It’s somehow appropriate that Anthony Richardson, the most mystifying prospect in the 2023 NFL Draft, is at the center of one of the quintessential modern examples of lost media. He, along with Alabama prospect Bryce Young and Kentucky transfer Deuce Hogan, were the stars of the unaired fourth season of Complex Sports’ high school reality series, QB1.
Knowing that there’s information out there, but that it’s inaccessible, is always frustrating. But it can be exasperating when it relates to one of the most misunderstood prospects in this year’s draft. Richardson is misunderstood not because everyone has the wrong idea…but because no one has any idea.
We Have Virtually No Data on Anthony Richardson
Richardson threw 393 passing attempts in college. Due to an injury-shortened senior season, he only threw 523 passes in high school — meaning that his 916 passing attempts are one of the lowest combined high school and college combinations we’ve ever seen for a first-round prospect. Only Trey Lance (643 total high school and college passing attempts) is known to have fewer.
By contrast, Young had 949 passing attempts in college alone. Throw in his Mater Dei and Cathedral High School career, and you end up with a résumé of 2,260 passing attempts.
Even late starters like Will Levis (1,456) and C.J. Stroud (1,584) have more combined passing attempts than Richardson, and they’ve had a good chunk of them come in their final two years of college football — where it matters most for evaluators.
But the projection issues for Richardson expand far beyond the fact that NFL teams don’t have enough passing attempts to know what they’ll get from the Florida prospect. Given his injury-shortened senior season, the Gators didn’t know what they were getting when Richardson committed to them.
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On top of that, Richardson’s only year as a starter came in a new offense under Billy Napier, who assumed the job from Dan Mullens (who recruited Richardson). Not only was Napier’s offense a relatively simple one compared to the ones run by the other top QB prospects, but Richardson didn’t have the talent around him to showcase who he is as a passer.
Florida has only one offensive player in the consensus top 200, and that’s guard O’Cyrus Torrence. After him, it’s just tackle Richard Gouraige and receiver Justin Shorter in the top 300. Next year’s draft class isn’t looking great on offense, either.
Ohio State, meanwhile, has three in the top 50 alone and likely the top receiver in next year’s draft in Marvin Harrison Jr. Levis wasn’t surrounded by NFL talent last year in Kentucky, but he at least put in a bunch of reps in 2021 with NFL players like Wan’Dale Robinson, Luke Fortner, Darian Kinnard along with prospects next year such as Tayvion Robinson. And, of course, Young played at Alabama.
This is important not because we need to find excuses for Richardson’s play. Rather, we simply have no context for the limited amount of play there is.
Richardson Is Inconsistent, Which Is Confusing
The airing rights to QB1 belong to Netflix, and though the show was fully shot, edited, and put through the production process, Netflix pulled it from their platform, along with the three other seasons of the show.
Netflix never gave a reason, and it’s somewhat reminiscent of other recent such controversies, like when Warner Bros. canceled two shows that had been fully shot or animated before they could see the light of day or when HBO Max pulled 80 titles from their service, including the extremely popular Westworld series, in anticipation of a merger.
The tax vagaries of such a move aside, it represents the state of modern media. Instead of hard storage, we’re subject to the whims of streaming services that can turn off your access to your favorite shows at the snap of their fingers.
That ephemerality seems much like Richardson himself — a moving target. When you feel like you have a grasp on who he is as a prospect, you throw on his next game, and your mind changes. Then you look for the commonalities underneath, and you’re left with… not much to go off of.
Richardson was wonderful against Utah and woeful against Kentucky. He tries too hard to play hero ball, but he also happens to be the only hero Florida has. Very few players generated a first down on half or more of their rushing attempts – just 18 in the FBS last year. Even fewer also happened to generate over seven yards per attempt. Only Richardson, Boise State’s Taylen Green, UCF’s John Rhys Plumlee, and LSU’s Jayden Daniels could say the same.
That Richardson could be both consistent and explosive while running the 57th-ranked offense is an exciting addition to his conundrum.
Like so many canceled shows, Richardson’s time at Florida has come and gone. Our opportunities to learn more about the player have disappeared, and the fact that there are hundreds of hours of footage of the first time he led a team are inaccessible is more frustrating than never having learned that at all.
Declaring early was a bold move. It might have allowed Richardson to avoid injury — and a quarterback class that includes potential top picks Drake Maye and Caleb Williams — but it now puts the onus on NFL evaluators to take a sliver of data and project a decade off of it.
Richardson Is Consistent, Which Is Confusing
Though Richardson has been knocked for consistency, evaluators have found an underlying stability to his approach. His statistics have shot up and down from game to game, but his process has been extremely promising.
Nate Tice, a former Division I quarterback and current scouting analyst for The Athletic, was impressed with Richardson’s maturity as a quarterback. On The Athletic podcast, he described in detail what he liked about Richardson as a prospect that separates him from the Logan Thomases and Tyree Jacksons, who go late in the draft with enormous athletic upside.
“He’s more of a real quarterback [than you might think],” Tice said. “He’s more than just an athlete that he’s been typecast as — he handles protections. He gets everybody lined up.”
