There's Never Been a QB Quite Like Anthony Richardson

Anthony Richardson can do just about anything on a football field. He can break off an 80-yard touchdown run, sending would-be tacklers bouncing off him like bullets off John Wick. He can throw a 20-yard out route with a defensive lineman clinging to his heels like a toddler chasing his father. And he can fake a jump pass, spin 180 degrees in mid-air and throw a 15-yard dart to a receiver in a play that elides similes. 

But his most mesmerizing move might be the backflip.

Richardson’s backflips are almost ostentatious. At the NFL Combine last month, Richardson broke QB records for the vertical jump and the broad jump and then ran a 4.43 in the 40, the fourth-fastest time for a signal caller since 2000. It was precisely the kind of performance he needed to put himself in the QB1 discussion. And then, after his final drills, he pointed into the NFL Network cameras, shuffled back a few steps and launched into a standing tuck. If his Combine performance was him saying, “No quarterback in the draft can do what I do,” the backflip was that sentence’s exclamation point. Even if he stumbled out of the spin.

“I gotta redo that one,” Richardson says now. “I should have stuck it!”

The backflip neatly embodies the debate about Richardson’s potential as an NFL quarterback. On one side are those who note, soberly, that there’s no known correlation between a player’s potential to become a franchise QB and his ability to do a backflip. This group looks at his prosaic performance at Florida—13 starts, a 54.7 completion percentage and 24 touchdowns against 15 interceptions—and wonder how it’s possible that he’ll improve on those numbers at the next level. On the other side are those who see a 6’5”, 248-pound cannon-on-wheels QB who can do a damn backflip and wonder how it’s possible that he won’t.

To a sufficiently bold NFL general manager, Richardson’s generational athleticism makes him worth any risk. That’s why, at the end of this month, Richardson will definitely get picked in the first round. Probably in the top 10. Possibly even No. 1 overall.

“You can make the argument that whereas [fellow projected first-round quarterbacks] C.J. Stroud, Will Levis and Bryce Young all have limitations, Anthony Richardson doesn’t,” says ESPN NFL draft analyst Matt Miller. “With Bryce, it’s his size. With C.J., it’s his lack of willingness to run or lack of athleticism. With Levis, it’s his age. With Anthony, the floor may be low because of his mechanics and his accuracy issues. But his ceiling? Right away, he’ll be run of the three or four best runners in the league. And arm talent-wise, there’s nothing he can’t do. He could be a top-five NFL quarterback.”

For Richardson, being a bust isn’t an option. Not after his mom worked three jobs at a time to allow him to play football in the first place. Not after he spent his high school years hauling his little brother around town on his bicycle so that he could babysit and go to practice at the same time. Not after he endured injuries and coaching changes and nights where he didn’t have enough to eat.

Instead, Richardson imagines a future in which he has a bust. “I’m gonna be in the Hall of Fame one day,” he says. “I already know it. I’m going to grind until I am a Hall of Famer. I’m going to make sure of it. Just making it to the NFL, that’s not enough. I gotta be one of the best to ever do it. That’s just how I am.”

Anthony Richardson smiles as we pull into the parking lot. It’s a 90-degree day in late March, and he’s been showing me the Gainesville that he grew up in. He’s dressed in the standard athlete off-day uniform: slides and socks, joggers and a hoodie. As he tells stories in his sonorous voice, he boyishly twirls the twists in his hair. 

For most of the ride, he’s been reclining comfortably—or as comfortably as possible considering he’s 6’5” and this is a rented Toyota Corolla. Now he’s lunging forward and pointing to a single-story, multi-family brick apartment on our right. This, he tells me, is where he ate his meals with his mom and shared a bunk bed with his little brother and washed his jerseys in the kitchen sink. It’s where he stayed. Then he traces his finger across the windshield to the other side of this parking lot, to the football field. That’s where he lived.

Whenever he had a free moment, Richardson would gather his friends from the neighborhood to play. They’d hop the black fence and sprint along the track that surrounded the field. They’d practice round-offs in the sand of the long-jump pit and backflips off the picnic tables behind the field. They’d shimmy up palm trees and dare each other to jump down. And, of course, they’d play football. Even if they didn’t have one: Richardson’s mother, LaShawnda Cleare, remembers watching her son and his friends play with a full Gatorade bottle one morning and then, later that afternoon, with the same bottle empty. 

