Fixing Anthony Richardson

Often when I get questions about recruiting and recruiting services, the questions center around one key issue: “Can the recruiting services be trusted, or are they biased?”

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That is usually because someone commits to Alabama and immediately sees their national ranking rise or someone commits to Florida and immediately sees their ranking sink, and so the casual fan looks at the change in numbers and assumes that things outside of true evaluation are moving the numbers.

But there is one main reason I believe the recruiting rankings, specifically the 247Sports composite, can be trusted. That reason is that we have a treasure trove of data that shows a distinct causal effect between elite recruiting and winning. You can see this whether you look at it nationally, or even more starkly if you break it down via conference.

But the key is that there are enough data points over enough years that I can see that the rankings correlate with success, which means that even if they do have some biases (because every human endeavor does), they’re generally trustworthy.

Conversely, each football game is one data point (win/loss) made up of smaller sets of data points. For example, Anthony Richardson threw 35 passes against Kentucky and played really poorly. But is 35 passes enough to make a determination about who he is as a QB? I’m not sure.

It’s the same with the recognition that he now has three starts, the Gators are 1-2 in those games and he’s played poorly in both losses. Is two losses –sandwiched around a really good performance against Utah – enough to make a determination about who he is as a QB? Again, I’m not sure.

Richardson put up a stink bomb against Kentucky. He doesn’t need me to tell him that. He said as much after the game.

“We lost, and I feel like it’s completely on me. A lot of people say it’s not, but I feel like it’s on me. I played terrible. I didn’t do anything that would’ve helped my team. I tried to lead, but I didn’t feel like I did that real well tonight. I take full responsibility for the loss.” – Anthony Richardson, Florida Gators QB

While that level of accountability is honorable and answers a lot of questions about his leadership ability, it doesn’t help to answer the question of who he is as a QB.

But as I’ve explored social media and message boards over the last couple of days, it has become clear that this one data point (or 35 if you wish to break it down that way) has changed the way many in Gator Nation view Anthony Richardson. They see the way he fell apart when things started to go south and immediately conclude that he doesn’t have what it takes to be great. But I’m not so sure.

The question that’s critical to answer then is whether that is enough data points to make that sort of blanket statement, or are these the normal growing pains that young quarterbacks go through?

The Burrow Comparison

I was obviously in early on Joe Burrow before he transferred to LSU. I thought he had an opportunity to be special and thought Dan Mullen messed up when he didn’t pursue Burrow through the transfer portal.

But Burrow was not immediately all that great. In fact, if we look at his first three games as a starter against FBS opponents for the Tigers compared to Richardson, here’s what we see.

Richardson was clearly worse, but he wasn’t much worse. The thing you’d point out is clearly the turnovers and the lower yards per pass attempt, but this does ignore the fact that Burrow ran for 38 yards total (on 18 carries) vs. 136 yards on 29 carries for Richardson. The rushing stats drag Burrow’s Yards Above Replacement (YAR) – my proprietary stat for taking a QBs running and passing into account – down towards Richardson’s.

AR is still worse, but neither of these stat lines would inspire a ton of confidence.

But this also isn’t a fair comparison for Richardson because he has faced three top-25 teams in his first three starts, one who won the National Championship, one who recently competed with Ohio State in the Rose Bowl and one who jumped into the top-10 after defeating the Gators. Burrow’s first three FBS starts were against a Miami (FL) team who finished 7-6, an Auburn team who finished 8-5 and a Louisiana Tech team that finished 8-5 as well.

If instead, we look at the first three starts that Burrow had against teams that finished in the top-25 of the AP Poll (#7 Florida, #7 Georgia and #2 Alabama), here’s the new comparison.

Those numbers are really, really close. Burrow has one less turnover and a slightly higher QB rating. He was more effective as a passer (though not all that effective) and less effective as a runner. These are both poor QB performances, but that’s really the point.

