Is Anthony Richardson ready to start for Florida?

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I love the potential of Anthony Richardson.

A guy his size (6’4”, 234 lbs) who can move the way he does with the ability to move the ball down the field so effortlessly doesn’t come around that often. Combine that with the moxie that he’s shown by embracing taking on Tim Tebow’s #15, and you start to get excited about what he’s going to be able to do.

Then factor in his line against Oklahoma in his one drive of the Cotton Bowl (1/1, 27 yds, 1 TD and 3 rushes for 42 yards) and reports of his performance at the first fall scrimmage and I can see why people are getting awfully excited. At the same time, the backup QB is always the most popular guy in the room.

Nobody knows that more than Emory Jones, who was one of the most popular Gators throughout the 2018 season and the beginning of 2019. It wasn’t until Kyle Trask took over after Feleipe Franks was injured against Kentucky that the calls for Jones started to subside.

So here we are again in a similar spot that we were when Trask entered that Kentucky game down 21-10 only to lead the Gators to victory. We know our QBs are skilled. But we also know they have very limited experience.

So if Emory Jones falters or (God forbid) goes down with an injury, is Anthony Richardson ready to come in?

High School Stats

If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know I believe that high school stats – particularly completion percentage – transfer well from high school to the college game. So what does that mean for Richardson?

Anthony Richardson high school stats. (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)

Well, what you see is a gifted runner (9.7 yards per rush his junior season) who was an extremely limited passer until his senior year. But that year, he was putting up numbers that would rival a 5-star prospect like J.T. Daniels. Unfortunately for Richardson, he only played six games his senior season because of injury, but that’s some serious improvement.

Of course, that also begs the question, why the improvement? Well, his rushing stats indicate that the coaches may have really started to open things up for Richardson his senior year. He ran an average of 9.6 times per game as a sophomore and 8.6 times per game as a junior. That dropped to 5.5 times per game his senior year, indicating that they believed they were getting enough out of him in the passing game to risk injury by running him all the time.

But one red flag is that the completion percentage was basically stagnant his first three seasons and then jumped his senior year. Did he happen to play easier competition in the first six games of the season? Did he just get hot for a few games?

I’m also not sure that it matters if we’re asking the question of whether Richardson can be a solid SEC QB. Nick Fitzgerald’s career completion percentage at Mississippi State was 54.2 percent, indicating that Dan Mullen will be able to get a lot out of someone with limited accuracy.

But the enticing thing about Richardson is those six games in 2019, because if he’s able to harness that kind of accuracy combined with his athletic gifts, he’s going to be a real threat to every defense in the SEC, Alabama included.

Florida Gators Highlights

Richardson got really limited playing time in 2020 for Florida. With Kyle Trask and Emory Jones in front of him on the depth chart, that was to be expected.

I can’t say a whole lot about him going 1-2 for 27 yards with a TD and an INT except that I’d trust the high school results more than the garbage time results against Arkansas and Oklahoma when it comes to his ability to throw the ball.

But when it comes to his ability to run the ball, I think those garbage time stats do tell us a little something. Richardson had 7 rushes for 61 yards (8.7 yards per attempt average), which is pretty close to the 9.7 yards per attempt he averaged in high school. Now that average is very much skewed by a 28-yard scamper that he had against Oklahoma, but even if you subtract that from the ledger, Richardson still averaged 5.5 yards per rush attempt when the opponent knew he was running the ball.

That is what’s been so impressive with Emory Jones thus far. Opponents have known he was going to run the ball and they haven’t been able to stop it. Richardson appears to have the exact same quality.

All of that is great news for Richardson’s long-term prospects, and I know that he got a lot of people excited with the way he executed the touchdown drive in the bowl game against Oklahoma. But a closer look at the main plays from that drive show me that he probably still has quite a bit of growth to do before he’s really ready to excel in the SEC.

For instance, this play produces a great result, in many ways because of Richardson’s unique gifts. But he also misses a wide open Lorenzo Lingard (#21) in the flat both right after the snap and prior to taking off running. I know what most fans are thinking: “who cares if the play was successful for 28 yards?” and in some ways they are right. But consistency at the QB position means making the right decision, time after time. Even though the result on this play was good, the process of decision-making on the play was not.

That isn’t the end of the world. Quarterbacks make poor decisions all the time. The great ones make poor decisions less often, but even QBs who have great seasons miss running backs who spring free from time-to-time.

