Jones, Richardson begin competition to be Colts starting QB
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WESTFIELD, Ind. (AP) — Indianapolis Colts quarterback Anthony Richardson insists he's healthy.
Daniel Jones embraces the chance to compete for a starting job.
And coach Shane Steichen has a broad outline of how he intends to split the snaps over the next several weeks, with no timetable to make a decision, as the competition began in earnest at Indy's first training camp practice Wednesday.
“We'll have a maintenance plan for him (Richardson). We want him to get all the team reps, so you might not see him throw some individual reps every single day,” Steichen said.
“And just with the way the (team) reps are going to play out, those guys are going to get the same amount of reps, just like today. We'll flip both to get reps with the ones every day.”
It's the second time in Steichen's three years with the Colts he's presided over a quarterback competition. The first ended after one preseason game in 2023 with Steichen selecting Richardson, then a rookie, the starter over Gardner Minshew.
Perhaps that should have been expected given Richardson was selected as the No. 4 overall pick in that year's draft and the Colts still searching for a long-term replacement following Andrew Luck's surprise retirement in August 2019.
This time, the plan seems different.
In addition to splitting snaps with the starters at practice in Westfield, Indiana, a northwestern suburb of Indianapolis, general manager Chris Ballard said Tuesday he wants to see both quarterbacks in action against other teams.
It remains to be seen if the scheduled joint practices against Baltimore and Green Bay can provide enough information to produce a decision or whether Richardson and Jones may play in the less controlled environment of preseason games.
If first impressions suggest anything, there wasn't much difference on the field.
Each struggled against Indy's defense, which knocked away multiple passes thrown by both in 11-on-11 drills. Jones also threw an interception on what he described as a “bad decision” before throwing a pretty completion on a long ball to Anthony Gould near the end of practice.
“I think like any Day 1, there was some good, some bad,” Jones said. “There are always things to clean up. We'll look back at the tape and then improve on it, but I thought for Day 1, we did a lot of things that you look for on Day 1.”
Jones has been around long enough to understand expectations.
The New York Giants made him the No. 6 overall draft pick in 2019. He became the starter in Week 3 of his rookie season and after struggling for three years, he led the Giants to the playoffs in 2022. New York rewarded Jones with a four-year, $160 million contract, but Jones made only six starts in 2023 and threw eight TD passes and seven interceptions last season before he was released by New York and signed by Minnesota.
Now he's back, looking to start again.
"There's so much work to do, especially for me — learning the system, getting to know the guys, learning communication with the coaches,” Jones said. "It's a long process. There's a lot of work ahead of us, but kind of the way you go about it is focusing on that day, that practice, that meeting or whatever at the moment.”
Richardson's injury history, meanwhile, has limited him to just 15 starts over the past two seasons, and he missed the team's final minicamp practice because of a sore throwing shoulder.
He also acknowledged he did not throw to his teammates when they worked out in California this summer.
“I had surgery a year and a half ago, so I've been dealing with on and off soreness with that,” Richardson said, noting he thought it was just a normal part of the recovery process. “But it was something else, and I wouldn't necessarily worry about it. I was just trying to do what I could do to help the team.”
Richardson also has struggled with accuracy, completing just 50.6% of his throws, including 47.7% last season when he had the lowest completion rate of any regular starter in the league.
On Wednesday, though, Richardson pronounced himself healthy and ready to win yet another quarterback competition.
“Everybody wants success like right here, right now,” he said. "There were definitely things I could have worked on last year, so I'm trying to improve on that and make sure I’m just available for the team whenever they need me.”
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