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There were things Shane Steichen and the Colts knew about Anthony Richardson before they drafted him at No. 4 back in April. Then, there were things they would have to see for themselves later on. And one of those, serendipitously enough, showed itself in the first quarter of Indianapolis’s first preseason game, on the road against the Bills, three weeks ago.
On the Colts’ fourth play of the game, and their third throw, the rookie took a shotgun snap, and the Bills’ Greg Rousseau came unblocked into the backfield. Richardson leaned back and pump-faked to freeze Rousseau, then threw the ball off his back foot in the direction of slot receiver Isaiah McKenzie. The problem: Richardson was off-balance enough for the ball to sail inside and high, and into the hands of Buffalo corner Dane Jackson.
Afterward, Richardson conceded that he needed, in that spot, to either give McKenzie a better ball or know well enough to understand the difficulty of the throw, and just throw it into the stands. But, at that moment, that wasn’t what Steichen was thinking about.
“In my head,” Steichen said last week, “I was like, Alright, let’s see how he responds.”
From the outside, how Richardson rebounded in the moment may seem like a small test in a season full of them. Steichen, however, saw it as a critical one, as he and his staff gathered information on the player they’ve tied their futures to.
In short, it would either give them confidence that they could proceed with their plan—or, it might lead them to slam on the brakes.
That plan was hatched soon after Steichen arrived in Indianapolis (fresh off a Super Bowl run with the Eagles), and was founded on the Colts trying to take a practical, realistic view of their circumstances. Realistically, after the franchise rolled through four starting quarterbacks in the four years following Andrew Luck’s shocking retirement, they could no longer wait to take a quarterback with a top five pick in tow. And from a practical standpoint, given the makeup of the Colts team, that quarterback was going to play as a rookie.
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Which is why what Steichen saw on that mid-August afternoon in Western New York was so vital to where Indianapolis is taking things. Richardson responded to his interception by churning out a couple first downs on the Colts’ next series, then piloting a 14-play, 77-yard drive (it ended on a missed chip shot of a field goal on the possession after that).
“He finished 7-of-12, and operated [the offense], he bounced right back from it,” Steichen said. “Here we go. Next drive. Next play. Keep ripping it.”
In a way, that encapsulates what the Colts are looking for from their quarterback this year. Make plays. Make mistakes. Keep learning. Keep ripping it. And in seeing how his big, raw gunslinger reacted in Orchard Park, Steichen got his affirmation that the plan, as laid out, won’t break Richardson.
The rest of it, as we’ll explain, should be pretty fun for the rest of us to watch.
We’re on the doorstep of the 2023 season now, and that means we’ve got a lot to get to in The MMQB this week. Among those things ….
• How the ups and down of the early days of Trevor Lawrence’s career could be an indicator of some pretty massive things to come for the Jaguars and their quarterback.
• What Jalen Hurts has done through three years is, well, pretty different for a quarterback. We’ve got the story on how he’s making it happen.
• A loaded set of takeaways to get you ready for Week 1.
But we’re starting with one great mystery this week—what the Colts will look like in the regular season with Richardson as their pilot—and how so much of the last seven months has been dedicated to getting to this point, in the right place, for both the team and its prized young quarterback.
Steichen was officially hired on Valentine’s Day, two days after Super Bowl LVII. Jim Bob Cooter was hired to be his offensive coordinator on Feb. 20, and between then and March 1, four new position coaches came aboard, with Indy legend and receivers coach Reggie Wayne kept on from Frank Reich’s staff.
The timing alone didn’t leave much room for error as Steichen was drawing up what he would want to build in his first year as a head coach—and how he’d find his quarterback only made things more complicated. With the idea being that he and GM Chris Ballard would use the fourth pick to finally stop the position’s revolving door in Indianapolis, Steichen spent his first seven weeks putting together and installing an offense for, well, a QB to be named later.
Essentially, as he saw it, it was like custom-building a home for a family without meeting that family until you’re halfway through the process. Steichen could lay the foundation. He could construct some infrastructure. But he’d do it knowing a good percentage of the details and fixes would have to wait.
