Insider: Colts ready to unveil closely-guarded Anthony Richardson offense

INDIANAPOLIS — The Colts coaching staff has been hard at work for months, preparing and planning an offense that will finally be unveiled Sunday.

The Anthony Richardson version of Shane Steichen’s offense.

Or, more accurately, its prototype.

If the Indianapolis offense has one advantage on Jacksonville’s defense in Sunday’s opener, it’s the element of the unknown. The Colts have kept their plans for the offense a closely-guarded secret, rolling out the bare essentials in the preseason, politely declining any and all questions about the scheme Steichen plans to run.

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The Jaguars probably have a few hunches. Ideas they picked up by watching tape of Steichen’s offense in Philadelphia, tape of the preseason games and film of Richardson’s season as the starting quarterback at Florida.

But there is no way to know exactly what Steichen wants to run. The Colts made sure of it.

“Any time you move from the preseason to the season, things change a little bit schematically,” Indianapolis offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said. “Are we having a good time this week putting together the plan? We sure are.”

Part of Steichen’s plan for developing quarterbacks, a plan honed over the past three seasons with Chargers star Justin Herbert and Eagles hero Jalen Hurts, is building the offense around concepts Richardson’s already comfortable running.

“Without diving too far into it, we want to do stuff that he’s good at,” Steichen said.

That stuff could have come from just about anywhere.

From the plays Steichen ran with Hurts in Philadelphia, from the Chargers playbook, from Richardson’s time at Florida. Before and after the Colts used the No. 4 pick on Richardson in April’s draft, the coaching staff was hard at work on his tape, sifting through concepts and finding elements that either matched Steichen’s offense or might blend well into the scheme the coaches were already installing in Indianapolis.

“Doesn’t mean you’re going to copy-paste their offense over,” Cooter said. “Sometimes you look up, and there’s a play that maybe a quarterback has a lot of comfort with, and they ran it quite a bit in college, and it’s a play that is a good offensive play, but maybe you didn’t use it a ton with your previous offense.”

Then the adaptation begins.

In the past, rookie quarterbacks often had to do the bulk of the adjusting, fitting themselves within the scheme a team was already running.

Teams looking for ways to improve the odds on developing a first-round quarterback have flipped that dichotomy around. Under coaches like Steichen, the offense transforms in order to fit the rookie.

“You’re like, ‘You know what, I think we can get this thing going,’” Cooter said. “’I think this guy can run this route, and that guy can run that route.’ Those things kind of naturally happen when you’re doing that sort of research behind the scenes. I think it’s a good, sort of offseason policy, when you’ve got a young quarterback, to dive into their past and know what they’re comfortable with.”

From the outside, it might seem like it’s easy for Jacksonville’s defense to read those tea leaves, or that it might not matter much, given that the defense can just attack.

But it’s important to remember that NFL game plans are based far more on tendencies than most fans and observers realize.

“Obviously, there’s a lot of intricacies into a game plan each and every week,” Steichen said. “There’s different front structures, different coverages and you’ve got to study your tail off and make sure you’re prepared and ready to go.”

NFL coaches and players watch a mountain of tape each week in search of tendencies and tells; by the middle of the season, a veteran defensive player can accurately whittle down the list of possible plays an offense might run in any given situation to just two or three by weighing the formation, down-and-distance, and tendencies.

The Colts have no tendencies. Not yet.

Neither does Richardson. The rookie quarterback is going to face a lot of unknowns of his own in the season opener — looks Jacksonville has designed to make Richardson’s life miserable — but the Jaguars do not have a database yet of the plays and formations that give the Colts rookie trouble.

“I think sometimes, when you’ve got a quarterback like that, you might try different things and just see how he handles it,” Colts defensive coordinator Gus Bradley said. “How does he respond to a loaded front? How does he respond to pressure? All (that stuff), you don’t really have a lot of tape to watch.”

None of that means Richardson will be a star in his first NFL start.

The element of the unknown typically isn’t enough to outweigh a rookie’s lack of experience, and the offense’s lack of knowledge about how the plays they’ve spent months preparing will fit the offense once the regular season arrives.

But it gives the Colts a starting point the rest of the NFL hasn’t seen.

“I think you kind of find out about your team that first month — the first four weeks, Week 5, Week 6, right?” Steichen said. “In there, you kind of figure out, really, who you are as a football team.”

Who Richardson is as a quarterback.

Then the tinkering begins anew.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Colts ready to unveil closely-guarded Anthony Richardson offense