Colts Coach Shane Steichen Explains How Anthony Richardson Is Growing

It’s easy to write off young quarterbacks, but Indianapolis is betting that patience will pay off.

Richardson led the Colts to a narrow 25–24 win over the Patriots. / Bob DeChiara-Imagn Images

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.

It was over for them. Supposedly. At the respective ages of 23 and 22 years old.

Now take a second and think about how ridiculous that is at this stage of their careers.

Indianapolis Colts coach Shane Steichen was driving home Sunday night, fresh off the plane from New England, when I brought up where his quarterback, the uber-gifted, uber-raw Richardson, is in his second season. And he knows. A month ago, it really didn’t matter how many times he, or anyone else with the Colts, said that the team still believed in Richardson. Few bought it because nothing had gone the way anyone drew it up 20 months earlier.

“There’s definitely got to be patience,” Steichen says. “There’s no doubt about it.”

You don’t have to look far to find stories to prove that. The Denver Broncos pulled John Elway at halftime of his NFL debut, yanked him again midgame the next week and benched him five games into his rookie year. Likewise, the Pittsburgh Steelers benched Terry Bradshaw midway through his rookie year, and, four years later, Bradshaw was locked in a battle with Joe Gilliam Jr. to keep his job. The Dallas Cowboys kept the heat on a struggling Troy Aikman in 1989 and into ’90 by keeping Steve Walsh, who played for Jimmy Johnson at Miami, in his quarterback room.

That’s not to say that Young or Richardson’s story will end like those three former No. 1 picks did—with championship rings and enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But they’re examples of how a quarterback’s path isn’t typically a constant ascension that’s seldom knocked off course.

And so there Steichen was in Foxborough on Sunday, as Richardson drove the Colts down the field, standing on the sideline, knowing exactly what he was going to do if the offense punched the ball into the end zone against the New England Patriots and cut the visitor’s deficit to 24–23.

“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, Go win it.”

For Steichen, there wasn’t even a discussion on it—“We were all in.”

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. Richardson paid off the bet, throwing a touchdown pass to make it 24–23, then barreling in for the game-winning two-pointer. 

Steichen’s aforementioned patience paid off in the process, too.

It turns out Richardson’s not done in Indy, just like Young’s not done in Carolina—and even Will Levis is getting runway to prove himself in Nashville. Maybe two of them will make it. Maybe one will. Maybe none. But in a year where Sam Darnold, Baker Mayfield and Geno Smith are legit factors in the playoff race, Richardson’s Sunday showed the folly in making sweeping judgments on a young quarterback before he turns 23.

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We’re 13 weeks in, and it’s December. Here’s what we’ve got in the Week 13 takeaways after a rough weekend for your favorite NFL reporter (I’ll spare you grumbling about my Saturday) …

• The Philadelphia Eagles’ statement of a fourth quarter against the Baltimore Ravens.

• The Washington Commanders’ rebound against the Tennessee Titans.

• Redemption for two Seattle Seahawks, and a bright future for the Los Angeles Chargers’ rookies.

• Why the Cincinnati Bengals’ season should be a wake-up call for the franchise.

• What the Chicago Bears need now.

And more. But we’re starting with Richardson’s revival, what it tells us about the position he plays and where the Colts could be headed with him.

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Steichen has applauded Richardson's response to being benched earlier this season. / Marc Lebryk-Imagn Images

If you want to discuss where Richardson and the Colts are now, and where they’ve been the past two months, you should know this first: The benching was simpler than you think.

At the time, the evidence in front of Steichen and the offensive coaches showed that Joe Flacco was the best option for the team at the most important position on the field. The level of the offense needed to be raised across the board. If a coach is going to tell players that and doesn’t give them the best option at the most important position to accomplish it, a lot of other things will be tough to sell to the locker room.

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.

“He responded in the right way, for sure,” Steichen says. “He’s made great strides, great growth in all aspects of his game. That part’s been really good to see—we just got to continue that growth.”

It’s come the old-fashioned way.

Over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve heard it, Richardson has shown urgency in the job. It wasn’t that he wasn’t working hard before—it was maybe more that he still had to find the next level of work ethic if he wanted to become one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks. So, while a lot of people focused on the flashpoint that preceded his benching (his tapping out of a snap against the Houston Texans), Richardson took a deeper look at where he was in his career.

When he got his job back, in the week leading up to the Colts’ Nov. 17 game against the New York Jets, Richardson was at the office on Tuesday—the players’ day off—studying, working and getting with coaches during their breaks from meetings as they were game-planning for New York. It was the first sign of what was coming.

And to be clear, none of this was part of some master plan to spark Richardson.

