Week 8 Colts vs. Texans: Forget the Highlights, lets look at every Anthony Richardson throw

We’re looking at Anthony Richardson from week 8

Week eight is in the books for the Indianapolis Colts. Their 20-23 loss to the Houston Texans brings the team to 4-4 through eight games. Normally I post an article of highlights following the game but this week, I’m going to highlight the play of Anthony Richardson and see if his 10-32 for 175 yards 1 touchdown and 1 interception, matches the way he played against the Texans.

First Half

Here are the throws

First, we’ll talk about some of the obvious things. There were 4-6 throws in that compilation that fell incomplete, that could have been caught. Some of them would have been difficult catches, sure. But at the same time NFL receivers are paid to win some 50/50 balls… in fact the term “50/50 ball” alludes to the rate at which you would like to see those type of contested throws completed. The Colts receivers brought in 0/100 of them (if we’re sticking to fractions).

Second, obviously not every one of those balls was perfect (or good). The pass to AD Mitchell in the endzone was about as perfect as you can place a ball, but several others were slightly off target and the pass to Pittman down the seam was odd enough for me to believe it was miscommunication. A couple of the throws were off due to pressure or contact from defenders. The long touchdown pass to Josh Downs wasn’t a great throw, either. He under threw it. BUT (and this is a big but) that’s a throw he likely would have been excited to make in weeks 1 and 2 and sailed it 20 yards out of bounds, he didn’t do that this week. He errored on the side of not putting enough on it and it resulted in a 69 yard touchdown, that’s good!

Third, the final drive of the first half was bad on several accounts. Before anything else, I’ll point out that Richardson just can’t make that throw. It was a bad decision. It was the kind of decision a raw prospect of a quarterback making his 10th NFL start, would make. But it was bad all the same. Without that play, who knows what the second half would have looked like. The next point about the last drive I’ll make is that Shane Steichen has to realize he has the ball with less than a minute to play and more than 90 yards to go. He has to realize that his quarterback (for a myriad of reasons) has only completed two (2) passes in the entire half. He has to realize that he would be very lucky to go into the half tied with the defending AFC South Champion, the same team who you’re chasing in an attempt to become the defending AFC South Champion, next season. Instead you call routes that die… you have the entire field to go. It’s third down and if you’re not just going to run the ball and punt, if you’re dead set on throwing the ball, why are you calling routes that settle? Why not give your receivers a chance to beat someone on a crosser? Why aren’t you scheming them open? Inside your opponents redzone, you’re calling a spacing concept with your young, oft inaccurate quarterback? Why? How did that sound like a good idea to anyone?

Fourth, a lot has been made about Steichen’s play calling in the first half. After thinking it over and having a conversation on Twitter I’ve come around to something I wasn’t seeing before:

The game plan was good! Go back up and look at those plays. The plays were there to be made and his players didn’t make them. But, on the other hand, I don’t believe he moved off of his game plan soon enough when it was obvious his guys weren’t executing. At some point, preferably before your quarterback starts 2 for 14, you realize that the offense is stuck in the mud and you need to shift gears. Because in the second half, Shane shifted gears and no one should be surprised that the offense looked far better.

Second Half

Here are more throws

Steichen came out and did something that he has no problem doing for Joe Flacco and Gardner Minshew: he called a lot of high percentage, quick winning routes and Anthony Richardson did what Minshew and Flacco have done with those concepts, he completed passes to them. After the half Richardson made several throws that he would have sailed in the first two weeks of the season and the offense moved the ball well. Steichen got Jonathan Taylor involved and the offense looked better.

And I’ll say it again, Anthony Richardson was not good enough in this game. He does need to improve. But the point I’m trying to make here is that despite his box score, he has improved. It didn’t look good today and his box score is bad and in the first couple of weeks of the season that was true too. The difference is, today Anthony Richardson didn’t let his team down as much as they let him down. That wasn’t true earlier in the season, but it was today.

Final Thoughts

Anthony Richardson is progressing. He progressed from weeks one and two, to his start last week and he progressed from last week to this week. I talked about it in the live thread article that I posted before this weeks kickoff (that I’m aware that no one reads on their way to the comments). Here’s what I said:

After watching Anthony Richardson last week, I also feel completely alone in the online Colts world. First let me say, Richardson was bad. There. Got that out of the way.

But it is wild to me the way people are talking about why he was bad.

I feel like I’m the only one who remembers week two against the Green Bay Packers. When he was sailing passes to wide open receivers and then when asked about it, he more or less said that he was working through things too quickly, getting excited and trying to rush the throw which was making the ball come out wildly.

So last week was it the same thing? No! His throws were mostly on target. He had one or two off target throws, but every quarterback will have one or two they’d like back. So what was it last week? Everything he threw came out late. He slowed down, way down, too slow. He worked his reads, found the open man, got his feet right and threw the ball. The problem wasn’t his accuracy it was that from the time he found his receiver to when he actually made the throw it took too much time, allowing the defensive backs to make a jump and break up the passes.

THIS IS FANTASTIC NEWS!

Not because the result was bad. Not because the balls were deflected. Not because we had to listen to another week of narrative based “analysis” but because he took a problem he had the last time he played a full game and he fixed it in the next one. He is working through a problem he (and probably his coaches) identified and he’s fixing things week to week. This is what progression looks like. It isn’t always that things just get better. Sometimes you have to suck at something in a different way before you figure out what works and the process is happening right in front of our eyes and it sure feels like everyone is missing it.

Little known online fact about me (I think) I coached gymnastics for almost a decade. I mostly coached bars and floor (I’m a big guy who was good at spotting the kids, I was most useful on those two events) but every now and then I would find myself working with kids on vault or beam. I, after a near decade of coaching, still don’t know that much about beam, I won’t get into it here but just know, I don’t. The one thing I do know is that when a kid is learning a new skill and is consistently falling off of the beam on the same side, you convince them to fall off of the beam on the other side. Every time I told a kid to fail, but just differently, I would get confused looks and every time they successfully fell off the beam on the “other” side, I would then tell them to split the difference and land on the beam the next time they did the skill. And guess what? Normally that worked.

Sometimes you have to fail multiple ways to understand how you can succeed, before you actually succeed.

Rchardson’s throws were coming out a beat quicker today. Not quick enough but it was a marked improvement from a week ago and his accuracy was still improved from earlier in the year. Richardson is changing how he is playing from week to week, it’s not always going to look good or even decent but this is what it’s going to look like. If the Colts want to win games while he goes through that, they need to make difficult catches and the coach needs to put him in advantageous situations and today, neither one of them did that.

Richardson wasn’t good enough. He has to continue to improve. But there’s no reason to lose hope when these observable week-to-week improvements are being made. Box score scouts and former failed basketball coaches are going to tell you that there’s no hope for Richardson. But I don’t care what they say and neither should you.