It looks like Alec Pierce will be able to play when the Colts go against the 49ers on Monday night. But cornerback Sauce Gardner does not look poised to return from his calf injury.
Pierce (foot) was upgraded to a full participant on Friday after he was limited on Thursday.
Gardner, however, remained sidelined as a non-participant. Receiver Anthony Gould (foot) and offensive tackle Bernhard Raimann (elbow) also were DNPs on Friday.
Guard Quenton Nelson (wrist) was downgraded from full on Thursday to limited on Friday.
Quarterback Anthony Richardson (eye) remained limited as the Colts get him back on the field in his 21-day practice window to return from IR.
Receiver Josh Downs and linebacker Germaine Pratt were both back on the field as full participants after each missed Thursday’s session for personal reasons.
Running back Ameer Abdullah (neck), defensive tackle DeForest Buckner (neck), and safety Daniel Scott (knee) all remained full.
Colts Clips
It’s not quite Nolan Ryan vs. Steve Carlton, but it’s an interesting wrinkle arising from the surprise unretirement of Colts quarterback Philip Rivers.
Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford entered Thursday night’s game at No. 8 on the all-time passing yardage list. He exited at No. 7.
With 457 passing yards, Stafford leapfrogged Rivers. Currently, Stafford has 63,988 yards. Rivers has 63,560.
Rivers needs 329 yards on Monday night to reclaim the seventh position. (In his first game back, Rivers threw for only 120 yards against a Seattle defense that Stafford torched.)
Stafford likely won’t be looking in the rear-view mirror. With 101 more yards next Monday night against the Falcons, Stafford will bypass Ben Roethlisberger at No. 6 on the career regular-season passing yardage list.
Unless Roethlisberger unretires next week. Which sounds just as crazy now as the notion of Rivers coming back did 12 days ago.
49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall did not practice Thursday, the team’s first session of the week ahead of Monday Night Football.
Pearsall injured his ankle and aggravated the posterior cruciate ligament injury in his knee.
With an extra day this week, the 49ers are not ruling out Pearsall.
“He’s doing a lot better today than he was on Monday, and the extra day will help,” Shanahan said, via David Bonilla of 49erswebzone.com. “So, he’s got a shot.”
Offensive guard Spencer Burford (knee/ankle), defensive tackle Jordan Elliott (knee), linebacker Nick Martin (concussion), running back Christian McCaffrey (rest) and offensive tackle Trent Williams (rest) also did not participate.
Linebacker Tatum Bethune (ankle), cornerback Renardo Green (neck), defensive end Yetur Gross-Matos (hamstring) and defensive end Sam Okuayinonu (ankle) were limited.
The Colts remained without cornerback Sauce Gardner at Thursday’s practice.
Gardner has missed the last two games with a calf injury he suffered in the team’s Week 13 loss to the Texans. The team will have two more practice sessions before issuing injury designations for Monday’s game against the 49ers.
Quarterback Anthony Richardson (eye) was limited in his first practice since being designated for return from injured reserve. Wide receiver Alec Pierce (Achilles) was also a limited participant.
Wide receiver Josh Downs (personal), wide receiver Anthony Gould (foot), linebacker Germaine Pratt (personal), and left tackle Bernhard Raimann (elbow) did not take part in practice. Running back Ameer Abdullah (knee), defensive tackle DeForest Buckner (neck), left guard Quenton Nelson (wrist), and safety Daniel Scott (knee) were full participants.
Anthony Richardson is officially getting back on the practice field.
Via multiple reporters, head coach Shane Steichen announced in his Thursday press conference that the Colts are opening Richardson’s 21-day practice window to return from injured reserve.
Richardson has been sidelined since suffering an orbital fracture during a freak pregame accident back in October.
Steichen said that Richardson still has some vision limitations, so the plan is to get him worked back in through individual drills and with some scout-team work.
With that, Richardson is not going to be activated for Monday’s game against the 49ers and it’s still unclear whether or not Richardson will be healthy enough to play at all the rest of the season.
Philip Rivers is still set to start against San Francisco on Monday night for his second game since surprisingly coming out of retirement at age 44. But Steichen noted rookie Riley Leonard is over the knee injury he sustained against the Jaguars in Week 14.
The Colts’ first injury report of the week will be out later on Thursday.
Philip Rivers sells.
The return of the 44-year-old grandpa to the Colts, nearly five years after he last played for the team, moved the needle in Indianapolis.
Via Zack Keefer of TheAthletic.com, the Week 15 game between the Colts and the Seahawks was the most-watched Colts game on CBS in Indianapolis in five years.
And, of course, five years ago, Rivers was the team’s starting quarterback.
It’s no surprise. Rivers’s return sparked fascination for all NFL fans. For Colts fans, who were able to enjoy a near upset of one of the best teams in the league, there was no reason to stop watching the game until the very end.
This week, the Colts host the 49ers on Monday Night Football. The national broadcast gives all football fans a chance, two nights before an old man in red makes his worldwide rounds, to see if an old man in blue can make a Christmas wish come true.
During a 17-year career, that ran from 2004 through 2020, Philip Rivers earned $244,223,210. He’ll be adding a little more to that mountain of cash.