As an example, he used plays from a few different games that really separated him from other quarterbacks. Against Tennessee, Tice described a play where Richardson called a motion, fixed the alignment of a receiver, calls a false cadence, changes the protection after the safety bites on the hard count, and then gets through a progression to nail a 50-yard pass.
On another play, Tice described a concept where Richardson went from the wheel route up the sideline to both crossers over the middle before taking the dig route as his fourth progression — one he threw away from the leverage of the safety to ensure a completion.
“I’ve seen people that are negative about him, especially a lot of Florida fans, saying, ‘You guys said this about Malik Willis last year,’” said Tice. “Malik Willis didn’t do any of this that Richardson was doing in the two years of tape I watched of him. Even Josh Allen at Wyoming had more accuracy sprays that I was a little more worried about than anything Richardson has done.”
Tice praised Richardson’s advanced pocket presence, elite field awareness, and ability to quickly go through progressions, along with his handling of the offense pre-snap to go with that post-snap prowess.
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Derrik Klassen at Bleacher Report agrees. “As a passer, Richardson is a mixed bag,” he said in his scouting report. “But he has more of a foundation than he’s let on. Richardson is an excellent pocket manager. He remains calm and often does well to preempt pressure.”
Importantly, Klassen praised the Florida QB’s football intelligence. “Richardson is also a fine processor, especially for such a young and inexperienced player,” he wrote. “He regularly showed the ability to cycle through his progressions and play within the system, rather than looking to break structure. Richardson just needs to speed up his timing and be a little snappier as a decision-maker.”
That aligns with Pro Football Network’s Ian Cummings, who wrote, “Richardson is still progressing operationally, but there are glimpses of immense promise in that department.”
Cummings added that “the Florida QB has shown he can read across the field and go through progressions. He flashes quick diagnosis upon moving to the next read, and he can also survey multiple vertical routes and use discretion when choosing risks to entertain.
“Richardson can actively anticipate windows over the middle of the field,” said Cummings. “And while his discretion can be hot and cold, his field vision is a budding strength. When the pocket starts to collapse around him, he can sequentially evade rushers, reset, and quickly identify open routes while under pressure — showing off steely poise, quick diagnosis, and mental acuity.”
Richardson is in the unusual category of being advanced in the skills that are difficult to teach and behind on the skills that are typically much more fixable for quarterbacks. Upper-body mechanics are traditionally difficult to fix, but lower-body mechanics tend to see themselves improve upon entry into the NFL.
But if those things are easy to fix, why aren’t they fixed? Florida was not a productive offense, and any improvement in those areas would have turned into tremendous gains for the team, even if the offense was behind talent-wise compared to its SEC competition.
Richardson can’t do much about the ball bouncing off of his receiver’s helmets and shoulder pads. But he can do more about getting that ball to hit catchable spaces much more consistently.
Richardson Demonstrates Uncommon Maturity — Is That Enough?
If maturity is a theme for Richardson, then it translates off the field, too. The few interviews we have with people who were embedded with Richardson for the Complex Sports/Netflix series give us an understanding of a person who cares deeply for his family — especially his mother and younger brother, who he often felt like a father figure for.
Producer Dustin Nakao-Haider told Yahoo News that “There are just these great moments of him, like, helping his younger brother do homework and then Anthony doing his homework. He was always focused, he was always kind of locked in, and the camera — we just happened to be there to observe his life.”
Growing up in a single-parent home, Richardson often found himself as the mentor to his younger brother while their mother worked multiple jobs. That meant Richardson would end up bringing younger brother Corey to practice, where Corey would imitate Anthony’s football drills on the sideline.
That mentorship also translated when Richardson was hurt partway through his senior season, turning into a coach on and off the field for backup freshman QB Holden Johnson.
As Richardson himself wrote in the Player’s Tribune, “The way I’m able to adapt is one of my greatest strengths. I know I have the ability to put enough effort and time into something to be great at it. And I feel like I turned what could’ve been a challenge into a strength at Florida. I had a new quarterback coach every year, and I had to learn a new offense in six months.”
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Adaptation is a critical skill, and it’s good for an NFL quarterback to have that in his back pocket. But Richardson being a chameleon also makes it difficult to know who he is.
The way to find a camouflaged creature in the wild is to ignore the color and look for the shape. But you kind of have to know what that shape is for that strategy to have any meaning, and it’s difficult to figure out if Richardson looks like a Josh Allen or a Tim Tebow.
At his pro day, Richardson uncorked a rocket of a throw that hit the ceiling. A calculated, cheeky move that both referenced his own scouting report and Will Levis’ pro day.
Anthony Richardson hit the damn roof at Florida's pro day pic.twitter.com/VH9PuhxhiW
— CJ Fogler account may or may not be notable (@cjzero) March 30, 2023
If the extent of what we know about Richardson is that he can process the field well, has an instinct for leadership, and is one of the best athletes we’ve ever seen at the position, we still wouldn’t know enough to project him as a potential star quarterback.
That list of traits sounds impressive, but it’s also been shared by a number of failed QBs throughout the years. Is it possible for Richardson to improve his accuracy? Can he pick up a more complex NFL offense? Is he genuinely coachable, or does he merely have good eyes?
We’ve never seen a prospect like Anthony Richardson in part because we’ve barely even seen Anthony Richardson.