Philip Rivers was one of the most bankable QBs of the fantasy football era

Philip Rivers played the entire 2008 AFC Championship Game with a torn ACL.

Any post-retirement recap of his career should begin with this fact, because it’s one of the most damn impressive things we’ve seen in the NFL in recent years.

Rivers had suffered the injury in a Divisional Round road win against Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis Colts, a game in which he threw three touchdown passes. He then had a mid-week arthroscopic procedure to remove half his meniscus before traveling to New England to face the still-undefeated Patriots. The Chargers were running on fumes, with LaDainian Tomlinson and Antonio Gates also dealing with significant injuries. San Diego gave the Pats a game, ultimately losing 21-12. Rivers passed for 211 yards and led four scoring drives, shuffling around on one leg.

Philip Rivers dropped back 37 times in the 2007 AFC Championship Game.
With a torn ACL.

Seriously. #fbf #LACvsNE pic.twitter.com/pbJOxKQVug

— NFL (@NFL) October 27, 2017

We’ve all used Rivers as a punchline at some point, because he’s such an odd, quirky player. No one throws like that guy. No one trash-talks like that guy. No one generates gifs like that guy. But when you consider Rivers’ legacy, let’s never forget that he played the biggest game of his professional life on a knee that needed to be rebuilt.

Rivers’ placement in the hierarchy of modern quarterbacks is somewhat complicated because, while he ranks top-five in career passing yards and touchdowns, he also had the dumb luck of overlapping in the AFC with the best years of Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger and Manning, as well as the early years of Patrick Mahomes. So the postseason resume for Rivers is a bit thin. We might think differently of him if he’d simply spent his prime years in the NFC, where the path to the Super Bowl wasn’t quite as messy.

Still, Rivers’ best seasons were among the best of any era. At various times, he led the NFL in passing yardage, touchdown passes, completion percentage, yards per attempt and passer-rating. He has six seasons with 30 or more TD passes and he earned eight Pro Bowl nods. He also delivered top-12 positional finishes in fantasy ten times over a 17-year career.

Whether or not you think Rivers is a Hall of Famer, he was unquestionably one of the greatest and most bankable QBs of the fantasy era. Congratulations to a one-of-a-kind player on a memorable career.

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