Had you decided after Burrow’s first three starts against top-25 teams that he was an unworthy QB, you would have been wrong. If you were Ed Orgeron and you cut bait with Burrow after 2018, you would have ended up starting Myles Brennan in 2019.

(Editor’s note: After I wrote this section, David Wunderlich posted a twitter thread about Vince Young going through similar issues early on. That’s definitely worth checking out too.)

Progression through a season

If we carry the Burrow comparison further, here’s what we find.

In his first nine starts for LSU, Burrow averaged 6.7 yards per attempt, threw 6 touchdowns and 4 interceptions. His QB rating for those nine games was 114.3, he never topped 300 yards passing, and he only topped 57 percent completions one time. His YAR for those nine games was -0.56, or as the name of the stat implies, below replacement level.

That’s 258 attempts for Burrow (AR is currently at 125) where he was well below average at the position for the Tigers. But something happened and Burrow made a leap. Lots of people might point to this moment where the switch flipped for Burrow.

But the truth is that the switch actually flipped after LSU’s 29-0 loss against Alabama. In the last four games of the 2018 season (against Arkansas, Rice, Texas A&M and UCF), Burrow was outstanding. He completed 67 percent of his throws. He averaged 292 yards per game on 9.6 yards per attempt with 10 TDs to only 1 INT. His YAR for those four games was 1.62 and his QB rating was 173.5.

Essentially, his play to close the 2018 season set the stage for what was to come in 2019. He also was way better once he got some reps against teams who weren’t world beaters.

I think that’s where some of the other data points that we have for Richardson outside of his first three starts really should give us hope. Just like Burrow, Richardson has struggled against very good teams. But when he’s gotten opportunities against lesser opponents, he has lit them up.

What this shows is that Richardson has been truly special in his limited opportunities outside of his three starts. A QB rating of 178.1 is elite. A YAR of 4.62 is Heisman Trophy worthy. He has still thrown too many interceptions and I’d like to see more accuracy, but this is a QB with a profile that says there is a leap to come.

Whether that leap is big enough to carry this Gators team either this year or next is the question that the rest of this season can answer.

So what went wrong?

But all of that does lead to the natural question of what has gone wrong in these starts? After all, if Richardson has performed so well against lesser opponents, why did it just go “poof” the minute he played better ones.

Well, one thing I think we need to acknowledge is that despite him taking responsibility, it is not all his fault.

In the Gators game against Utah, the play selection was 37 rushes and 24 passes. Of those 24 passes, 9 went for 10-plus yards, or 37.5 percent. But of the 37 rushes, 10 went for 10-plus yards, or 27.0 percent.

But against Kentucky, the script flipped. Florida threw the ball 35 times and ran it 30 times. Of those 30 runs, only four went for 10-plus yards. Even if Richardson had contributed a couple of runs in that range, Florida still would have come up short of that 27 percent mark set during Utah by 2-3 runs. This has as much to do with his running backs and offensive line performing below expectations as it does Richardson.

Of course, Richardson also should have converted a bunch more of those passes too because out of his 35 throws, only seven went for 10-plus yards. Given his percentage against Utah, we would have expected that to be more around 13, which suggests that he missed six throws.

Looking back at the film, I think that’s correct. So let’s look at those six throws and analyze the thought process that went into them and whether what went wrong is correctable.

Miss number one could have been a touchdown. Richardson sees two-deep safeties and Florida has the perfect play called for this. Ricky Pearsall (#1) is running and out route while Xzavier Henderson (#3) is running a post. If the safety stays deep with Henderson, AR throws the ball over the linebacker to Pearsall. If the safety jumps on Pearsall (like he does here), AR throws the ball to Henderson.

The throw is awful, but Richardson went to the right man given the defensive alignment pre-snap and how they responded post-snap.

