One of the winners in the 2017 NFL draft? Philip Rivers. One of the potential losers?

One of the winners in the 2017 NFL draft? Philip Rivers. One of the potential losers? His team, the San Diego — sorry, Los Angeles — Chargers.

We here at Shutdown Corner deemed Rivers a winner because of the supporting cast the Chargers added for him, including Clemson receiver Mike Williams, Western Kentucky guard Forrest Lamp, and Indiana guard Dan Feeney. Those players will give Rivers both protection and offensive options.

What they won’t do is take years off Rivers’ driver’s license. He’s 35 now, he’ll be 36 in December, and that’s the point at which teams need to start thinking succession plan. But for the fourth straight year, the Chargers didn’t draft a quarterback. And that’s starting to raise a few questions about who’s the next top dog for the Chargers.

   Who’s going to replace Philip Rivers? No one knows yet. (AP)“When you go into the draft, there’s a lot of different things you’d like to do and don’t always get it all done,” Chargers general manager Tom Telesco told ESPN, when asked why Los Angeles didn’t take a quarterback. “There were a couple situations where we thought it might happen, but we didn’t quite get there.

 

”Granted, quarterbacks are playing longer than ever before. Drew Brees is almost three years older than Rivers. Tom Brady will be 40 when the season starts. So it’s not like Rivers is on his valedictory lap just yet.But Ben Roethlisberger, who flirted with retirement this past offseason, is three months younger than Rivers. There’s always the injury possibility. And the Chargers aren’t exactly stacked with backup options. There’s Kellen Clemens, the well-traveled backup who’s 33 years old. There’s Mike Berkovici, who hasn’t played a single snap in the NFL after starting only 16 games at Arizona State. And there’s Eli Jenkins, a quarterback from Jacksonville State who doesn’t even have a number on the current Chargers roster.A strong, franchise-level quarterback is cost-of-entry for an NFL team today; the list of teams that make the playoffs without one is minuscule, and the list of quarterback-weak teams that could make the playoffs in competitive divisions like the AFC West is shorter still. 

The Chargers are holding an ace in Rivers, but if they’re going to stay relevant in Los Angeles over the long term, they need to decide on the quarterback that’ll be under center in 2025 very soon.