Anthony Richardson just scratching the surface of what he's capable of

The scene of a 6-foot-4, 240-pound human being running away from defenses in back-to-back weeks was jarring. What Anthony Richardson did to introduce himself to Florida Gators fans and the country was nothing short of exhilarating.

Richardson looks like the kind of created player a 12-year-old would make. People that big shouldn’t be able to move the way he does. His physical talents are immense. Richardson wasn’t this superhuman when he first met Denny Thompson, but it didn’t take long for Thompson to realize what was in front of him. He asked Richardson just to play catch, wanting to see how the young man threw and how the ball came off his hand.

“I’m just going to observe you for a little while. It was one of those rare moments where you watch somebody and you’re like, Okay, this guy’s got a legit and real chance,” Thompson said on the Gators Online Podcast. “I tell people this all the time, you look at Anthony and you watch him move and you get to know the kid and how smart he is. And you realize that he was made to be a quarterback. And it’s like if you were going to mix everything up and say, how, how do I build a quarterback? It would come out something like Anthony.”

Richardson wants to be more than just a runner

His physical abilities aside, Richardson wants to be a quarterback, not a runner.

“If they changed the rules of football and said the quarterback cannot run the football, Anthony would still be a first-round talent, Thompson said. “That was our goal here.”

So Thompson and Richardson went to the lab. He has the arm strength, but was he really ripping it like the best do? Thompson didn’t think so, so he came to Richardson with a plan.

“When we started to hear what NFL scouts thought about him, it made us take a real step back and go, okay, Anthony, do you throw the football like a top five guy? He’s always been fluid and smooth, but that answer was was at the time, probably not,” Thompson said.

“I’ve seen top five picks and they ripped every single ball, right? They’re top five for a reason. So we really dug into mechanics and dug into specifically his body and how he should throw a football because it’s different for everybody. Everybody’s built differently. And we found the places where he gets power from and how do we get control and how are we consistently able to have the same patterning over and over and over again?”

The pair worked together as much as they could from the end of the season, while Richardson was returning from knee surgery. Once he was cleared to get back on his feet and go through his drops the real work continued.

Showing the progress

Richardson looked markedly better in the spring game. He completed 18-of-24 passes for 204 yards and two touchdowns. His passes had more zip, and intent than he’d shown previously. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

“Where we were in the spring with him — and I’m not trying to hype him up, I really just being completely honest on this — what what the Anthony Richardson you saw in the spring, we were about 30% through that process,” said Thompson.

Richardson had the opportunity to go to the Manning Passing Academy, where he wowed everyone with his arm strength.

“Now you’re throwing the ball with violence and you know exactly where the ball’s going and you’re still smooth,” Thompson said of Richardson. “That was the thing. I didn’t want to lose this fluidity. And so we worked, you know, a couple of new patterning things and we got a couple of other experts involved.”

The program is close to being finished. Thompson estimates that Richardson is 80 percent of the way to where they both want him to be before September 3.

Thanks to the work that Thompson and Richardson have put in, Florida fans should see an evolved Richardson on the field this fall.