For miss number two, Richardson again identifies that it is two-deep coverage. How do I know he understood this? Because at the snap (where I have the clip paused), he is looking towards his left and the Kentucky linebacker. If that linebacker drops towards the middle of the field, he hits the slot receiver running a hitch. But if the linebacker goes towards the slot receiver, that means there will be an opening between the safeties.

Again, the throw is poor but the thought process that went into the throw is sound.

Miss number three is a fade route to Justin Shorter. I hate fade routes. I haven’t spent enough time actually looking into the numbers, but I suspect they are the least likely pass to succeed on the field. Though when they do deliver, they’re about as pretty as you can get.

What that means is that this is an inefficient, but okay read. Kentucky had just switched from a 2-high look to a single high safety, in part in response to Florida having guys running open down the middle of the field (Richardson had just hit Pearsall to set up this first down play).

The thing that sticks out though is that Florida had Kentucky caught in a blitz here as the safety who looked to be lined up in coverage at the top and the outside linebacker to the same side rushed Richardson. The screen passes to Xzavier Henderson weren’t all that successful in this game, but it would have been a big play had Richardson gotten the ball out to him here.

I grade this an incomplete. This isn’t a poor decision, but it’s a non-optimized one. It’s going for a kill shot when a shorter, higher percentage option was available.

Miss number four is a true miss and all on Richardson. The read is correct as Zanders is wide open on a first down play. Richardson just throws it too high and too hard and Zanders can’t bring it in. Hit him in the numbers and it’s an easy 10-yard gain.

Miss number five is again a good read. Richardson recognizes that the deep safety is way to his left. The other safety is in the middle of the field and drops right down the middle at the snap. That means he has Justin Shorter and (I believe) Ja’quavion Fraziars against a corner and a linebacker. The linebacker takes away Fraziars underneath, which means he has an opportunity to get the ball to Shorter.

The throw is bad. But part of the reason it is bad is that Richardson is unable to step into his throw because left tackle Richard Gouraige (#76) is driven back into Richardson by the blitzing linebacker. In part that’s because Gouraige has to come so far after Richie Leonard (#67) and Kingsley Eguakun (#55) double team Kentucky nose tackle Josaih Hayes (#99).

Richardson’s inaccuracy is a part of the problem, but it’s not the whole problem.

Miss number six is again completely on Richardson. He makes the right read, recognizing that Ricky Pearsall (#1) is in single coverage against Kentucky linebacker J.J. Weaver (#13). Weaver has safety help deep, but Pearsall beats him immediately and is wide open. Richardson just misses him.

At this point, Richardson was 5-15 for 80 yards as these six throws all came before the interception at the end of the half. Two of the incompletions were drops, one by Henderson for a first down and one by Pearsall on the play just before the sixth miss by AR. Had his receivers helped him out and had he hit on half of his misses, his line would have looked more like 10-15 for 143 yards (9.5 yards per throw).

Obviously, it’s discouraging that Richardson missed all six. But it also is encouraging to me that he was making the right reads on each of these throws. These weren’t errors where he was throwing into traffic and isn’t seeing the field well. He threw to the right guy just about every time, but something in his mechanics was off.

Fixing it

Of course, this leads to the question of how do you fix this? The answer, as always, is multifaceted.

The first thing I think we need to do is look at Anthony Richardson’s 2021 season for some guidance. Richardson only threw 61 passes, but seeing as how he’s at 59 this season, I think we can draw some conclusions by looking at his attempt distribution from 2021 to 2022.What should jump out at you as a difference between 2021 and 2022 is how often Richardson threw to the outside last season. Nearly 87 percent of his throws were to the outside compared to nearly 41 percent of his throws having that distinction this season. He also took a lot more deep shots, as 23 percent of his throws traveled 20-plus yards in the air compared to 15.3 percent this season.

But the thing I want you to really pay attention to is the 1.7 percent number at 20-plus yards down the field to the left. It seems to me that is really significant, especially in light of the next set of charts.The chart on the left shows Richardson’s success rate for 2021 on throws of varying distance and location. What we see is that Richardson was really successful going to his left, hitting at a 67 percent clip on throws of 20-plus yards.

