It’s easy to write off young quarterbacks, but Indianapolis is betting that patience will pay off.
At the end of October, questions lingered on Bryce Young’s availability on the trade market, and Anthony Richardson was in the process of being benched. Few talked much about the potential for the first and fourth picks in the 2023 NFL draft to bounce back, and show why they were taken that high in the first place.Now take a second and think about how ridiculous that is at this stage of their careers.
“We were going for it,” he says. “Right before the drive started, I knew, depending on if we scored quick with a good amount of time left, then maybe kick the PAT. But with that much time left, we were going to go for two for sure. Anything inside a minute, it’s like,The call was about winning the game first and foremost. But there was also an implicit doubling down on the quarterback that many wrote off a month ago.
So, the Colts let nature take its course. Flacco’s play leveled off, and Richardson moved forward through the disappointment of losing his job, listening to his coach’s insistence that this wasn’t even close to the end for him in Indianapolis. Remember, Richardson started just 13 games as a collegian. Had he stayed in school and exhausted his eligibility, he’d be in his fifth year at Florida now—Bo Nix and Jayden Daniels spent five years in school, and Michael Penix Jr. had six. So, the sheer volume of defensive looks, game plans, coverages and rush plans he’d seen was a fraction of what some quarterbacks carry into the pros.
On the play after that, Richardson put a hole shot between the corner and safety down the seam, inside the 5, and tight end Kylen Granson couldn’t quite haul it in. Two plays later, on third-and-9, Richardson saw contact and threw it outside to Michael Pittman Jr. on the sideline to draw a chain-moving pass interference call.
Then, Steichen leaned into the other part of Richardson’s game, calling a quarterback power with a read to Jonathan Taylor off it on the two-pointer. Richardson read Jahlani Tavai staying home on the edge, kept it, and scored. All of these plays that went according to plan, contrasted with a fourth-and-3 conversion to Mo Alie-Cox earlier in the drive, in which Richardson outran a free blitzer to buy time to find his tight end and move the chains.
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