The Colts just hoped Richardson would benefit in some way from getting to step back for a minute, as they got Flacco out there to win games. The rest was the work of the quarterback himself.

“He’s in there at 5:30, 6 o’clock in the morning consistently—on a consistent basis—which has been really good to see,” Steichen says. “Being around his guys and having that morning routine has been huge for him. The daily process of the meetings and the walkthroughs and the practice, he’s been taking it in stride and done a good job with it.”

Again, the hope was this would take care of itself organically.

Sunday indicated it has.

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Richardson's game-winning drive against New England kept the Colts' slim playoff hopes alive. / Eric Canha-Imagn Images

The game itself had its moments where Richardson showed his growth.

But more than that, just being out there is what he needed.

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.

Having the opportunity to build the library of things in his head to draw on was a win, especially since this time around he displayed a better appreciation for it.

“That’s a big part of it,” Steichen says. “That’s going to continue to develop over time. That’s going to take time.”

In the meantime, he can—and did Sunday—show signs of growth.

Much of it came to life in some of the adversity he faced on the game’s last possession.

With 2:02 left, on third-and-2 from the Patriots’ 41-yard line, rookie Adonai Mitchell beat corner Marcus Jones on a double-move, and Richardson put the ball on him but Mitchell let it go through his hands. On the next play, Richardson took a quarterback sweep left around the corner to convert the fourth down.

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.

Richardson won’t win awards for these plays, of course (he was 12-of-24 for 109 yards, with two touchdowns and two interceptions). But they’re little things where the coaches see him fighting through and not flinching, with the game on the line, in a way he might not have last year—or even last month.

And in these moments, he’s getting more experience in knowing when to be Superman and, just as importantly, knowing when not to.

“His pocket presence, he’s had calmer feet in the pocket as he’s been going through it,” Steichen says. “That’s just repetition more than anything. … He’s playing more and seeing more looks and seeing different things. That’s been good. He’s had good feet in the pocket. The one thing is he’s not throwing it to the wrong spots. His reads are good, all those different things have been good.

“The repetition and how to throw it, where to throw it, that part’s been good.”

It showed up again at the end of the game, with everything on the line, on fourth-and-goal with 17 seconds left, and the ball at the Patriots’ 3-yard line. Steichen called a mesh route—with receivers running crossers to create natural picks—that would take a second to develop through the traffic near the goal line. Richardson hung in the pocket, waited for Alec Pierce to clear out from the mess, and put one on him to make it 24–23.

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.

“Some of the stuff, if it plays out exactly how you want it to, that’s great,” Steichen says. “But I think a lot of it, like the scramble play he had on fourth down, is the knack for it. Shoot, this ain’t open and there’s a blitzer coming off the right. I’m going to scramble right and find the open receiver. That’s a natural ability that he has that’s impressive.”

Knowing when to use it, though, is the real key. And Richardson’s getting there.

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Young looked improved in Carolina's 26–23 loss to the Buccaneers. / Jim Dedmon-Imagn Images

Hours after all this, Young was leading the Carolina Panthers on a fourth-quarter comeback for the second consecutive week against a perennial contender. He drove Carolina 60 yards in nine plays to put the home team ahead 23–20 with 30 seconds left. Then, he got the offense to the fringe of field goal range in overtime to win it, before a Chuba Hubbard fumble flipped the script on the Panthers.

Earlier in the day, Levis and the Titans had a rough one, getting run out of the building by the homestanding Commanders. But even that was after Levis put together a breakthrough performance in a win over the Texans last Sunday.

The point? There are going to be ups and downs for all the young quarterbacks.

That goes, too, for the belle of their quarterback class.

C.J. Stroud’s sophomore season hasn’t gone quite as expected. Houston (8–5) is still comfortably atop the AFC South, but Stroud’s had his struggles as the Texans have fought through receiver injuries and issues on the interior of the offensive line.

That, of course, doesn’t mean Stroud isn’t who we thought he was, just like Richardson losing his job in October didn’t mean his NFL career was over. It’s way easier and simpler than that. These are young quarterbacks going through a lot of things for the first time, with the hope that they’ll learn and grow from the experience.

The numbers tell us that only a small percentage of them will make it.

But facts show that, for most, it takes time to tell which is which, something Darnold, Mayfield and Smith would certainly attest to.

So for now, maybe people will just accept that Richardson is a work in progress.

Yes, he hit a pretty significant career pothole in October. But what’s more important than that is how he came out of it—quickly getting his pace up to 100 miles per hour.

“The way he’s been going about it has been tremendous,” Steichen says. “You just stay on this path, and I think he’s got a chance to be very special.”

Now maybe the rest of us can give him that chance.

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