Why Anthony Richardson, the most athletic quarterback in history, poses an NFL draft puzzle

When Platte applied his coding wizardry to football, he invented a metric that crunches a host of pre-draft testing data into a single number for every player. His formula takes information like how fast a player runs and how high he jumps and distils it into what he calls a Relative Athletic Score, a nifty grade that’s popular among draft pundits and helpful for quantifying someone’s traits compared with his peers.

Richardson was unremarkable at the University of Florida. Unlike the other quarterbacks expected to go atop the draft, such as Alabama’s Bryce Young or Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud, Richardson didn’t light up college scoreboards.

But when the draft begins Thursday, there’s a strong chance commissioner Roger Goodell steps onto the stage in Kansas City and calls out Richardson’s name early anyway. That’s because, according to Platte’s metric, Richardson is the most athletic quarterback in modern football history.

“Nobody else comes close,” Platte says.

So despite everything he hasn’t done yet on a football field, he’s bursting with the tools that make coaches dream about what he someday might do.

He’s big, fast and boasts a powerful arm. He’s also the most likely player in this draft to make one team look completely brilliant — or utterly foolish.

“The guy is an absolute physical freak. You’re talking about historical athleticism for the position,” says Billy Napier, his coach last season at Florida. “This guy’s just getting started — still very much a green player.”

Whoever takes Richardson will be staking their future to someone who hasn’t played like a superstar. His 53.8% completion percentage last season at Florida ranked 102nd out of 108 qualifying passers in the country. He threw just 17 touchdown passes with nine interceptions while the Gators went 6-6 in his starts.

That hasn’t deflated expectations that he will be a top-10 pick. And the best way to understand that disconnect is through Platte’s metric.

Relative Athletic Score takes all of the data that gets cooked up during the pre-draft process — from a player’s exact height and weight to how fast he runs the 40-yard dash — and translates it into a single number on a 0-10 scale by comparing it to players at the same position. Going into this draft process, Platte figured Richardson would get high marks because his athleticism wasn’t exactly a secret.

“Then he comes in and blows it out of the water,” Platte says.

Richardson received a perfect 10 as the highest-rated quarterback in a database that goes back to 1987. Richardson — who since the 11th grade has called himself Cam Jackson, after the multitalented MVP-winning quarterbacks Lamar Jackson and Cam Newton — actually took the top spot from Newton. His testing was so off the charts that he recorded the third-highest raw score among the 20,000-plus players at any position over the years.

So what does he do so phenomenally that produced such an incredible score? Richardson himself actually explains it pretty succinctly.

“I’m able to do everything on the field: run over people, jump over people, run past people,” he said at the combine.

At 6-foot-4 and 244 pounds, Richardson can definitely run over people. He can jump over them, too: his vertical leap (40.5 inches) and broad jump (10 feet, 9 inches) were both the highest ever for a quarterback at the combine. And there’s no doubt that he can blow past defenders — his 4.43-second time in the 40-yard dash is among the fastest recorded at the position.

But whether he booms or busts as a quarterback in the NFL will also come down to whether he can improve as a passer.

The chasm between what Richardson has shown he is capable of and what he has actually done is enormous. He started for just one full season in college, and that year wasn’t especially impressive.

His relative lack of experience is also part of the sales pitch. At just 20 years old, with 393 collegiate passes, Richardson is expectedly less polished than his peers. By contrast Young, the quarterback favoured to be picked first overall by the Carolina Panthers, threw 949 passes during his career at Alabama. That’s why the optimistic view on Richardson is that he’s a freakish athlete and with more time he can tap in to his vast potential.

Napier notes other circumstances that have factored into Richardson’s development. His first season in college, 2020, was the year up-ended by the pandemic. During his sophomore year, Florida’s coach was fired mid-season. And when Florida had a so-so season in 2022, Napier was a new coach installing a new offence for not just Richardson but the entire team.

Those are also the reasons Napier says Richardson’s subpar statistics undersell his actual talent. “I don’t necessarily know that the completion percentage is a reflection of his overall ability,” he says.

Recent history has also shown teams are willing to roll the dice on prospects like Richardson with the belief that physical superiority and the ability to thrive as a dual-threat passer are so valuable in modern football that it’s worth the risk that a player can improve other parts of his game, like passing accuracy. The Buffalo Bills were rewarded for that notion when they took an unproven passer who struggled to hit his targets out of Wyoming. Then after a rough couple first seasons, Josh Allen grew into one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks.

The same can’t be said yet of Trey Lance, who also had impressive physical traits but had little experience in college at North Dakota State. Nonetheless, the 49ers traded three first-round picks to move up and take him third overall in 2021. Between injuries and lack of opportunity since then, he has seen limited action so far in San Francisco and whether he succeeds as a pro is still an uncertainty.

Napier thinks Richardson’s gamble is already paying off. He could have returned to Florida for another year to play better and come off as less of a risk to NFL decision makers. But recent weeks have indicated that he didn’t have to do that — Richardson’s likely to go off the board early anyway.

“He bet on himself,” Napier says. “And I think he’s proved to a lot of people that he may have been right about that.”

– The Wall Street Journal