College football and NFL football are largely the same game, but they are far from the same thing. This is far beyond differences like whether the clock stops on a first down or the pro level’s contracts and players’ union that don’t exist in college.
In the NFL, football is a player’s entire life. There aren’t classes to attend. There aren’t occasional weekend trips home to see the parents. It’s a job, and little exists outside of that job for those who excel.
The NFL is also chock full of people who give the impression of being some combination of being bigger, faster, and/or quicker than human beings should be. It’s only gotten more so over the years as conditioning and nutrition have gotten more scientific and rigorous. Sure, we can laugh about the punters and kickers here, but the point stands in general.
That’s why it matters so much that Anthony Richardson blew everyone away at the NFL Combine. His measurables aren’t a good match for quarterbacks; they’re somehow a mix of both edge rushers and wideouts and corners. An 89.8% match for Khalil Mack’s Combine numbers is faster than most wideouts and makes 60-yard throws look casual. Even in a league full of people who shouldn’t exist, he stands way, way out.
That’s why it was smart for Richardson to go pro after 2022, despite how unpolished he is as a quarterback, and why he’ll go in the first round. Probably the first half of the first round, and maybe the top ten.
The unpolished aspect to his game is why he’s not the surefire No. 1 overall pick. For every terrific play he’s made, there’s another where you can only shake your head. He’ll not see a defender and throw a pick, or miss an open receiver, or scramble out of bounds for a loss instead of throwing it into the tenth row.
He’s also relatively inexperienced. He only played six games in his senior year of high school, and he attempted more passes in 12 games in 2022 (327) than he did in 17 games across his junior and senior seasons combined (301). Tim Tebow and Johnny Manziel won the Heisman in their second seasons in college, but both attempted more than 340 passes as high school seniors alone.
AR was hampered due to hamstring (2021) and ankle (2022) injuries, and started just 13 games in college. His first start, against a historic Georgia defense in ’21, was a no-win situation and should barely even count. He lost his first quarterbacks coach Brian Johnson after his first season, and he got completely different offense after his second.
Some players blossom in college despite not throwing a ton of passes as high school seniors or despite college staff shuffling. Overcoming both is a higher degree of difficulty, however.
That’s why I don’t think Richardson’s pro career will be a huge reflection on Florida as a football program.
Dan Mullen talked in circles around Richardson’s decision making when being grilled about why Emory Jones was starting in 2021. Billy Napier then talked a lot about AR being inexperienced and still needing to learn the position.
Richardson was no less a stunning athlete when compared to peers as a recruit than he is now, but he was in the lower half of the 4-star range in the 247 Composite. One of the guys he’s often compared to, Cam Newton, was a 5-star both out of high school and JUCO. Everyone knows the high school recruiting analysts get stuff wrong all the time, but it goes to show that Richardson was never seen as finished product by either the scouts or his own coaches.
And make no mistake, there isn’t a single person in the NFL who thinks he’s a finished product. It’s been clear all along that AR will be drafted based on potential rather than who he is now. If a GM at the top of the Draft needs someone to compete for the starting job on Day 1, he’s going to take Bryce Young or CJ Stroud instead.
Still, the potential is tantalizing. The reverse of what I said above is true: for every truly bad play Richardson made, you can find a brilliant one that shows real skill, outstanding athleticism, or both.
It’s going to feel bad for some fans that UF had a first-half-of-the-first-round quarterback and only got a 6-6 record out of his one year starting. My first response would be that Richardson doesn’t play defense.
My second would be to remind you all the rest of this stuff. If you need to complain about something, you could grouse about Mullen’s generally slow player development pace. He has coached up some quarterbacks with long pro careers, but Alex Smith spent four years in college and Dak Prescott spent five. Prescott didn’t become a full-time starter until his fourth season. Richardson wasn’t going to get there by the time Mullen got the boot.
I would also stress again that the NFL is different than any other level of football. You can turn on almost any game on a Sunday and see some dude starting who went to an FCS or D-II program you’ve never heard of. That guy, for whatever reason, became a better football player in The League than he ever was in high school or college. Other players peak in high school and don’t do much in college, or peak in college and become draft busts. The best NFL quarterback ever, while at Michigan, had to work hard to hold off a guy who went on to try and fail at being a pro baseball player, and he had a 30-16 TD/INT ratio in two seasons as a starter.
It’s hard to readjust your mind given how both fans and schools themselves love to claim successful NFL players, but a lot of pro careers are little more than a reflection on the player himself. A lot of NFL players would’ve succeeded regardless of where they went to school, and a lot of the rest broke through because they got trained by a pro team’s coaches and staff. The number of NFL players who only got there because they went to one specific school, meaning they would’ve failed to get there had they gone literally anywhere else, is almost certainly somewhere between “quite small” and “zero”.
It’s definitely a disappointment that Florida had this kind of athletic outlier on campus for three years and doesn’t have much to show for it. Doubly so, since Richardson came from Gainesville itself. Had he led the Gators to glory, well, that’s the kind of thing that Hollywood makes sappy sports movies about.
That’s just how it goes sometimes. Anthony Richardson’s career prospects have more to do with Anthony Richardson than they do with UF. If he goes supernova, it’s not going to be because of the brilliant coaching he received that led him to complete almost 54% of his passes last year. If he bombs, it’s not going to be because no quarterback can succeed coming from UF. If anything, a downside result for Richardson might reflect on the dysfunction within the program that he experienced, something that is no secret to anyone who’s been following the team for the last dozen years.
And throughout those dozen years, the program has produced players who’ve been successful, unsuccessful, and something in between in the NFL. All we can say for sure about Richardson is that he’ll be another one of those.