INDIANAPOLIS – Colts quarterback Philip Rivers planned to be back at St. Michael Catholic to lead 8th period weight room action Tuesday with his football team he’s led to the Alabama Class 4A state semifinals twice. A special season awaits.

Next fall, Rivers’ oldest son, Gunner, will be a senior quarterback – currently ranked the sixth-best at his position in the Class of 2027 by 247Sports, the top recruit in Alabama in his class and No. 42 in the country. Also set to be on the sidelines? Gunner’s younger brother Peter, an incoming freshman at St. Michael Catholic.

With Rivers’ only other son Andrew just 2-years-old, this fall marks the only opportunity for two of Rivers’ boys and their dad to share the sidelines as the legendary NFL quarterback turned high school head coach begins his sixth fall wearing a headset instead of a helmet.

Don’t expect him anywhere else in nine months.

“These last four years, had the situation (to play quarterback) come up, I was out unless the football season was done. I wasn’t going to leave the guys midseason or leave before the year started,” Rivers told Rich Eisen last week when asked about the prospect of answering another call to be a prospective playoff team’s emergency quarterback. For Rivers, the uniqueness in his relationship to head coach Shane Steichen and team leadership made this four-week stint in Indianapolis the perfect opportunity to be his first and last return at quarterback.

“My son will be a senior quarterback,” Rivers said. “My other son will be a freshman on the team next year, so it’s going to be a special fall next fall.”

In the hours ahead of his last day on an NFL roster, NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported that, according to multiple sources, Rivers had garnered increasing interest in the NFL’s latest head coaching cycle, with the chance the now-ex NFL quarterback could even be interviewing this cycle.

Though Rivers never outright said Monday that there is no outside opportunity that would keep him from coaching St. Michael Catholic later this year, the impression he’s given reporters in recent weeks was that he was focused on getting back to his life in south Alabama once the Colts season was complete.

Rivers did say on Monday, though, that this experience has taught him to always be open to unexpected opportunities.

“There’s nothing concrete with that,” Rivers said of the reported NFL head coaching interest. “But if anything, this last month has taught me to be open to anything, and you go from there. But I’m looking forward to getting back home, getting back with those guys and getting back with my family and for Gunner’s senior season coming up.

“We’ve been back-to-back to the (Class 4A state) semifinals, and hopefully we can get over the hump this year. I don’t have any of those things on my radar, but certainly it’s nothing I would shut down before it even became a possibility.”

Before he closed his exit interview though, Rivers made clear that he is open to and interested in pursuing being an NFL head coach at some point – even if only once in the NFL’s last 65 years has a team hired a head coach who came without any college or professional coaching experience beyond the high school ranks.

That team, of course: the 2022 Indianapolis Colts, who hired former star center Jeff Saturday off ESPN’s sets and into the heat of a tumultuous season as its interim head coach. Saturday won his debut – a 25-20 road win over the Raiders – before the team dropped its final seven games to finish 4-12-1.

“Those are all big what ifs, but I do think, as humbly as I can say it, that I can coach at this level,” Rivers said Monday. “I know enough about the game and the guys and from a leadership standpoint and the game and all that comes with it. But that’s not something I’m sitting here pursuing.

“You’ve just gotta take it one day at a time, be where you are, and go from there.”

Joel A. Erickson and Nathan Brown cover the Colts all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Colts Insider newsletter.