What we also see is that Richardson was not very successful in the upper right hand side of the chart, as the only place he was even at 50 percent was in the middle of the field at 11-20 yards. Everywhere else was unsuccessful.

That’s a problem as Napier has thus far completely ignored the type of throw that Richardson showed he was adept at last year. Certainly Kentucky begged him to throw there given some of their 2-high safety looks, but when given some opportunities later on, Florida didn’t really go that direction.

Here’s an example of one of Richardson’s throws to the left last year for a successful big play. And note that the fade to Shorter that I showed above is the only throw of the six misses where AR actually put some air under the ball. I said above that something was off mechanically for Richardson and to me, it appears as though he has better touch going left.

Does he need to fix this and get better going right and down the middle? Absolutely. But could Napier make his life easier by giving him some throws and reads in that direction? The answer is absolutely to that as well.

Takeaway

I’m not saying Anthony Richardson is going to be Joe Burrow. I’m not even saying that he’s going to be an elite QB at the University of Florida. What I am saying is that it is way too early in his career to be making declarations one way or the other.

I’m sure if I searched long enough, I’d be able to find examples of hyped QBs who were bad in their first three starts against ranked opponents and never recovered. In fact, that might be the outcome that is most likely when you have QBs start out that way.

But the Burrow example definitely proves that improvement is possible, even within the season. It means that we need to give Richardson time to breathe, time to learn, and time to develop. We’ll have way more data points by the end of the season to make the declarations that some want to now, but at that point it will not longer be trying to connect minimal data points.

The film says that Richardson’s misses were physical mistakes, not mental ones. For the most part he made the proper read, got the ball out on time and just missed. Everything he threw was a bullet, but we know the man can put touch on the ball. We’ve seen him do it…..particularly to his left.

What that suggests to me is that he was hyped up for the game, put too much on a few of the early throws, lost his confidence and things snowballed from there. It doesn’t suggest to me that he’s a QB who is throwing to the wrong place on a consistent basis or is not thinking his way through the game.

There is no doubt that the turnovers are concerning. So too is the way that the game careened out of control and the lack of Richardson being able to provide value in the running game. Obviously none of those are positives and they’ll need to get corrected.

But you can’t go from believing that Richardson is the kind of player you’ll tell your grandkids about to a complete bum after one game. It just isn’t enough data to make that sort of conclusion. In fact, I’d suggest that the individual data points inside the film point towards something that should be relatively easy to correct. It’s certainly easier to correct than a QB who isn’t seeing the field.

The Utah game may have led us to believe he was ahead of schedule. The Kentucky game certainly has tempered those expectations. But the upside that we’ve all seen is still there and I would peg his ability to reach that upside more likely than not.

Maybe AR won’t be able to reach that ceiling. Maybe he’s going to struggle and won’t turn things around. Maybe the confidence issues are going to crop up at inopportune times. We just don’t have enough data to know, but we will by the end of the year.

Or maybe the Kentucky game is just a blip on the radar and he’s about to take off.

Relationships, Hope, and Jonathan Tjarks

If you’d like to support Jon’s family, you can do so at this GoFundMe.

Jonathan Tjarks was born in 1987, six years after I was.

Yet Tjarks took his last breath on Saturday night, the victim of an Ewing’s-like sarcoma as I, and many of you, were obsessing over the Gators loss to Kentucky. He leaves behind a young wife, Melissa, and his 2-year old son, Jackson. That sort of thing certainly puts problems into their proper perspective pretty quickly.

I didn’t know Jon all that well, or really at all.

He was a basketball writer for Bill Simmons’ “The Ringer” and he had a very distinct voice whenever he appeared on Simmons’ podcast where you immediately knew it was him even without an introduction. He also had a way of breaking down basketball in a way that helped me as a relative novice and also hopefully has influenced my writing about football as well.

