The identity of the Indianapolis Colts’ week one starting quarterback is not yet set in stone, but things seem to trending in the right direction for rookie first-rounder Anthony Richardson to end up being that guy. New head coach Shane Steichen has spoken about being “pleased with where [Richardson]’s at” in terms of “grasping the offense”, and Richardson and veteran Gardner Minshew split first-team reps at last week’s two-day minicamp after Richardson took a backseat to Minshew at OTAs earlier in the month -- again, nothing is set in stone, but those things feel like progress.

Perhaps owing to the sort of analysis laid out by JJ Zachariason in two recent episodes of the Late Round Podcast (here and here), the Richardson-as-starter outcome would not be welcomed by many Jonathan Taylor proponents in the fantasy football space. The big takeaway from those episodes is that mobile and rookie quarterbacks each typically have a repressing effect on the production of the other skill position players in their offenses, and given that Richardson is a mobile quarterback (he’s the most athletic player in the position’s history and ran for nearly 1200 yards in just 22 college games) who will be a rookie in 2023, it stands to reason that Taylor and the other skill guys on the Colts offense are in for a double-whammy of circumstantial hamstringing if Richardson is indeed under center for most of the upcoming season. Perhaps I’m fighting windmills here given Taylor’s current ADP of 16.8 as the RB4 on Underdog, but I want to look at things from another angle and push back a bit on the idea that Richardson necessarily means bad things for Taylor’s immediate (and longer term) outlook in fantasy.

For the purposes of this little study, I’ll be assuming that Richardson is the Colts’ starting quarterback for at least half the season and will run for at least 30 yards per game in his starts -- for reference, that’s approximately the rate at which Russell Wilson chewed up yardage on the ground during his rookie season in Seattle (30.6) and would result in a 17-game total just over the 500-yard mark, a threshold that just 46 quarterbacks have eclipsed since the turn of the century (2.1 per year). Based on those assumptions, we’ll be looking at historical passers who fit the following criteria:

14 players pass all three of those filters and will serve as our sample group: Justin Fields and Jalen Hurts in 2021, Kyler Murray and Lamar Jackson in 2019, Josh Allen and Deshaun Watson in 2018, Robert Griffin and Wilson in 2012, Cam Newton and Tim Tebow in 2011, Vince Young in 2006, Michael Vick in 2002, and Donovan McNabb and Cade McNown in 2000. Obviously, this group of young, mobile quarterbacks runs the gamut from great passers (Wilson was third in QBR in 2012) to terrible passers (Tebow ranked 28th in QBR in 2011) and, as a result, feels like a fair representation of the wide range of outcomes we should anticipate for a unique prospect like Richardson in year one.

Who among us can forget Cade McNown running for 326 yards while going 1-8 as the Bears’ starting quarterback in 2000?

The reason I wanted to look at specific historical examples instead of general buckets of offenses led by “young” or “mobile” quarterbacks presented in opposition to general buckets of offenses not led by those players is that I don’t need to know that Taylor might be better served by having Patrick Mahomes or Derek Carr or Aaron Rodgers or Jared Goff as his quarterback in 2023 rather than Richardson, because that’s not a real-life situation we can do anything with. After back-to-back seasons of RB1-level production to open his career, Taylor experienced a down year in 2022, and I’m interested in whether the addition of Richardson to this offense is likely to help him bounce back and return to the high-end numbers he was posting early on. To that end, I think it’s useful to look at other young and mobile quarterbacks and the impact that they had on their specific offenses and surrounding skill talent in the years in question relative to how those offenses and supporting casts had performed in the years immediately preceding being led by those young and mobile quarterbacks. We don’t need Taylor to be as good with Richardson in 2023 as he would be with Justin Herbert in 2023, we just need him to be better with Richardson in 2023 than he was with a washed Matt Ryan in 2022.

In the years immediately preceding the first full-time starting seasons from our sample quarterbacks, the teams they led finished with average ranks of 21st in total yards gained and 23rd in total points scored. In the first seasons with their young and mobile quarterbacks, those same teams finished with average ranks of 17th in total yards gained and 14th in total points scored. In both yards and points, ten of the fourteen teams in question saw improvement in their league-wide rank in the first season with their young and mobile quarterback, and nine of them improved in both categories. Almost half of them -- Newton’s Panthers, McNabb’s Eagles, Wilson’s Seahawks, Griffin’s [redacted], Murray’s Cardinals, and Hurts’ Eagles -- jumped ten or more spots in league-wide rankings in both yards and points, and just three of them -- Allen’s Bills, Tebow’s Broncos, and McNown’s Bears -- ranked worse in both categories during their young and mobile quarterback’s initial starting campaign than they did in the year prior. I won’t dispute that young and mobile quarterbacks are worse for offensive productivity than veteran pocket passers are in general, but young and mobile quarterbacks have historically been overwhelmingly positive influences on their teams’ net productivity.

Cam Newton took the Panthers’ offense from last place in both yards and points in 2010 to top-ten finishes in both categories during his rookie season.

