close
close

first Drop

Com TW NOw News 2024

    • Richardson-Taylor backfield can save young QB from himself
    news

    Richardson-Taylor backfield can save young QB from himself

    Vaseline Posted on

    INDIANAPOLIS – Laiatu Latu had just ripped the ball out of Caleb Williams’ hands to set up a short field in the fourth quarter as the Colts protected a narrow lead, and Shane Steichen smelled blood in the water.

    A coach who usually hunts for explosive passing plays was ready to come up with a simple but sophisticated play. It was a run play, between the tackles. But it wasn’t just any run play.

    This was an inverted veer, with Jonathan Taylor moving laterally across his quarterback’s face. As the Bears’ defenders tracked the 110-yard star of the day, Anthony Richardson pulled the ball and ran behind a trailing Quenton Nelson, blocking Ashton Dulin and Michael Pittman Jr. to blast past the first-down marker and rumble downfield inside the 2.

    Three plays later, Richardson Taylor scored the deciding goal and the Bears won 21-16 at Lucas Oil Stadium.

    Then the NFL’s youngest starting quarterback threw a punch in the air.

    “It feels good,” Richardson said with a smile, “just done with the team.”

    It was a feeling Richardson had never had before: a win in an NFL game that he finished healthy. It was his seventh career start and third win, but the first time he didn’t suffer an injury that left him in the trainer’s room instead of celebrating with his teammates.

    Those visions, and the months of pain they created, had paralyzed the Colts in a state of play that culminated in an ugly 16-10 loss to the Packers last week. Though Richardson would come out of the game third in the NFL with 9.3 yards per carry, the Colts called just one designed run for him on 37 drop-backs. The result was three interceptions and Taylor sitting on the sidelines for the entire fourth quarter.

    This wasn’t what the Colts promised they would be when Steichen compared Richardson’s rushing to Steph Curry’s 3-point shot. But they could still feel the venomous blows to Richardson’s surgically repaired shoulder from the season opener, prompting them to send clips to the league asking for help.

    “We don’t want him to be touched,” Taylor said, “but that’s one of his specialties.”

    The Colts may have found a formula for survival against the Bears on Sunday:

    It starts with number 28 and 5 in the backfield.

    This is what has been in the back of their minds for all those months, what they tucked away for a week in Green Bay, when a young team lost its sense of what it wanted to be.

    INSIDER: 10 thoughts from the Colts on Anthony Richardson, Jonathan Taylor and a clutch win over the Bears

    “Earlier in the offseason I talked about how dangerous it can be when Jonathan Taylor and Anthony Richardson read that defensive end,” offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said this week. “One of them has it and the other one doesn’t, and how tough that is on defense.”

    The Colts called that read-option play on the game’s first 3rd-and-short, when the defensive end froze, Richardson handed the ball off and Taylor easily scampered for five yards.

    The NFL has never seen a backfield like this, with two players who weigh at least 225 pounds and can each run a 40-yard dash in under 4.4 seconds. Those two players have lit up Lucas Oil Stadium before: Taylor with the 1,811 yards he ran for in 2021 to claim the NFL rushing title, and Richardson with the runs and jumps that made him the most athletic quarterback prospect in NFL Scouting Combine history.

    The NFL has also never seen a quarterback as divisive as Richardson, due to his athleticism and his lack of experience and accuracy.

    Perhaps one extreme can save the other. Perhaps this two-headed ground game can provide the anchor for the rollercoaster that is the overall Richardson experience.

    “We know our backfield is deadly,” Richardson said. “The passing game wasn’t necessarily there. I couldn’t find a good rhythm, but I still have my legs, so Shane turned it up and we just ran the ball.”

    And now two interchangeable ball carriers begin to play with a unique vision.

    Take Taylor’s 29-yard touchdown run in the second quarter. The Colts had the gun, and when Richardson grabbed the ball and turned to find Taylor, he yelled to him that the nickel cornerback was blitzing. So Taylor turned an inside run into one that he bounced to his right, too long for the nickel or anyone else to catch.

    “I told him, ‘Listen, it’s ultimately me and you back there,'” Taylor said. “‘I’ve got your back. Let me know if you see anything and I’ll let you know the same thing.'”

    Each of Richardson’s extremes flashed in Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday. He showed off the arm strength on a 44-yard deep ball to Alec Pierce, the graceful run on the inverted veer, the unpredictability of his passing with wide-open misses to Taylor and Josh Downs and the hero-ball desire with the interception in triple coverage in the end zone.

    Richardson finished with stats that should spell defeat for a quarterback in this passing league: 10-of-20, 167 yards, no touchdowns, two interceptions and a 39.0 rating.

    But the Colts won anyway, because they found a formula that could create their own version of complementary football:

    Run to score. Force the other quarterback to confront the pass rush and earn some short fields. And when the defense gasps for air, make them choose between Taylor and Richardson and feel that dagger right in the middle of the chest.

    “I think if we’re doing well,” Steichen said, “we should obviously keep running.”

    That’s just who Richardson is as a passer at this early stage of his career, as he has a 55% completion percentage in seven career starts. History also suggests that’s who he’ll be this season, as passers who have transformed their accuracy over the years, like Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts, have done so over the course of multiple seasons.

    But what gave both players time to do that was a run game that allowed him to succeed in ways without those underdeveloped arms. Allen ran for at least eight touchdowns in each of his first three seasons, and Hurts found 56 first downs with his legs in his first year with Steichen as his offensive coordinator.

    Richardson finished with eight carries for 24 yards, though five of those carries for 28 yards were on kneel downs. It was a low-volume day that still pushed the Bears into the red zone, a part of the field where not every yard is considered equal.

    Combined with Taylor’s 110 yards and two touchdowns and Trey Sermon’s 16 yards and a touchdown, that was enough to win the game the Colts needed to win.

    MORE: Chasing Tim Tebow, idolizing Tom Brady, putting out fires: The making of Colts QB Anthony Richardson

    It won’t be enough against higher-octane attacks or in higher-stakes games. Not until the passing game gets going. And no one knows that better than the player who sailed the passes.

    “I just have to take it easy and let the ball go,” Richardson said. “I just have to give myself time and give myself some grace. I’m so hard on myself when I miss passes because I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t want to miss any passes.’

    “…It’s like, ‘Oh my god, it’s wide open. Let me give him the ball.’ And I just get too excited and I just miss it. So I just have to roll with it and just give him the ball.”

    But for now, it might be enough to turn a frown into a smile on the face of a young quarterback still learning the game. That quarterback wears every outcome as a referendum on whether he’s delivering what he was put on this earth to do.

    “That’s the first of many,” Richardson told the team in the locker room after the game. “Shoutout to the defense for coming with us and playing hard. We appreciate that. O-Line, great job blocking JT. Trey, great job getting into that box.

    “Hey, I’m gonna outperform you guys. I got all of you.”

    Contact Nate Atkins at [email protected]. Follow him at X @NateAtkins_.

    Vaseline
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like