Colts Draft Anthony Richardson: Dynasty Rookie Outlook (2023 Fantasy Football)

The 2023 NFL Draft is here! After months of waiting, we finally know where the 2023 NFL Draft class will land. This information shapes the outlook for rookies in 2023 and beyond. We’re going to have you covered throughout and following the 2023 NFL Draft to help you prepare for your fantasy football leagues. Next up for many will be dynasty rookie drafts. To help you prepare to make your dynasty rookie draft picks, let’s dive into Thor Nystrom’s 2023 NFL Draft profile as well as Pat Fitzmaurice’s dynasty rookie draft outlook for Anthony Richardson.

Dynasty Rookie Picks & Predictions: Colts Draft Anthony Richardson

Let’s first see what NFL Draft expert Thor Nystrom says about Anthony Richardson.

Thor Nystrom’s 2023 NFL Draft Outlook & Player Comp

Player comparison: Cam Newton

Bio

Richardson, as you know, is coming off one of the freakiest NFL Combine performances we’ve ever seen, regardless of position. Kent Lee Platte’s RAS system scored Richardson’s size-adjusted composite a perfect “10” — RAS only awards one “10” score per position — confirming that Richardson’s physical package is unprecedented at the quarterback position.

That athleticism projects to get Richardson out of dangerous situations in the NFL, as it did in college. Richardson knows a thing or two about that. As a kid, Richardson trained to be a firefighter. If he had not become a professional athlete, Richardson says he would likely be a Gainesville firefighter today.

Richardson grew up in the shadow of Florida’s campus. He was a dual-sport star who also excelled in basketball – highlights of him dunking can be seen across the internet. Richardson’s football journey began as a matchup-nightmare receiver. But he was too gifted not to have the ball in his hands every single play, so Richardson shifted to quarterback in high school.

At the NFL Combine, Richardson revealed that he has been calling himself “Cam Jackson” since the 11th grade, an homage to Cam Newton and Lamar Jackson. Interestingly, the year before that, as a high school sophomore in 2017, Richardson received his very first scholarship offer. It came from Louisville. Lamar Jackson was wrapping up his last year on campus.

It was going to be hard to pry Richardson out of Gainesville – but you can’t blame then-UL HC Bobby Petrino for trying. Richardson indeed committed to the Gators prior to his junior year. After that football season, he briefly re-opened his recruitment in an effort to get more exposure for his teammates.

A consensus four-star recruit and the ninth-ranked dual-threat quarterback in the 2019 class, Richardson was an Elite 11 finalist. He redshirted during the 2020 COVID-19 season on that Gators team that had Kyle Trask, Dameon Pierce, Kadarius Toney and Kyle Pitts.

The next year, Richardson platooned with QB Emory Jones under former HC Dan Mullen. That was the year Mullen gave Pierce only 100 carries, a popular talking point during the last draft process. What was even crazier: Giving Jones nearly 300 more attempts than Richardson that season and giving Jones nearly as many carries as Pierce and Richardson combined.

Mullen was mercifully fired, ushering in the HC Billy Napier era. Jones transferred to Arizona State (and is now at Cincinnati). It was Richardson’s show in 2022 — his only year starting in college, as it turns out. The flash plays were the most impressive of any quarterback in the class. The lowlights were… bad.

Richardson opted out of the Las Vegas Bowl against Oregon State in December and declared early for the draft. He’s gifted, raw, and inexperienced, as we’ll explore below.

Strengths

That we know of, God has only made one human being with this combination of size, athleticism, and arm strength. The NFL has never seen anything quite like Anthony Richardson.

Quick story. Richardson’s 40-yard-dash prop line at the sportsbook was set at 4.45. I knew he was a freak. But I also knew he was going to weigh in at over 240 — turns out 6-foot-4 and 244 pounds. I had to take the over — only 11 players in the history of the NFL Combine who weighed 244 pounds or more had cleared the 4.45 number, none of them quarterbacks.

In fact, the three quarterbacks who had bested the 4.45 number at the NFL Combine were all, at minimum, 20-plus pounds lighter than Richardson. My thought wasn’t that Richardson couldn’t do it. It’s just something that we’d never seen done before. And if he could, the book could have my money — I’d doff the cap.

Richardson took my money. It was truly incredible. The entire spectacle was. Richardson broke the combine record for quarterbacks on both the vertical and broad jumps. Vernon Davis is considered one of the freakiest tight end athletes to ever enter the NFL. At one inch taller and 10 pounds lighter, Richardson nearly matched Davis’ 40, both of his splits, and both of his jumps. These are not athletic traits that can be poo-poohed.

On the plays they coalesce on the field, you cannot defend Anthony Richardson. It’s unfair. I’m thinking about the two-point conversion play late in the 29-26 upset win over then-No. 8 Utah in the 2022 opener. Two rushers had free runs at Richardson, but after a mid-air pump fake and a spinning Houdini escape, the play ended in a wide-open receiver hit on the hands in the back of the end zone. What about the 80-yard touchdown run against LSU, where Richardson hit 21-mph top speed? How about the three other 60-plus-yard TD runs the past two years? You get the idea.

Oftentimes, two defenders are needed to take him down. An attribute I prioritize in quarterbacks is not panicking under pressure — you’d be surprised how many busts you could have identified in advance from this one metric alone in college. This is one element of Richardson’s game that isn’t raw. Richardson will allow rushers to get within mere strides of him before moving off his spot – because he knows he can shake them in an instant and then outrun them.

This buys Richardson oodles of extra time to survey options and consider possibilities. It’s a skill you don’t often see. Even free rushers have to approach Anthony Richardson like a lion, with the utmost care and the thought that he could suddenly and violently spring in any direction.