“Myself, coming from Philly, with the zone read game and doing all that stuff, it was like Alright cool, we’d be installing it as coaches before the players got in,” Steichen says. “You never know. We might not run these. We might’ve sat here and done two hours for nothing, but you never know. So we installed just your normal base run stuff. The pass game is the pass game.”
The detail of the run game, on the other hand, would be more specific to who the Colts wound up with at quarterback, with Indy knowing, after the Panthers traded up from No. 9 to No. 1, that there was a good chance two (with the Texans picking second) of the top QB prospects would be off the board by the time the Colts got on the clock at No. 4.
So Steichen, Cooter and the offensive coaches worked to install the passing game, and basic elements of the run game, while also brushing over ideas to highlight the strengths of Richardson, Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud or Will Levis—knowing that they would have to double back and focus all of those concepts and ideas post-draft, when they actually would know who’d be taking the snaps for them come the summer.
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“Shane’s background with several different styles of offense, and mine with a few as well, we thought it was best to at least discuss different modes of play and different plays within that that could come up during the year,” Cooter says, “Even though we knew there were some plays we were talking about where depending on who our starting quarterback was, those plays could absolutely just be thrown out of the playbooks.
“So we might’ve wasted a day along the way doing those types of things, but we wanted to give ourselves the full ability, the full capability, once we knew what was going on at our quarterback position. … We sort of had a good list of those plays kind of sitting off to the side, on the board, and we’re just waiting to see how everything shook out with the draft.”
That meant, when Colts players showed up for OTAs in mid-April, and their first minicamp right before the draft, they were getting the bones of what the offense would be, with the acknowledgment that, by Cooter’s estimation, “about half” of that offense would eventually be tailored to the identity of the quarterback.
It goes back to a core belief that both Cooter and Steichen had developed over the last few years working with young quarterbacks (the former with Jalen Hurts and Trevor Lawrence the last two years, and the latter with Hurts and Justin Herbert the last three), and a belief that only underscored the challenging situation the staff had to work through in that truncated period of time.
“It was such a unique position here this offseason,” Cooter says. “We always talk about building the offense around the players and the quarterback position being No. 1 within that, building around his strengths. Well, without knowing who your starting quarterback is as a new offensive staff, what do you put together?”
Steichen remembers Sept. 20, 2020 like it was yesterday. The bizarre situation the Chargers’ starting quarterback at the time, Tyrod Taylor, had a lung punctured while being administered a pain-killing shot for his cracked ribs. The ensuing fire drill in getting Herbert (a rookie who, in that COVID-altered year, hadn’t so much as taken a preseason game snap), ready to play in the moments before kickoff. And the place Steichen was in, in Week 2, to call it as Los Angeles’s first-year offensive coordinator.
“Right before kickoff, it was like, Come here. We’re going to go right down these openers. We’re going to run these plays,” Steichen says. “There might have been one or two zone reads in there that we’d skip, but he could still do part of that stuff. It wasn’t his main game, but he could still do some of that stuff.”
Herbert responded by marching the Chargers 79 yards on eight plays, covering the last 4 yards of the drive with his feet to score his first NFL touchdown.
Los Angeles lost the game to the reigning world champion Chiefs in overtime, but there were lessons from the experience that would stay with Steichen. And the biggest takeaway, as it came to playing with a young quarterback, was twofold. One, Herbert played fast because the staff made an effort to call it fast and kept the rookie from getting in his own head. Two, the Chargers tried their best to stick to what Herbert did well.
Steichen would use those lessons a year later when he took over as the Eagles’ play-caller midway through the 2021 season, installing and emphasizing elements of the Oklahoma run game to get Hurts going. Also on Nick Sirianni’s first staff that year was Cooter, who was able to take what he saw Sirianni and Steichen do with Hurts to Jacksonville with him, in working with Lawrence last year as the Jaguars’ pass-game coordinator.
