Have you heard lately that the Indianapolis Colts have a quarterback competition heading into the 2025 NFL season? It’s true! The team signed Daniel Jones as a free agent, but here’s the thing, they still have Anthony Richardson who was the No. 4-overall draft pick back in 2023. The NFL rumor mill suggests that the Colts starting QB job is up for grabs between the two of them.
Today is the first day of training camp practices and according to Sports Illustrated’s Jake Arthur, it wasn’t a good start for Richardson.
“Richardson’s stat line looks clearly worse than Jones’, as Richardson went 4-of-11 (36.4%) in 11-on-11s, but Richardson’s pass-catchers had issues hanging onto the ball, as I counted three drops by receivers on targets from Richardson: one each from Michael Pittman Jr., Jonathan Taylor, and Dulin. Richardson completed passes to Pittman (2), Pierce, and Gould,” Arthur writes.
It’s only one day, but Richardson managed to have a worse completion percentage than last year when he was at 47.7%. Head coach Shane Steichen said they want to be careful with him at this point, but so would I if my quarterback was throwing like that.
“It’s good to see him back out there,” Steichen said. “We’ll have a plan–a maintenance plan for him, as you guys will see. We wanted him to get all the team reps, so you might not see him throw some individual reps every single day. So we’re working him back into that deal.”
Steichen plans to give Jones and Richardson equal reps as Colts QB
It seemed like Jones had the leg up heading into camp (perhaps he still does and Richardson’s reps are more performative) because of Richardson’s shoulder injury. But, so far it sounds like Steichen is going to put them on equal footing in terms of reps.
“With the way the reps are going to play out, those guys are going to get the same amount of reps just like you saw today, it’ll flip,” Steichen said. “They’ll both get reps with the ones every day because we have third down day and we don’t want one guy getting all the reps on third down and then same thing with red zone. You’ll see that back and forth.”
The focus of the offense in this first practice (during 7-on-7s and 11-on-11s), according to Arthur, was on running plays, RPOs and first and second downs.
Daniel Jones seems and Anthony Richardson will likely rotate
Yes, both players got equal reps in practice on Wednesday, but it sounds like Jones is getting first crack right now. Again, it’s one day and we all want to make too much of an extremely limited sample size. In fact, Arthur says that the two signal callers will likely rotate as camp progresses.
“While the players will rotate their order day-to-day, Jones was the first quarterback during 11-on-11s.” Arthur writes. “In total, both quarterbacks received three drives with the first team. Jones went 7-of-8 passing (87.5%) throughout the day during full team drills, with completions to Anthony Gould (2), Alec Pierce, AD Mitchell, Ashton Dulin, and Salvon Ahmed. He also caught a pass he threw that was batted by defensive tackle Grover Stewart.
“Jones’ best play of the day was during 11-on-11s on a go ball down the left side to Gould that resulted in a gain of about 30 yards. Jones’ low point was during 7-on-7s when he threw a ball late to Josh Downs on the left sideline, which cornerback Kenny Moore II flew in to intercept.”
This won’t be a fun quarterback battle for Colts’ fans to watch regardless of who “wins.”
Colts’ Quarterback Struggles on Day 1 of Training Camp