It’s hard to get your hands on Richardson, harder to get a square shot on him. If Richardson’s accuracy improves, his supreme ability to extend plays is going to become deadly — I’ll point you back to that two-point conversion against Utah. That would have been unfair on an NFL field.

And friends: If you don’t hit Richardson flush, with form and follow-through and your hands wrapped on the other side, he’ll flick you away like a mosquito. He’s a rhino to wrestle down in the ilk of Josh Allen, Cam Newton or Daunte Culpepper — three of his ubiquitous comps.

That trio fits because they were also all outfitted with bazooka right arms, as Richardson is. Richardson generates absurd velocity on his drive throws. And Richardson’s ability to let-it-fly vertically presents defenses with the same conundrum that Allen currently poses, forcing them to cover every inch of the field. Fully realized, Richardson will be the same kind of spacing nightmare.

We’re exploring the reasons why Richardson didn’t get developed as quickly in college as he maybe should have. But I wanted to close by mentioning Richardson’s rapid improvement in the second half of his lone year as a college starter. After posting a 5/7 TD/INT rate over his first six starts — he struggled for a bit following the Utah game — Richardson logged a 12/2 TD/INT rate in his last six against the heart of the schedule.

Weaknesses

Richardson is the rawest first-round quarterback we’ve seen in the past decade — even rawer than Trey Lance. Richardson made only 13 starts in college and threw fewer than 400 career passes. He did all of this in an unstable environment that didn’t help his development.

Richardson suffered a season-ending injury during his senior year of high school. His first year at Florida was the historically-wonky COVID-19 season, a truncated campaign that began with fewer offseason practices.

Over Richardson’s three years on campus, he played for two head coaches, one interim HC, three offensive coordinators, and three QB coaches. He spent the offseason prior to his lone year as a starter learning an entirely new offensive system under a new staff.

I’ve strategically mentioned the lack of polish and experience as weaknesses first because — and we’re about to get to the heart of the Anthony Richardson conundrum – they can also be read as caveats to the rest of them. And that, of course, has more to do with the person analyzing Anthony Richardson than Anthony Richardson himself.

So you be the judge.

The biggest tangible weakness of Richardson’s game currently is his inaccuracy. So let’s be blunt: His current accuracy issues will nullify any chance of turning into even a league-average starting quarterback. Last year, Richardson ranked 13th among 14 SEC quarterbacks with a 53.8% completion percentage.

But let’s also be fair: Because of Richardson’s physical ability, he never needs to have Drew Brees’ pinpoint accuracy — it just needs to be good enough. And there’s a fix for that. Richardson’s accuracy is already adequate when his mechanics are in check. They crop up when he gets haphazard with his lower half. Might NFL coaching help with that? It did for Josh Allen.

Richardson also needs to work on throwing nuance (which, again, read another way, is: Richardson has plenty of arm talent to unlock). Richardson was the amateur pitcher who threw 95 mph and didn’t need to develop his secondary pitches. He’s going to need those secondary pitches in the NFL.

Richardson’s arm wows when he drives a 25-yard rope into a tight window. It’s frustrating when he throws a screen pass with the same velocity or when he eschews trajectory on a layer pass to fire another bullet.

Richardson does go through his progressions. And he’ll defer to the check-down when he has to. But one factor in his decision-making that mitigated more opportunities for big plays was his penchant for bailing on a play early by throwing the ball away under pressure when he didn’t have a look he liked. An NFL coach is going to tell Anthony Richardson that he is too gifted to do that unless necessary.

But, especially early in the season, there would be throws where you knew Richardson felt immediate remorse as the ball was leaving his hand, having been fooled by a coverage look. More ubiquitous were instances where Richardson’s belief in his arm outweighed his belief in his eyes, instances where he’d force balls into coverage prematurely.

Here’s the crux of the Richardson conundrum: Are these weaknesses, at least to some degree, a function of his inexperience and the lack of coaching and system continuity at Florida? Or is some franchise about to set itself back several years by taking a quarterback who will always be mired by crippling accuracy issues?

2023 Dynasty Rookie Draft Outlook: Anthony Richardson

An extraordinary physical specimen, Richardson put on a show at this year’s NFL Scouting Combine, running the 40-yard dash in 4.43 seconds at 244 pounds, breaking the QB combine records in the vertical and broad jumps, and posting a perfect 10.0 relative athletic score. Not only does Richardson have blazing speed, but he also has a powerful right arm capable of making every thrown an NFL offensive coordinator would ever ask him to make.

The big concern with Richardson is accuracy. He completed only 53.8% of his passes in his one season as a starter at the University of Florida. Too often, he’ll fire a fastball in a situation where a touch throw would make more sense. Richardson also lacks experience, with only 13 college starts and fewer than 400 college pass attempts under his belt. He’s going to need a lot of development.

But Richardson landed in a good spot with the Colts. Shane Steichen is a QB-friendly head coach, the Colts have a solid offensive line, and RB Jonathan Taylor will keep defenses honest.

Richardson is a swing-for-the-fences pick in fantasy leagues. In dynasty superflex leagues, he’ll be a top-4 pick in most rookie drafts, and while he wasn’t the first quarterback to be selected in the NFL Draft, he’ll be the first QB off the board in a lot of dynasty leagues. Richardson’s rushing potential alone gives him a chance to develop into a top-10 overall fantasy quarterback. If he reaches his potential as a passer, too, he could have the sort of fantasy value that Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts have. But Richardson doesn’t figure to have much rookie-year value, so he’s no more than a midrange QB3 in redraft leagues and probably isn’t draft-worth in the vast majority of them.