“It’s been good for me just to have a little more awareness of what a young quarterback is used to coming from college football,” says Cooter, who had also previously worked with Peyton Manning and Matthew Stafford. “Whether it’s the offensive structure of college football or the requirements of the quarterback position in college football, I’m probably a little more comfortable with understanding exactly what maybe they were doing, and how we can hopefully get the best out of transitioning them into the NFL with what we’re going to do
“Obviously, Trevor and Jalen, those guys were second-year guys when I was with them so it’s a little bit of a different story. But just young quarterbacks coming from college—What do they need to do to get into the NFL? I think it is a little bit different than it was 15-20 years ago. When I was in college, I was learning a ton about protections and changing the Mike point, and you talk to different guys today and they may not necessarily be doing all that.”
Which, implicitly, is Cooter saying it was on the Colts coaches to meet Richardson halfway.
The work on that starts with the contingencies in March. Steichen and Cooter spent time studying explosive, quarterback-driven runs from college and high school programs they respected, or had heard good things about. They would then create 20-play cutups from those offenses to send to line coach Tony Sparano Jr. and tight ends coach Tom Manning, who were putting together the Indy run game.
There were also specifics in other areas that the coaches were working for Young, Stroud and Levis. But it was obvious to everyone which would be tailored for the uniquely-gifted Ricardson, should he be the pick. And once he was, the second installment began.
Steichen got real comfortable with Richardson as a person, and as the guy the coach would tie his long-term job security to, during the quarterback’s pre-draft ‘30’ visit to Indy. The coach took Richardson bowling, just to get him out of the building; as Steichen explains it, “Let’s just go talk and eat some lunch and hang, that was really what it was more about than anything." Cooter, for his part, had that moment walking through the Florida facility, and seeing how even the lowest people on the totem pole seemed to have a rapport with the quarterback.
“Quarterback meets you out front of an SEC football facility and walks you to the film room, you’re passing by a secretary, nutrition, weight room, at these SEC schools, you got everything in that building these days,” Cooter says. “Everybody in that program you’re passing by, and he seemed to have just a great demeanor and great interaction with almost all of them. It was just kind of cool and natural and authentic, and that stood out to me.”
And as for who Richardson was as a player, you didn’t need to be Gil Brandt to see the eye-popping athleticism on tape. There were a slew of plays (one against LSU, a bunch against Utah) highlighting, in Steichen’s words, “the stuff you can’t coach.” But what really put the Colts over the top was the other stuff.
Cooter could see, in studying Richardson, the then-20-year-old would come off his first read, and get to No. 2 or No. 3, and use his athleticism to throw downfield, rather than just run all the time. It wasn’t consistent yet. But it was there.
So the Colts felt like, in time, they’d be able to harvest that ability. But realistically they also knew that, in playing him as a rookie, that time wouldn’t be September of 2023.
Which is where the second phase of building the offense for Richardson came in. The Colts drafted him on April 27, and in the weeks to follow, the coaches dove back into the stuff they’d brushed over through the seven weeks prior. They worked feverishly to retrofit the offense for their new quarterback—in an effort to get him doing things they knew he’d be able to execute and do well, to try to get him, and the offense, playing fast from the jump.
“We went through it again,” Steichen says. “Once he was in the building, once we drafted him, it was like, Boom, let’s get together. Remember these that we talked about in the spring before the players got in, before OTAs? Alright, good, let’s really detail these out. These are all up, let’s install these.”
And as the Colts first got Richardson for rookie minicamp, then for OTAs with the rest of his camp in mid-May, there was another detail in the plan to accelerate both the quarterback’s development and the offense’s installation: The fourth pick would get first-team reps, really, from the jump, which was another nod to the reality of the situation.
That reality, again, was that Richardson was going to have to play, and probably early on in the season. So the smart thing, as the staff saw it, was to first and foremost make him earn it, but also not oversell a quarterback competition at the expense of the rookie’s development.
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“The thing everybody had to do back in high school or junior high—You gotta work your way up from third string to second string to first string—well, you take a look at NFL training camps these days,” Cooter says. “The practice numbers are down, the rep numbers are down. If you take that path, you may end up getting in those reps with the 1s a little bit too late. And now you got a few less reps working with the receivers you’re going to throw to, the center you’re going to be communicating with a ton, calling those plays in the huddle.
“So it’s better to confront reality and just say, He’s sure going to compete for that starting job this year, let’s figure out our plan to get him some reps with the 1s, see how that works out, let him kind of find his way.”