I knew Jon had cancer but it wasn’t until I came across this piece that he wrote about his cancer, his church group and his son that I really started following his journey. I encourage you to go read it, but the line that stuck out to me the most was this passage about his feelings when his father passed away when he was 12 years old.

“There were a bunch of people at his funeral whom I hadn’t seen in years. They all told me how sorry they were and asked if there was anything they could do. All I could think was I don’t know any of you. I know of you. I’ve heard your names. But I don’t know you.”

In the piece, Tjarks wrote about how when you get sick, people talk about medical insurance and life insurance. But his unique experience of losing his dad young and then going through the cancer diagnosis young drove him to the conclusion that relationship insurance – people – are far more important than anything monetary.

Right after I read it, I found his contact information and emailed him because it had such a profound impact on me. And despite going through chemo and everything else he had going on, he responded quickly and graciously.

Two weeks before he died, I emailed him again after Melissa wrote on their Caring Bridge site that she thought he could use some scriptural encouragement. I knew what her updates meant at that point and how dire the situation was so I didn’t want to send something trite.

What I decided on was from the book of Matthew.

“Matthew 12:33 – Make a tree good and its fruit will be good or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.”

If you go to that Caring Bridge site, you can follow along on the family’s journey in full detail. You can read about how the chemotherapy zapped Jon of pieces of himself and how the tumors grew so fast that they eventually impinged his spine and prevented him from being able to walk and talk.

But you can also read about how much he loved his wife and that little boy. You can read about the tears of joy when he made some small step forward against the disease and you can read about the tears of sorrow and fear as the setbacks came. You can read about the people in his life who gathered around the family to help in ways both big and small. And you can read about the family’s enduring faith.

That faith wasn’t rooted in God curing the disease (though they certainly asked), but that whatever the outcome ended up being, that they would have hope in seeing each other again. I can only believe that it was that hope that enabled them to share these sorts of details to the world and face this cruel outcome with grace and dignity.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my friend Rob who had passed away. We had drifted apart but he had a profound impact on me. Essentially, the fruit from his tree was transient in time, but permanent in my heart. In many ways, that’s true about Jonathan Tjarks as well. While I never met the man, the story that he lived (and those stories told by the people who knew him well and have written/spoken about him this week) and his display of faith when facing down death was fruit that was transient in time, but now permanent in my heart.

One of my biggest fears – and I suspect the fears of many people out there – is that my life will be one of insignificance. I’ve read that people would rather be hated than ignored, and the fact that it rings true to me indicates just how strong the impulse is for humans to feel like their life somehow mattered.

Jon accomplished that.

He allowed himself to be vulnerable to the world so that people might in some small way feel enabled to be vulnerable themselves. And in that vulnerability, he pointed out that when you face your mortality, it isn’t the career accomplishments or the money or the transient things you think about.

It’s the people.

I have no doubt that Jon’s friends and family will circle around Melissa and Jackson and make them feel loved and supported over the next few weeks, months or maybe even years. I’m praying that they can fulfill his request to make sure that Jackson knows them in the way that he wrote so eloquently about.

But the fruit of Jonathan Tjarks’ life isn’t just about whether Jackson knows those people. It’s about whether the people who knew him (or knew of him) take his story and learn to build the same relationship insurance into their own lives even though they don’t have cancer. Or perhaps whether the people who know his story help provide the relationship insurance that is so desperately needed for someone else.

Because that verse in Matthew isn’t just about being nice.

It’s about the fruit of the Spirit; behavior that people in this world see from us and don’t understand, because those things are so different than our current cultural values. It’s about pointing people towards an eternal hope and that the people we care about eventually end up finding, as Melissa stated when Jon died, their home in heaven.

So as we say goodbye to Jonathan Tjarks, I think about what I’d want someone to say at my celebration of life. And based on the framework of what Jon has shared, I can only think of one thing left to say.

Goodbye Jon. You mattered to me.