Led mostly by a 37-year old and clearly-cooked Ryan, the Colts finished last season ranked 27th in yards gained and 30th in points scored on offense. If Richardson’s arrival sees Indianapolis improve to the average degree that a young and mobile quarterback-led offense has improved in recent history, they would finish 2023 ranked 23rd in yards and 21 in points. Those are still mediocre numbers, but mediocrity would constitute a large jump up from where this offense was a year ago.

Still, overall offensive improvement does not necessarily translate to improvement in the specific areas that would benefit Taylor, so let’s get down to brass tacks. In the years immediately preceding the first full-time starting seasons from our sample quarterbacks, the running backs on the teams they led produced an average of 3.98 yards per carry. In the first seasons with their young and mobile quarterbacks, the running backs on those teams produced an average of 4.39 yards per carry, a massive jump of 0.41 yards per carry that represents the difference between the 42nd and 62nd percentiles (since 2016) and the approximate difference between what Kyren Williams and Derrick Henry produced last season (3.97 and 4.41 yards per carry, respectively). A total of ten of those fourteen teams improved in collective backfield yards per carry from the year before their young and mobile quarterback started a significant amount of games. Simply put, running quarterbacks are very good for running back efficiency.

That much is typically regarded as a given, and you’ll often hear that running quarterbacks repress running back production in other key areas -- pass-catching and touchdown scoring -- to levels that offset the advantages they offer on a per-carry basis in the running game. That may be true, but again, those studies have been done by comparing the production of running backs playing with mobile quarterbacks relative to the production of running backs playing with pocket passers, a distinction that I’d argue doesn’t really matter once we know what kind of quarterback a running back will be playing with. Richardson is not a pocket passer, and lamenting that fact vis-à-vis what Taylor’s production could hypothetically be if Richardson was a pocket passer is meaningless. What matters to me is that in the years immediately preceding the first full-time starting seasons from our sample quarterbacks, the backfields on the teams they led scored an average of 19.6 PPR points per game, and in the first seasons with their young and mobile quarterbacks, those backfields scored an average of 19.8 PPR points per game. Perhaps those backfields could have scored 25 points per game with a pocket-passing Tom Brady at quarterback, but it’s simply true that they improved with their young and mobile quarterbacks from their previous level of fantasy productivity, even if incrementally. In total, eight of these fourteen teams saw increases in backfield points per game, with some of them -- Hurts’ Eagles, Murray’s Cardinals, and Vick’s Falcons -- improving by over 4.0 points per game. In total, the impact that young and mobile quarterbacks have historically made on their team’s running backs’ fantasy output has generally not been negative, but rather at worst a wash and at best an improvement, regardless of the minutiae of where the fantasy points in question are coming from (efficiency, pass-catching, or touchdown scoring).

For Taylor, these various effects of Richardson-at-quarterback should result in a bit of a bounceback, particularly from an efficiency standpoint but also potentially from an overall scoring standpoint given the rising tide of greater offensive productivity that lifts all skill position boats from the abysmal circumstances they operated in a year ago. The standard 0.41-yard boost in per-carry average for running backs playing with mobile quarterbacks in their first starting seasons would see Taylor jump up to 4.88 yards per carry in 2023, and add that to the respective impacts that a return to form for the league’s highest-paid offensive line (something that Pro Football Focus already anticipates) and a revamp in overall offensive architecture overseen by Steichen -- who coordinated the Hurts-led Eagles offenses that finished fifth and first, respectively, in rushing in 2022 and 2021 -- and regained health for Taylor himself (he missed six games with and was affected in a few more by various ankle issues last season) could each make on this running game, and it shouldn’t surprise us when Taylor averages over five yards per carry this season, just as he did in 2020 and 2021. Even while dealing with adverse circumstances up front, at quarterback, and within his own body that kept him from performing up to his lofty standards, Taylor’s efficiency as a runner was nothing to sneeze at a year ago:

I do think it’s true that Taylor will have to do his best to produce high-end numbers in 2023 without the aid of a lot of receiving work. Running quarterbacks don’t target running backs as often as pocket passers do, and Richardson specifically targeted running backs on a per-route basis far less often than CFB-wide averages during his career at Florida (Gator runners caught just 24 passes combined last season, and leading backs Trevor Etienne and Montrell Johnson had RATEs in the 22nd and 25th percentiles, respectively). Still, this offense is likely to be markedly better than the bottom-three unit they were in 2022, an outcome that would come with more yards and touchdowns up for grabs, regardless of the pass/run tendencies of the guy under center. Considering that Taylor’s best fantasy seasons have come on quality offenses (the Colts finished 16th in yards and 9th in points when Taylor was the RB2 in 2021, and they finished 10th in yards and 9th in points when he was the RB8 as a rookie) led by dominant running games that masked mediocre quarterback play (the 2021 team was first in yards per carry and second in total rushing yards with Carson Wentz under center, and the 2020 squad was 8th and 11th, respectively, in those categories while Philip Rivers finished just 19th in QBR), I wouldn’t rule out a return to elite fantasy form for the guy who averages more rushing yards per game over his career than all but four players in NFL history. Count me among those who are not worried about Anthony Richardson stealing Taylor’s lunch by running the ball too much.