How Anthony Richardson and Alec Pierce are working on their deep-ball connection

[JAFF]

How Anthony Richardson and Alec Pierce are working on their deep-ball connection

WESTFIELD — Alec Pierce flipped his head back to see when No. 5 was going to release the ball. And then Anthony Richardson did, with that smooth flick of the wrist that gets his teammates so excited, and the ball soared 40 yards through the air, up over the cornerback draped on Pierce and down into Pierce's hands -- and then to the turf.

The Colts were that close to creating Richardson's first pro highlight. Of course, close doesn't count in football, and this game against the Bills didn't count either. It's only preseason, which means it's time for practice and experimentation, for improvisation and hope.

Watching Pierce blaze down the field after Richardson's deep ball is giving the Colts plenty of that.


“Our guys are blessed with some abilities to really take some shots downfield from time to time and we’re going to use those when the time is right," offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter said. "... Excited to take some shots, excited for the aggression there. (You) can’t find a lot of receivers who don’t love the ball getting launched downfield with him having a chance to go make that play."

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When it comes to football theory, this is a match made in a lab. Pierce has 4.41-second 40-yard dash speed. At 6-foot-3, with a 40.5-inch vertical jump, he tested athletically in the top 17% of all wide receivers in the history of the NFL combine.


Richardson tested better than any quarterback the event has ever seen. Of course, playing quarterback is so much more advanced than athletic measurements can account for, as Peyton Manning and Tom Brady have shown. But Richardson's ability to shed a tackle, extend a play and launch the ball 40 yards without effort made him a unique fit for Shane Steichen's offense and for a team that drafted Pierce in the second round out of Cincinnati last spring.

Steichen is implementing an Eagles scheme that allowed Jalen Hurts to claim the runner-up spot to Patrick Mahomes for the MVP and fall just short of him in the Super Bowl. With a 700-yard rusher behind center and the looming threat of the quarterback draw, defenses often countered with an extra safety in the box. That would move the free safety to the middle of the field.


It's a tall task to ask a free safety playing centerfield to adjust to a ball thrown near the sidelines. It becomes gargantuan task when he has to read it and win at an angle because the throw is more than 40 yards down the field.

That's the world the Colts dream of with Richardson and Pierce. But football isn't played in a lab. All the athleticism in the world doesn't amount to much if the throw and catch can't happen in synchronicity.


That's why a 21-year-old quarterback and his 23-year-old receiver are working at this so much, running rep after rep after a day of camp has ended. They know the games will only offer a rep or two at it, and that's when they have to be at their sharpest. It doesn't come up in the red-zone drills, which make up a large portion of Richardson's 11-on-11 reps right now.

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It's partly why they met up at the University of Miami last month, along with other Colts quarterbacks and receivers.

"You can’t get enough of that work," Cooter said.

Pierce had been working on his routes for a month in isolation, either at a neighborhood field in his hometown of Glen Ellyn, Ill.; or at a training facility in Tampa Bay.

In Glen Ellyn, he ran routes every day as his father, Greg Pierce, lobbed passes to him. Greg Pierce played tight end at Northwestern, and he could hang in on a majority of the routes, just less so on the ones Pierce loves the most: the fade and the deep post.

That route work has allowed Pierce to tighten up his release game and to create space at the top of his routes. But it was always going to take time with Richardson, and nobody else, to nail the catch.

That's the most essential step but also the hardest, because of the depth of target and the distance to get to it, the cornerback, the crowd and the pressure.

Through repetition, Pierce is learning in his second season what it means to adjust to a new quarterback. He felt it after one fade route in practice in which he jumped too early, losing the battle with gravity as the ball soared over his head.

"He's got such a strong arm. I saw it off his hand and I wasn't thinking it was going as far as it was because it came out kind of low. I'm thinking it was back-shoulder more, so I slowed down just that hair and it made it go over my finger tips.


"I'm learning to trust that I'm always going to be running."

Pierce is speaking and practicing with more confidence than he had at this time a year ago, back when Stephon Gilmore was predicting all of his moves. He turned in a sound rookie season with 41 catches for 593 yards. But the Colt didn't have a quarterback with the arm strength or escapability to get the ball to him far enough down the field to grow his top skill. He played with three of them last year, rotating through Matt Ryan to Sam Ehlinger to Nick Foles and back.

Pierce did catch a fade route to beat the Jaguars in Week 6, but he found the end zone just one other time. His longest catch was 47 yards. His 12.2 average depth of target ranked 35th among all receivers with at least 20 receptions, according to Sports Info Solutions.

Saturday's missed opportunity in Buffalo shows he still has strides to make.


Richardson has some of his own as a rookie who started just 13 games at Florida, where he completed 54.7% of his passes. He did average 10.7 yards in his average depth of target, which ranked 10th in the nation, according to Sports Info Solutions. He was more accurate beyond 15 yards than underneath it, though that can drop off when he's on the move, as his on-target rate on scramble drills was -23%.

But the two can feel each other inching closer by the practice.

Last Thursday, Richardson scrambled near the left sideline and zipped a pass just as Pierce was flipping around on a back-shoulder fade. The ball came in like a bullet, but Pierce was expecting that now, and he snared the ball out of the air and shot up the sideline for an explosive gain.

"We’ve been trying to work that for the past two or three weeks now, just trying to get used to his speed and the way he likes the ball coming down," Richardson said. "We finally got one to work today and it feels good.


The next step in their evolution is doing it when it counts.