a problem for years in SD. And it was again in 2020.

After a successful season, the impression I get is that most Colts fans have accepted Rivers as a great quarterback. Many were reluctant at first. If he was ever any good, they said, those days were behind him. Those of us who have watched him for years have always known that if surrounded with reasonably good talent, he had the ability to get a team into the playoffs year after year. The success of the Colts with Rivers at qb this year should be a mirror in which other Charger fans see the failure of their own team's organization. The Colts went from being 7-9 to 11-5 just by adding him to the lineup. The Colts could easily have won two more games this year--- except for coronavirus complications. Spanos' team had the benefit of Rivers for a decade and a half with not much success. Unfortunately, the stink of the Chargers followed him to Indianapolis at first. Hopefully, it's gone now.

I'm an ex-Charger fan. So I'm biased. I think Philip Rivers remains the best option. He knows the team better now than he did when the season began. The first loss to the Jaguars happened because it was his first game on a new team. He made a couple of bad throws. Had the Colts played some warmup games, the team likely comes away with a victory. Another game the Colts should have won was against the Steelers. They lost it because the referees quite clealy made a decision to award the game to one of the NFL's most profitable franchises. They did it to make Steelers fans, who are more numerous, happy. If the refs call that game fairly, the Colts win that one, too. When you talk about kicking Rivers out the door for someone else, remember you are asking to get rid of the qb for a team that could very easily have been 13-3 this year.

Coach Reich let the media influence his decisions. The Colts are better than he fhought. The talking heads said the Colts would be outscored by twenty points against the Bills. So Reich wanted every last point he could get. That's why he went for a td instead of a field goal. It's why he went for 2 points instead of one. As it rurned out, the Colts only needed to play their usual game, and they would've won. It is an example of how people who aren't on the field influenced a game