Long before he became the most tantalizing NFL draft prospect in a decade, before he became a quarterback confident enough to wear Tim Tebow’s No. 15 at the University of Florida, before he even made a name for himself at nearby Eastside High School, Anthony Richardson was just a boy on this field who played football all day (he was all-time QB, obviously) and then chased dragonflies at twilight.

“Man, you’re about to make me cry,” he says. “Coming back to this field and thinking about all the stories, all the memories I have here. I always had a dream and an aspiration to make it to the NFL, but I never thought that it would happen so fast, that I would be getting there at just 20 years old. It’s still shocking to me sometimes. It doesn’t even feel real. I don’t think it’ll hit me until I actually get drafted.”

He started backflipping and playing football in the same year, when he was around 7 and living in Miami. He learned to backflip by mimicking his cousin Miles. On his first attempt, Richardson landed on his head. Undeterred, he spent the rest of the day launching himself recklessly into the air until he was able to touch down on his toes. 

He showed a similar abandonment on the football field. In one of his first practices, the coaches pitted their peewee players against each other in the infamous Oklahoma drills. Richardson remembers feeling dizzy after delivering his first blow. God only knows what became of the other poor child.

“Growing up in Miami, playing football and running track, that’s pretty much all we know down there,” he says. “Hitting people, running around people, running through people—that’s in my blood. That’s what I love to do.”

Cleare warned family and friends that if they wanted to get her boy a gift, it’d better be a skateboard or a ball—otherwise, they’d be wasting their money. He slept with at least a handful of basketballs and footballs in bed every night. When Cleare would ask him why, he’d reply: “Mama, ball is life.”

They moved to Gainesville when Richardson was in sixth grade, and by then it was abundantly clear that he was ahead of his peers. When we drive by his elementary school, he tells me about his first day there, when the basketball coach tracked him down in the hallway and begged him to join the team. He’d never played. He didn’t know the rules. But that didn’t stop him from becoming the team’s star. By high school, he could do 360 and between-the-legs dunks, and defend every opposing player on the floor. “Honestly,” he says, “I think if I would have trained for basketball the way I trained for football, I’d be in the NBA right now.”

In his freshman season at Eastside High, he’d play wide receiver in the first half and quarterback in the second half. As a receiver, he hauled in a one-handed leaping catch that had hints of Odell Beckham Jr. But he was only really ever interested in playing QB, and when the starter broke a finger midway through the season, Richardson took over the role full time and never relinquished it.

His high school coach, Cedderick Daniels, can remember countless incredible Richardson moments—sprinting an unimaginable 22 miles per hour on the field, dislocating a receiver’s finger with a bullet pass, rolling left and throwing back across his body for one particularly insane 45-yard touchdown pass—but one memory stands out most to him: The way Richardson would do running backflips to close out every pregame warmup. “He’s the freakiest athlete I’ve ever seen,” Daniels says. “No one has more fun than him on a football field.”

When Richardson and I arrive at his high school stadium, the first memory that comes to his mind is a rain-delayed game during his sophomore year. Eastside was losing when the game was paused. In the locker room, the players were listless. So Richardson convinced everyone to go outside and slide on their bellies across the slick, muddy surface of the field. The game was called before it was completed, so it counted as a loss. But for Richardson, the memory is still tinged in sepia. “Coach was mad because we were playing around while we were losing,” he says. “I don’t even think we touched a football the next practice. It didn’t matter. That night, we got the chance just to be young kids again.”

It was a feeling he only ever really got when he was playing football.

As Richardson was climbing the recruiting rankings, Cleare was working two to three jobs at a time to keep pace with her growing boys. She drove buses for the city, took orders at Taco Bell, baked cakes and did hair. When Richardson shows me a rusty rec center where he used to play basketball, he remembers a moment when his mother gave him the last $20 from her purse so that he’d be able to eat at a weekend-long basketball tournament out of town. Later, when I ask Cleare if she remembers giving Richardson her last dollar, she laughs and says: “Which time?” 

Her work schedule left Richardson largely responsible for caring for his little brother, Corey Carter. He’d get Carter dressed for school in the morning and sometimes make him a meal in the evening. The apartment didn’t have a washer and dryer, so he’d hand-wash their clothes in the sink. Before he was old enough to drive, Richardson would ride Carter around town on the handlebars of his mountain bike, often pounding the pedals in the punishing Florida sun while wearing his football pads and helmet.

But when he stepped onto a football field, he felt carefree.

