Colts’ Stat of the Game: Week 1 vs. Jaguars

That is the stat of the week for you. Now this is not a fact to extrapolate and say that Richardson is going to be better than Manning and Luck, we don’t know that yet, but comparing the three and taking into account the number of college starts each of them had before making their NFL debut (Manning had 45 college starts at Tennessee, Luck had 38 at Stanford, Richardson had just 13 at Florida) AR5 gave us Colts’ fans plenty of reasons to be optimistic for the future. Even comparing him to fellow rookie quarterbacks C.J. Stroud and Bryce Young, Anthony Richardson comes out on top with the best debut. Of course, it is just one game though, we still have 16 more to play and scrutinize our new franchise quarterback, but so far so good.

There were certainly issues and areas with plenty of room for improvement, some throws were clearly off the mark, and he needs to take better care of his body when rushing the ball, but I loved the leadership, poise in the pocket, and ,this might be subjective, the thing I loved the most about Richardson was the body language. The way he carried himself and the passion with which he faced the game was inspiring, and I really want to watch how he looks with an All-Pro running back next to him and with more games under his belt with Steichen. After half a decade on quarterback purgatory, it is nice to have a young franchise quarterback to get behind and root for, as well as monitoring his development closely. I said this before and I will say this again, I expect Richardson to struggle, and I would not be surprised if we see some really bad games from him eventually this season. That is normal with rookie quarterbacks and even more for a guy that has just 13 starts in his college career. So my advice would be for everyone to just be patient and enjoy the ride, it seems like we got ourselves a good one.