Anthony Richardson Wanted Out. The Colts Said Nothing.

Anthony Richardson asked the Indianapolis Colts to trade him this offseason, and the organization’s response was to do nothing at all, which turns out to be the loudest possible answer.

Nobody moved him. Nobody handed him a vote of confidence, either. He went back to the voluntary program, put in the work, and by every account earned praise for how he handled a request that went nowhere; the Colts, for their part, kept Daniel Jones as the guy under center once he was cleared from his Achilles injury and let Riley Leonard, who has all of one career start, push from behind. Richardson is now competing with Leonard for the No. 2 job, which is a polite way of saying the clipboard.

The Colts’ own training camp preview describes the arrangement as an even, 50/50 rep split between Richardson and Leonard, with Jones entrenched as the presumptive starter now that his Achilles has cleared him for camp. Coach Shane Steichen framed the competition like this: “Both of those guys are having a good offseason. They’re both doing some really good things and it’s back and forth right now.” That’s a head coach describing a fight for QB2 as though it were genuinely undecided, because in Indianapolis, apparently, it is.

What should bother you more than it probably does is this: the Colts are not testing Richardson’s trade value, and they are not developing him as insurance behind Jones. They are storing him. Picture a storage unit, the kind you rent when you can’t bring yourself to throw something out but also can’t figure out where it goes. You keep paying the monthly fee; you never open the door. Every few months you drive past the building and feel a small flicker of guilt, and then you keep driving.

The unit exists so you never have to make the call. The Colts’ quarterback room exists, at least in Richardson’s case, for the same reason. A former No. 4 overall pick fighting a backup with one career start for even reps isn’t a QB1/QB2/QB3 problem. It’s a franchise unwilling to write off a swing it took three years ago, so it keeps the asset on the books and calls the ambiguity patience.

The Colts’ own camp preview makes clear the preseason games are where Steichen expects the reps to keep splitting before anyone commits to an answer. That’s a coach’s way of saying the decision hasn’t been made yet, because making it would require somebody to admit something.

Richardson’s actual football isn’t helping his case, either. Beat reporters covering camp have flagged accuracy problems creeping back into his throws this summer, the same issue that’s dogged him since Indianapolis drafted him in 2023 on the theory that the arm talent and the mobility would eventually organize themselves into a finished quarterback. Three years later, that arm talent is competing with a backup quarterback for a job that used to be his outright.

Jones, for what it’s worth, isn’t walking into a hostile locker room. He’s the guy Indianapolis has committed to, fully cleared for camp and treated like the presumptive starter he’s expected to be, while Richardson and Leonard fight underneath him for a seat nobody in the front office wants to formally define.

ESPN’s Stephen Holder, who covers the team, put the non-decision in writing back when Richardson first returned to the building:

https://twitter.com/HolderStephen/status/2051337162121965904

He’s right that the Colts are no closer to trading Richardson than they were the day he asked; what’s changed since then is that a backup quarterback with one career start has made the standoff look worse. A team spent a top-five pick on a quarterback, watched him ask to leave, declined to do anything about it in either direction, and is now presenting the fallout as a normal competition instead of what it looks like from the outside, an organization that doesn’t know what it wants and has decided that not deciding counts as a plan.