3 pros and cons of Seattle Seahawks drafting Anthony Richardson
By Lee Vowell
Con No 1: Seahawks should be concerned about Richardson’s accuracy
There is little doubt that if you were playing parking lot football and Richardson showed up and asked to play that he should be the first pick of either team. Richardson is going to be faster, jump higher, and have more quickness than anyone else you are playing with most likely. But in the NFL most players are physically gifted enough and coaches scheme well enough to limit a quarterback with raw skills but no polish.
It’s worse if a quarterback can’t throw straight. Richardson has issues more on intermediate passes and that’s a bad problem. It could be he was taught poor technique at Florida and his college team just allowed Richardson’s natural abilities to try to help them win games instead of the school actually developing the player. But whatever reason Florida had for under-coaching Richardson, they certainly didn’t do him any favors in getting him ready for the NFL. But that’s not the job of the Florida coach, to get a player ready for the NFL. But other coaches (Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia) seem capable of it.
Richardson can already be used in wild cat designs if an NFL team wishes, but if he were to come in right away then a team would be better off being extremely conservative and not letting Richardson throw too much. Of course, Richardson has a big enough arm to throw deep with ease so maybe if he fakes a run enough he could hit DK Metcalf or Tyler Lockett deep once or twice in a game. But that is in a perfect world, of course.
The worries about Richardson’s accuracy (he only completed 53.8 percent of his passes in 2022 which was his only season in college as a full-time starter) won’t go away that soon. A player can be taught better technique but there is no way to know if Richardson has the talent to be an accurate passer. So taking Richardson at pick number 5 overall is taking a huge chance on a player that may or may not work out when the Seahawks might need to take a player at a different position who is a safer bet to help sooner and long-term.