ORLANDO – Shane Steichen can’t wait to work with Anthony Richardson again.
You can feel it in the way the Colts coach shifts his hands from side to side and then up to his ear, like a quarterback ready to launch a pass. He’s launching into coach mode before the clock has hit 8 a.m. at the annual owners’ meetings in Orlando, before the coffee has had a chance to kick in.
What excites him most about Richardson’s expected return to full-go practices this spring after a six-month layoff after shoulder surgery isn’t the 4.4-second 40-yard dash speed, the 6-foot-4 or 244-pound size or even the electric arm, all of the traits that drew the Colts to Richardson at this time a year ago. They know all that.
No, the draw to seeing Richardson in his first full offseason program is to build on something more mundane but also just as important.
“He had a really good feel of where to go with the football early,” Steichen said. “It might not be his first read, but it’d be a guy on a jet motion and it’s like, ‘I’m going to throw an over,’ and nobody covered the guy on the jet motion.”
As much as Steichen lives for the upside in a quarterback like Richardson or Jalen Hurts or Justin Herbert, and as badly as he covets the gifts he wanted back when he was an undersized quarterback at UNLV, he will forever be most fascinated by what lies between the ears.
As a coach, he lives to find answers to problems, to solve riddles that haven’t been posed yet and to test the imaginary boundaries of a game stitched into 1st-and-10s and fields with dimensions of 100 yards by 53. And he knows that no matter how sharp or new the look of the X’s and O’s on a whiteboard, the true potential lies in what the quarterback can read in real time.
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