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Former Colts QB Joe Flacco weighs in on NFL's development of young quarterbacks

Former Indianapolis Colts quarterback Joe Flacco recently appeared on 92.3 The Fan with Ken Carman and was asked about his thoughts on how the quarterback position has evolved during his career.

Flacco, who recently signed as a free agent with the Cleveland Browns, is about to enter his 18th NFL season after being drafted in 2008, and in recent years, he has been the veteran quarterback on several different rosters, a number of which also had a young quarterback in that same room.

So what’s one of the biggest differences at the quarterback position that Flacco has noticed over his long career? It’s the urgency that teams now have to get that young player on the field right away, even if they aren’t ready.

“I don’t want to necessarily get myself into trouble by like giving you my exact thoughts on what’s going on in the league right now,” Flacco said on Carman’s show, via Pro Football Talk. “But, everybody wants to get everybody out there right away. And listen, I get it. When I was a rookie, I wanted to play right away. That really wasn’t the plan, but I did want to play right away. I think these days, though, just becuase there’s not — you don’t have to commit as much money in the draft to these guys. Obviously, the top picks are still getting a good amount of money. But they’re not getting the type of money that was starting to happen when I was a rookie. When you were a top draft pick, you were assigned a lot of money.

“I think it’s become a little bit easier to draft these guys a little bit higher. So now you’re getting guys who haven’t played a ton of college games, maybe, and you’ve drafted them so high. So now, there’s a lot of pressure to get these guys on the field right away. So now, just by that, just by the sheer numbers of it, you’re going to get a couple guys that were probably drafted a little bit higher than they would’ve been 15-20 years ago, because you would’ve really had to make a big commitment to them 20 years ago that you don’t quite have to make now. And then because you do draft them so high, you have to play them. So now there’s just naturally going to be a couple guys here and there that maybe you drafted in the top five or top 10, that maybe 20 years ago, they would’ve been second-round picks, and they would’ve been willing to keep them on the bench for a little bit. And now because they were the third pick overall, you have to play them, and they’re not quite ready. And then mentally, it hurts their development. So, there’s a lot of things I think that you could probably say, and that’s what I’ll go with.”

Flacco never mentioned Anthony Richardson by name, and as already stated, he’s worked with a number of young quarterbacks over his career. So, generally speaking, this is probably more so an overarching observation.

However, Richardson’s situation with the Colts does match what Flacco was describing, and even GM Chris Ballard has acknowledged that if he could do it over again, Richardson wouldn’t have started right away.

“Looking back on it, I wish we hadn’t played him as a rookie,” Ballard said during the 2024 season via The Athletic. “John Dorsey (a longtime personnel man) called me and said, ‘Don’t play him.’ John had had the great wisdom from Green Bay, where they sat all those quarterbacks. And as they mature and get older, they pick up habits that we were expecting Anthony to have from the get-go.”

Richardson came to the NFL in 2023 as the fourth overall pick and loaded with upside and potential, but about as raw of a prospect as one can be at that stage of the NFL draft, having made just 13 career starts at Florida.

Having to learn on the fly and do so at the NFL level has resulted in inconsistent play, which included Richardson completing just 47% of his passes last season while having the fifth-highest turnover-worthy play rate, according to PFF.

And now, Richardson enters Year 3, having to compete for the Colts’ starting quarterback job with Daniel Jones.

“I do think it’s important for young quarterbacks to be able to learn,” Flacco added. “You don’t want to put a young quarterback in a football game before he’s actually ready because there’s just so many things, and the cycle in this league these days is just so quick. You want these guys to be ready, and I do think there’s huge advantages to be able to sit back and … gain that confidence and really, really learn the game, and get the team surrounded in a good way so that you can go out there and have success.

“And I think that stuff happens naturally through competition in different rooms. The more competition you have and the more people you have competing, the more conversations come up and the more people learn. I think that’s true not just in sports, but in every environment. You want good people in a room together that can push each other and then you’ll get the most out of everybody.”

This article originally appeared on Colts Wire: Joe Flacco weighs in on NFL’s development of young quarterbacks

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