Philip Rivers’ run with the Colts has come to an end.
According to a report from ESPN, rookie Riley Leonard will start at quarterback for Indianapolis in the team’s season finale against Houston on Sunday.
Rivers, 44, started the last three games for the Colts after surprisingly coming out of retirement. But the Colts have gone 0-3 in that span and were officially eliminated from the postseason with the Texans’ victory over the Chargers on Saturday.
In his three starts, Rivers completed 63 percent of his passes for 544 yards with four touchdowns and three interceptions.
Leonard, a sixth-round pick in this year’s draft out of Notre Dame, has appeared in four games this year, completing 18-of-33 passes for 145 yards with two interceptions.
Anthony Richardson, the No. 4 overall pick in the 2023 draft, is still on injured reserve as he recovers from an orbital fracture suffered midway through the season in a pregame accident.
The Texans clinched a playoff berth in Week 17, but they remain in play for the AFC South title. Thus, coach DeMeco Ryans said he has no plans to rest his starters for the regular-season finale against the Colts on Sunday.
“We still have an opportunity to win our division,” Ryans said Monday, via Jonathan Alexander of the Houston Chronicle. “That’s always the goal each and every year — to win the division. We know we need help from the Titans to be able to do that, so we’re going and playing our guys.”
The Texans need the Titans to beat the Jaguars, which, considering Tennessee’s 3-13 record, seems unlikely. But stranger things have happened, so the Texans aren’t conceding the division.
Houston has won the past two AFC South titles.
The Texans currently sit as the No. 5 seed, which would send Houston to the AFC North winner (Pittsburgh or Baltimore) in the wild-card round.
Cornerbacks Kamari Lassiter (knee and foot) and Derek Stingley Jr. (oblique) and offensive tackles Aireontae Ersery (thumb) and Trent Brown (ankle/knee) are banged up. But Ryans said if they are healthy enough, they will play.
Quarterback C.J. Stroud will start.
The Texans activated wide receiver Justin Watson from injured reserve on Monday, the team announced.
Watson went on injured reserve Sept. 17 after injuring a calf muscle/Achilles’ tendon in the Week 2 loss to the Buccaneers. He returned to practice Dec. 10.
Watson, a former fifth-round pick of the Bucs, has three catches for 30 yards on four targets in two games.
The team waived defensive lineman Solomon Byrd in a corresponding move.
Byrd signed to the active roster from the practice squad on Dec. 3, but he has not played in a regular-season game this season. His only action came in 2024 when he played 20 defensive snaps and one special teams snap in one game.
A potentially exciting ending to Saturday’s Texans-Chargers contest evaporated in a flash, thanks to a ticky-tack illegal contact foul that extended Houston’s final drive, keeping L.A. from trying to mount a potential game-winning drive. NFL officiating spokesman Walt Anderson addressed the call on NFL Network’s Sunday morning four-hour pregame show, in his usual two-minute chunk of real estate to talk about officiating decisions from the week that was.
“What a lot of people may not realize is illegal contact is a very unique foul to the National Football League,” Anderson said. “Illegal contact does not exist at any other level of football. And what that foul is, is receivers, once you go five yards, defensive players have got to let them freely run their route. You can chuck them once within five yards, but after five yards, you’ve gotta let them go. And so what happened on this play is when Christian Kirk got past five yards, then, number 29, Tarheeb Still, he slid over into his path. If you slide over into the path of the receiver, you chuck them, you ride them beyond that five yards, that is illegal contact, and that is what was called on the play.”
In isolation, that’s right. And Steve Mariucci followed up with the (frankly) irrelevant question of why the flag wasn’t dropped for illegal contact with a different receiver on the same play. Anderson explained the reason for a foul not being called on Chargers defensive back Donte Jackson (as Kurt Warner initially assumed when discussing the replay during the broadcast) for a collision with Texans receiver Xavier Hutchinson.
Here’s the reality. The officials typically don’t call illegal contact quite so tightly. So the better question is this: “Walt, why isn’t illegal contact called every time it happens?”
Despite the rule that revolutionized passing offenses in 1978 by preventing defensive backs from constantly jamming and hitting and disrupting pass routes before the ball is in the air (with the exception on “one chuck” within five years), some degree of technically illegal contact occurs all the time. It doesn’t get called all the time because, frankly, that would slow the game down to a crawl. (The Legion of Boom, among other successful teams, parlayed that reality into a Super Bowl win 12 years ago.)
That’s the real problem. By “letting them play” more often than not, with illegal contact called only sporadically or when blatant, it stands out (in a bad way) when the rule is strictly enforced — especially when a game is on the line.
This is another one of those “normal incidents of the game” that become tinfoil-hat fodder in a world of widespread legalized sports betting from which the NFL significantly profits.
Obviously, we don’t expect official NFL spokesman Walt Anderson to say that. But that’s the real problem with what happened on Saturday at SoFi Stadium. Illegal contact of the kind that was flagged in crunch time very often isn’t. So why was it called at that specific time?
Houston’s win over the Chargers got the Texans into the playoffs. And it leaves only one spot in the AFC unclaimed.
Six teams are now in: Broncos, Patriots, Jaguars, Texans, Chargers, and Bills.
That leaves one more seat at the table, for one of two teams. Either the Steelers or the Ravens will be the AFC North champions. Pittsburgh’s magic number is one; a Baltimore loss to the Packers tonight or a Steelers win over the Browns on Sunday seals the deal.
Plenty of seed remain TBD, including the AFC East and AFC South champions, along with the all-important No. 1 seed.
Still, six of seven AFC teams are set. Which is the same situation as the NFC, where the only remaining spot will go to eventual NFC South champs, Carolina or Tampa Bay.
