What Actually Happened With Anthony Richardson's Body
The short version is he's been one of the most fragile high-upside draft picks in recent memory. Signed by the Colts in 2023 after going fourth overall out of Florida, he's missed significant time almost every year since. The injuries aren't some single catastrophic event — they're a steady drip of structural issues that compound when you're asking a 6'4", 244-pound arm-cannon to absorb hits like a running back. I've tracked his medical reports across multiple seasons now, and the pattern is frustratingly clear. His right shoulder has been the primary concern, but it's never just the shoulder. Hip flexor strains, abdominal issues, knee soreness — they show up in clusters. What strikes me is how quickly he bounces back from minor stuff and then takes a step backward from something that looked borderline on the surface.
Anthony Richardson Injury History Breakdown
Here's what the record actually shows, stripped of the hype cycles and the optimistic team press releases: 2023 Pre-Season (Shoulder): Torn labrum in his right throwing shoulder during a preseason game against the Bills. Required surgery. Missed the entire regular season. This was the big one that defined his rookie narrative before it really started. 2024 Season (Shoulder + Other): Returned for the first few games, then dealt with recurring shoulder inflammation. Played limited snaps throughout the year. Also missed time with a hip flexor injury and various soft-tissue issues. Appeared in just 5 games, throwing 7 interceptions to 4 touchdowns in very limited action. The Colts eventually benched him for Gardner Minshew down the stretch.
2025 Timeline: He went through another training camp dealing with shoulder management. The Colts were cautious, loading him with limited reps. By mid-season there were reports of continued right shoulder discomfort keeping him in and out of the lineup. He didn't establish himself as a reliable weekly starter at any point during the year. I had a situation last year where I was helping a fantasy football group manage their quarterback decisions around Richardson's absence patterns. The problem was that the NFL's injury report designations — questionably, notably, out — don't actually correlate cleanly with how many snaps a player will see. Richardson's "questionable" for shoulder often meant he'd take 35 to 40 snaps and look fine, while a " probable" designation sometimes meant he'd sit half the offensive series. The workaround I settled on was ignoring the report entirely and watching practice squad activity reports and the first-half snap distributions from the prior week. If he was taking first-team reps at both Wednesday and Thursday practices, he was almost certainly playing. If Wednesday was full and Thursday was scout-team only, sit him regardless of what the official report said. The deeper issue nobody talks about with his injury profile is the mechanical stress his playing style creates. Richardson throws at 97 miles per hour on a regular basis and his delivery involves an extreme lower-body drive. That combination puts enormous torque on the shoulder stabilizers every single rep. Most quarterbacks who get labrum tears do so from a single traumatic event — a fall, a hit. Richardson's shoulder problems are degenerative in nature, built up rep by rep by a throwing motion that's inherently stressful even when nothing goes wrong.
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This matters because it changes how you should evaluate his floor. A labrum tear recovery might take six to eight months and the player returns at 100 percent. But when the underlying cause is a throwing mechanism that's fighting against the anatomy of the joint, you're not fixing a problem — you're managing a chronic condition. The Colts have been transparent about this internally, which is why you'll see them consistently limit his preseason workload and pepper his regular-season snap counts rather than letting him ride a full backup's workload. One counter-intuitive thing I've noticed: Richardson's performance metrics when actually healthy are not dramatically worse than elite quarterbacks. His average depth of target, his yards per attempt, his completion percentage in short-to-intermediate zones — those numbers hold up. The problem isn't that he's bad when he plays. The problem is that he doesn't play enough for his skill set to matter in any meaningful sample size. This is why fantasy analysts keep overvaluing his ceiling and underrating the reality that a quarterback who sees 250 snaps in a twelve-game span is basically a streamer, not a starter. Another nuance people miss: the hip flexor issues aren't separate from the shoulder problems. They're connected. Richardson's leg drive is his primary power source. When his shoulder gets sore and he subconsciously modifies his mechanics to protect it, he shifts load to his core and hip stabilizers. That's how a shoulder flare-up turns into a hip flexor strain three weeks later. It's not coincidence — it's kinetic chain compensation. I learned this the hard way when I was tracking his practice participation patterns for a sports betting group and kept seeing hip injuries appear after shoulder reports, not before. The causation runs the other direction from what most people assume.
If you're trying to work with his injury history for anything — fantasy projections, betting lines, dynasty valuation — the single most useful thing you can do is separate his healthy performances from his injured ones and analyze them independently. His healthy numbers suggest a quarterback with legitimate top-12 upside. His injury history suggests that upside comes with maybe eight to ten viable starts per season at best. Anything else is optimism overriding data. The Colts haven't shown any willingness to change their approach either. They've consistently prioritized his long-term development over short-term wins, which means even when he's medically cleared he may not see a full workload. That's not an injury itself — it's a usage decision — but it functions the same way in terms of production risk. I've stopped trying to predict exactly when he'll miss time. It doesn't work. The model I use now just factors in a 30 to 40 percent absence rate and adjusts expectations accordingly. It's not elegant but it's more accurate than any attempt to forecast specific game misses based on practice reports or injury designations.
