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, .”
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.