You can see that here in the 2020 film, where Kyle Trask – whom everybody can agree was fantastic last season – decides to push the ball down field to Kadarius Toney rather than just dumping the ball off to a wide open Dameon Pierce. The one real negative that you saw from Trask last season was that, especially early in the year, he would lock on to Toney or Pitts to the detriment of making the right play. The point isn’t the rip on Trask here, but to point out that Richardson is hardly alone.

It’s ironic, but the touchdown throw that Richardson made against Oklahoma is actually the play that concerns me a little bit more.

It becomes immediately obvious at the snap that the safeties have vacated the center of the field. Richardson completes the ball to a wide open Jordan Pouncey for a TD but the ball is a little bit behind Pouncey and he has to wait for it.

Now, you could make the argument that Pouncey was so wide open that making him slow up and not missing him is the wise thing to do. But I also think you can make the argument that Richardson was late getting the ball out and even though the middle of the field was vacated, did not anticipate that Pouncey would come open over the middle, but rather waited until he came open to make the throw.

Again, Richardson has the physical gifts to make this play a successful one. But this is against a vanilla defense of Oklahoma backups, not Alabama or LSU on a Saturday night.

Takeaway

None of this is to say that Richardson won’t be a successful QB at Florida. I think he’s probably the most physically gifted QB on the roster, which is saying a lot when Emory Jones is ostensibly leading the competition.

But what I do think it says that at least as of December of 2020, Richardson still had a lot of development work to do. That shouldn’t be surprising, given his limited time in Dan Mullen’s offense, but also in the timeline of his development in high school.

I do think that one of the things his high school completion percentage points out is that he hit a point where the light bulb came on and he had much greater command of his high school offense. And while the TD drive against Oklahoma was successful, you can see the areas for development even in the successful plays.

Give credit to Richardson for being able to go out there and move the offense even when the game was going fast for him. As it slows down, he’s really going to be a force. And perhaps he has been able to take this offseason and further develop to a point where some of the issues I’ve pointed out here will be resolved.

But the question I opened with was whether Richardson will be ready if Emory Jones is ineffective or unable to play due to injury. I think the Oklahoma drive gives significant hope that he can fill-in should Jones have to miss a game or two.

But I think it also makes me understand why Emory Jones has been the leader in the clubhouse to start all offseason long.

Afghanistan

I’ve written in this space about my love for the U.S., particularly this past Independence Day. But with that love and respect for the foundations of the country comes a responsibility to speak out when we do something wrong.

I wasn’t alive for Vietnam and so the events of Saigon are just something I’ve read about in a history book. I was uneasy about President Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. support from the Kurds in northern Syria. I wish he had spoken up more when Hong Kong was essentially annexed by China.

So it’s not like the U.S. vacillating with its allies is necessarily new news. But the pictures coming out of Afghanistan – of a withdrawal so haphazard that there were people falling from the wheels of planes because they were so desperate to get out – just struck me differently. Reports yesterday surfaced of Afghan women tossing babies over barbed-wire fences because they were so desperate to get them away from the Taliban.

And so I found myself calling my mother on Monday and confessing that it’s the only time I can ever remember truly being ashamed of my country.

Perhaps it’s because I know people who have served in Afghanistan and have seen the effect that it has had on their ability to function in day-to-day life. Perhaps it’s because I watched on September 11 as people desperately jumped from the Twin Towers and had those feelings rush back to me watching people falling from the planes. Or perhaps it’s because the realization of the Taliban takeover made it abundantly clear that a bunch of people are going to end up tortured not just because the U.S. decided to leave, but because of how the U.S. decided to leave.

I used the word “people” in the preceding paragraph because I think it’s important to remember that first and foremost these are not “Afghans” or “Americans”, but human beings. We were there to support human beings and we failed. Regardless of your political persuasion, people are going to die because of haphazard actions taken by the U.S. Government, which clearly didn’t anticipate the speed of the Taliban takeover or have contingencies in place to get people out.

My Grandfather served in World War II. When I was maybe 13 or 14, the topic of the Vietnam War came up. I remember his eyes narrowing and his tones getting more hushed as he spoke of the events that he saw unfold on TV as Saigon fell. At the time, I thought he was angry. But now I don’t think that’s what it was. I think he was ashamed.

I understand how he felt.