Rivers is getting the prorated one-year veteran minimum of $1.255 million. With four of 18 weeks left in the season, it works out to $278,889.
As many have pointed out since Rivers returned, it also restores his league-provided health insurance, which otherwise would have expired five years after his last game. If he retires again after the 2025 season, the five-year clock will reset.
Obviously, Rivers isn’t risking his health for free health insurance. With $244 million in earnings (it’s a lot less than that after taxes), he can easily afford to pay for his own health insurance. Besides, the Colts didn’t do it to get him free health insurance for five more years; the Colts needed a quarterback for the stretch run.
But it’s a nice benefit for vested veterans, courtesy of the negotiations between the NFL and the NFL Players Association.
As of last week, and without even being on the Colts’ 53-man roster, quarterback Philip Rivers had 15-1 odds to win the NFL’s comeback player of the year award. After his first 2025 game, Rivers has made another move.
He’s currently 5-1, behind only 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey, who’s the clear favorite at -210.
The Rivers “comeback” (which literally is a comeback) doesn’t fit within the clarification the Associated Press published to voters last year: “The spirit of the AP Comeback Player of the Year Award is to honor a player who has demonstrated resilience in the face of adversity by overcoming illness, physical injury or other circumstances that led him to miss playing time the previous season.”
Rivers missed playing time in 2024 (and 2023, 2022, and 2021 by choice). Still, the AP won’t be rejecting ballots that contain Rivers’s name.
With five names on the list for each of the 50 voters, Rivers will surely get votes. Unless the Colts manage to turn their current 1-5 slide into a playoff berth, Rivers likely won’t get enough votes to secure the trophy.
The other realistic candidates are Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott and Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence, both of whom have 7-1 odds.
The Colts have a healthy young quarterback, a quarterback who is coming back from an injury sustained in an unfortunate pregame accident, and a 44-year-old grandfather who just started his first game since the 2020 postseason.
As we know, between Riley Leonard, Anthony Richardson, and Philip Rivers, it’s Rivers who is set to start the Week 16 matchup against the 49ers on Monday Night Football.
Richardson has been cleared for football activities, but in a Monday press conference, head coach Shane Steichen did not definitively say one way or another whether or not Richardson would have his 21-day practice window opened this week. While Leonard could be an option, Steichen was fairly blunt when asked why the team would go with Rivers instead of potentially giving the rookie a shot.
“Obviously, we wanted to see how Philip did on Sunday, and I thought he did some really good things. To bring in a guy of his age and where he’s at in his career — we didn’t bring him in here to sit on the bench. I’ll say that,” Steichen said, via transcript from the team. “So, he’s excited for this challenge. We obviously got to take it one week at a time, and then we go from there.”
Rivers looked limited at times by different factors during Sunday’s loss to the Seahawks, finishing 18-of-27 for 120 yards with a touchdown and an interception. But Rivers’ knowledge of the offensive scheme and how defenses would attack it allowed him to overcome some of those limitations to be an effective signal-caller. The numbers indicate Rivers didn’t do much downfield passing, but he didn’t necessarily have to.
“Yeah, I think obviously, we talked about a little bit earlier, but going into that game plan — that was the game plan,” Steichen said. “We wanted to run the ball, control the clock, take easy completions. I thought we did a pretty good job of that. And our defense was phenomenal. They played awesome. Obviously, they didn’t score a touchdown. And to kick that field goal there at the end to have a chance to win it — I thought it was like a hard-fought game. I thought our guys played their tail off, and just at the end, it wasn’t enough. We’ve got to find a way to do that.
“I thought Philip did a hell of a job of managing that game plan. That was the plan going into it. I thought he did a hell of a job. Obviously, on the road in a hostile environment, first one back in a long time. He did what was necessary to put us in position to win that game.”
As for the aftermath of the game, Steichen said Rivers felt good coming into the building on Monday.
“He’s in the quarterback room right now watching tape,” Steichen said. “He’s like, ‘I’ve got my normal bruises that I had when I played.’ But he said, ‘I feel pretty darn good.’ So, that was good for him to come out of the game clean. And then obviously he’s excited for the challenge coming up this week.”
“Obviously, it is a story, and he knows that. But I mean, it’s about the team, and he’s here to help us win football games. Otherwise he wouldn’t be here, and he’s going to fight like crazy, just like he always has his whole career to help win one week at a time — as to his mindset, and that’s what he’s looking forward to, of the challenge each and every week of preparing to get ready to go out and compete and try to win a football game.”
The second game of the Philip Rivers reunion tour will be broadcast to a national audience.
Colts coach Shane Steichen told reporters on Monday that Rivers will start the Week 16 Monday night game against the 49ers.
The game has massive ramifications for the 8-6 Colts, who started 7-1 and have lost five of six games.
They gave the Seahawks a run for their money on Sunday, losing 18-16 after taking a 16-15 lead with 47 seconds to play.
Rivers, in his first game since the 2000 wild-card playoffs, completed 18 of 27 passes for 120 yards, one touchdown, and one interception. He was sacked once.
The Colts are currently the No. 8 seed in the AFC postseason field. If the Colts fail to qualify, they’ll be the sixth team since the merger to start 7-1 or better and miss the playoffs — and the first to do so since the league expanded the tournament to seven teams per conference.