“Sports were a way for me to escape from the stresses of my life,” Anthony says. “What am I gonna eat at night? Are my clothes gonna be washed? Is my little brother gonna have food? Is my mom gonna be stressed out from work? I didn’t have to worry about any of that stuff when I was on the field. Those two hours a day at practice made it possible for me to do what I’m doing now.”

Florida fans started to see what he could do during his redshirt season in 2021. In a role perhaps predictive of one he’ll play in the NFL, Richardson would play 5-10 snaps a game as a changeup to the team’s starting quarterback, Emory Jones. In a memorable performance against USF, he posted a Madden-on-rookie-mode stat line: four carries for 115 yards and a touchdown, 3-for-3 passing for 152 yards and two more scores. He struggled in his first start against Georgia’s NFL-caliber defense and got injured at the end of the year, but there was still an expectation in Gainesville: that, if things went according to plan under new coach Billy Napier, Richardson could emerge as an elite college quarterback.

And for the first 60 minutes of the season, he looked undeniably elite. On our way back from Richardson’s old neighborhood, we drive west down University Avenue and see the long shadow of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium—the Swamp. In Week 1, Richardson scored three times in unranked Florida’s shocking upset over the No. 7 Utah Utes. In the days that followed, he was being compared to Cam Newton and projected as a first-round draft pick. 

All of a sudden, his outlet from stress became a stressor itself. In a Week 2 loss against Kentucky, he completed just 40 percent of his passes and tossed two picks in front of two dozen NFL scouts. He had another rough outing the next week against USF. “I’m my biggest critic, so if I’m not close to perfect, I beat myself up,” he says. “I started getting in my head a little bit. Once I'm doing that, that’s when I mess up. I’m at my best when I’m just being free, when I’m just being me, when I’m letting everything flow naturally.”

In the run-up to their next game, a matchup at No. 6 Tennessee, Florida’s coaches compiled 50 of Richardson’s best plays from practice and games. The footage included a jump pass that Richardson had done in training camp. It was somehow even more stunning than his spin against Utah, because in this case he’d done a full 360 and launched the ball even further down the field just a breath after landing. In the caption beneath the clip, where the coaches normally write constructive comments, they just wrote: “Superman.”

On the day of the game, Richardson found offensive analyst Ryan O’Hara on the sidelines and handed him a big bag of Skittles. “Hold these for me,” he said. After he led the Gators on an 8-play, 75-yard drive that ended with a 44-yard TD pass, he hunted down O’Hara and scooped a handful of the candy into his mouth. Florida would lose the game, but Richardson had regained the sense of freedom that had always fueled him on the field. 

During the rest of the season, he seemed to be his old self, walking into film sessions carrying a family-sized bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos and sharing his snacks with backup quarterbacks who made great plays. Florida’s coaches told him he could become one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of a school with three Heisman Trophy winners if he decided to return, but they heard the way NFL Draft analysts were talking about him. “I can’t emphasize enough,” Napier says. “Anthony was a first-year starter in a first-year system with a new staff, and he made the most of his opportunities. There’s no question that the best football in his career is yet to come.” 

Napier believes that what Richardson needs most at the next level is something that he lacked in college: continuity with a coaching staff and a system. That’s true for all draft prospects, but it seems especially so for Richardson, who needs to be comfortable and confident in a playbook before he’s able to start improvising over it. Because Richardson is at his best when he’s able to just be himself.

“I always hear stories about people getting to the NFL and losing their love of the game,” Richardson says. “I don’t want to be that person. I love football. It helped shape me into who I am today. This sport does something to me. It connects me to people. It helps me bring them joy. For me, playing is everything. Anytime I get to touch a football, it puts a smile on my face.” 

We end our time together at Florida’s indoor practice facility. As Richardson walks into the gym, he daps up everybody from teammates to coaches to trainers to the camerawoman recording that day’s training session. He changes into his workout shorts in the end zone as he talks with one of his receivers about a route. He warms up by stretching bands and bouncing weighted balls against a wall. Then he starts sending footballs humming to the sidelines and across the middle and down the field. For a moment, I’m so distracted by the onslaught of effortless passes that I don’t notice the fact that he’s not wearing any cleats.

He used to tell his mom all the time that one day he’d be rich and famous. He’s already rich from the million-dollar NIL deal he signed at Florida, and his bank account is about to get even bigger. He’s already famous among hard-core football fans, and he’s about to be introduced to an even bigger audience when he walks from the green room to shake Roger Goodell’s hand at the Draft.

But right now, he’s not thinking about any of that. He’s just a kid with a ball in his hand and his feet on the ground.