Richardson responded quickly. Within a couple weeks, he was getting calls out cleanly in the huddle, after coming from environments where he never really had to huddle at all. “For him to come in and be able to spit those play-calls out in the huddle with confidence,” Cooter says, “was really, really impressive.” And that allowed for the coaches to move confidently themselves, ahead into camp with Richardson ready to gobble up more first-team reps, and the plan to build an offense for the quarterback moving along briskly.
Indeed, the interception Richardson threw in the Buffalo was part of a larger blueprint.
No, no one planned for him to lose balance and serve one up for Jackson that day. But the Colts did want him to make mistakes, fight through and see everything he could over the course of the summer. To that end, Indy had joint practices with the Bears and Eagles to work out run-game kinks. And in games, Steichen wanted Richardson to throw the ball. Richardson famously only started 13 college games, so the more he could see, the better.
"I wanted to throw it around a little bit more than normal with him,” Steichen says.
Obviously, that would inform the coach on how he could get Richardson playing fast once the regular season starts. It also allowed Steichen to hide from opponents what the offense will look like—similar to how Mike and Kyle Shanahan spent the summer of 2012 hiding how they’d deploy Robert Griffin III.
And that’s not to say that Indy’s going to roll up 40 points and 459 yards in Week 1, like that Washington team did. But they’ll probably catch a few teams off-guard, generate some highlights and be an entertaining watch through Richardson’s rookie year.
The hope, from there, is that if Indy can get its offense rolling a little, they’ll wind up with a more confident Richardson, who’ll play faster as a result. Then, well, Steichen has a story from Herbert’s rookie year that indicates the hope would be Richardson might come along a little quicker than you’d think—and surprise some people with what he’s capable of. Maybe even his coaches.
This one’s from a game against the Raiders, with Steichen having prepared Herbert for Las Vegas’s tendency to send zero blitzes near midfield, plus given him answers to deal with out of a 3-by-1 set (three receivers to one side, one to the other).
“We had this play to where they would play zero to the nub side and cloud it to the three-receiver side and bring slot pressure,” Steichen says. “It was like, Hey, if they bring this in here, this is a call on Keenan [Allen], you’re going to be on a backward dip and go over the top like a deep cross. … I didn’t see the blitz in 2-by-2 and how it would play out. Sure enough we lined up in 2-by-2 and I’m like, Oh my gosh, this is the blitz. I remember distinctly, because you could hear everything [with empty stadiums that year], he knew it.
“[Herbert] was like, It’s zero to this side, but who’s covering the tight end? It was Maxx Crosby as the d-end. He looked at Hunter Henry and he’s like, If he comes, give me your eyes. I’m like, Oh my gosh. This is unbelievable. For a rookie?”
Essentially, Herbert, with the 40-second play clock running, had adapted what Steichen had taught him for one situation to a similar, but different, situation on the fly. That helped inform the coach not to hold Hurts back in the two years to follow, and as a result, Steichen and the Eagles got game-changing moments from an empowered quarterback. “Jalen was the type of guy who could really see it on game day,” Steichen said.
With time, and based on what they’ve seen, the Colts will work to get Richardson to the point where Herbert and Hurts (both four-year starters in college) are.
And that, ultimately, is what moments like that one in Buffalo are about.
“He handled it like a pro,” Cooter says. “He was calm, he got his notes, he realized the mistake he made and what actually happened to encourage him to make that mistake. And he learned from it. He said to the receiver, basically, That’s my fault, that’s my fault. The great quarterbacks all kind of take accountability for everything, right? Hey, that’s my fault, that’s on me, I’ll get it fixed. And shoot, he was ready to go.
“We’re looking at the Surface [tablet], we’re cleaning up the rest of the plays, and he was getting ready for his next drive.”
Cooter says that in one breath, and adds in the next how he’s “extremely excited” to see what this looks like in six days. “I think we’re going to be exciting to watch.” Steichen doubles down on the idea: “Just the big-play ability [Richardson] has fires me up.”
And as for how the rest of it is coming, the Colts are pretty excited for that stuff, too. It’ll take time, of course. But if that afternoon in Buffalo’s an indication, Richardson can handle that.
