Chris Shepard of Stampede Blue sits down for five questions.
We are going into year three of our ongoing relationship with the rest of the AFC South and their beat writers. Chris Shepard and I have been doing this awhile and there is no one I would rather open the season with than Chris. We sat down for our inaugural five questions on the 2024 season.
Battle Red Blog: Anthony Richardson missed most of last season due to injury. How has he been looking in training camp? What are the expectations for him this year?
Chris Shepard: The question with Anthony Richardson coming into his rookie season was always about whether or not he would look like he belonged leading an NFL football team. He was the youngest starting quarterback in the NFL and he started just 13 games in his college career. Not only was he inexperienced, but his draft status wasn’t due to stellar play during his time at Florida, it was due to his immense physical gifts and how it projected to the future. So there was a very real chance he would come out and look completely overwhelmed, playing the game’s most difficult position at the sport’s highest level. Instead, he looked like a natural leader. He was a round peg in a round hole in an offense tailor made for what he did well. There were absolutely some rough moments, but those were expected. The surprising part was just how many impressive moments there were.
So far this season we’ve seen much of the same. Richardson will once again be the youngest starting quarterback in the NFL in week one and his four starts last year didn’t exactly add a vast amount of playing experience for him to fall back on when opposing defenses start to get more complex and inevitably show unscouted looks late in close games. There are going to be “rookie” mistakes from the second year Richardson. There will be some boneheaded decisions that come from a player with his level of inexperience. But on the other-hand the general feeling out of Colts camp from a few of the reporters in the know is that this year Steichen’s offense doesn’t have any of the training wheels it had at this time a season ago. It seems that sitting and learning for a season may have been beneficial for Richardson. And also, there are exactly zero other 6’4” 250 pound quarterbacks, who run legit 4.4 second 40 yard dashes, who have been caught throwing accurate 40 yard jump passes with Aaron Donald hanging off their shoulder pads. So you know, the highlights have a chance to be way cooler than the lowlights and after the run of QB play we’ve had in Indy, I’ll take it.
BRB: How have the Indianapolis Colts rookies looked so far in training camp? Who are some of the key names Houston Texans fans should be on the lookout for?
CS: At this time of year it’s always tough to say but so far no one has been able to block Laiatu Latu consistently. And I mean nobody. To start camp Latu was working against third and fourth teamers, he beat Jake Witt so badly and so consistently Witt actually retired from football last week at just 24 years old (he didn’t cite this as the reason but I choose to believe it). He quickly got work against the Colts first and second team and while Bernhard Raimann might not be a top five left tackle, he is a legitimate starting tackle, someone the team won’t have to replace for quite some time and Raimann struggled to deal with Latu consistently. Then the joint practices came and it was more of the same. Latu, so far, has been really impressive. He probably won’t get a sack in his first NFL game but I would be surprised if he didn’t wind up with some pressures.
Second round receiver Adonai Mitchell will likely be on the field a lot, especially with fellow second year receiver Josh Downs’ status for the game up in the air, but I’m not sure how much he will produce. He has shown flashes and is (in my mind) unquestionably the most physically gifted receiver Indy has, but he and Richardson might not be on the same page quite yet. When we talk again in week 8, this might be a very different story.
The rest of the class (that made the team) looked very solid overall, but at this point will largely provide depth. You might see Anthony Gould return a kick or run a vertical route (he’s really fast) and you might see college safety turned linebacker Jaylon Carlies flying around making mistakes at 100 miles per hour, but the biggest impact will likely come from Laiatu Latu.
BRB: Did the Colts make key changes in the offseason? Who are some of the other new faces that Texans fans should be familiar with. Who will have a big impact on the game on Sunday?
CS: Not really! I, like most everyone else, wish this were different but the Colts decided that they were just going to run it back with essentially the same roster plus some draft picks and we already talked about those guys!
BRB: How do you see the AFC South shaking out this season? Who do you see as the Colts primary competition?
CS: We’ll start with the team at the bottom: the Titans. They just seem to build on mistake after mistake and it’s beautiful to watch. Next in third place the Jaguars imploded over the second half of last season and that usually doesn’t lend itself well to the following year. I’ve been wrong before and I do believe Trevor Lawrence is a good quarterback so they’ll have a chance to do it, but I won’t believe it until I see it.
Then you have the Colts and the Texans. The Texans are the defending champs. I was hopeful Bobby Slowik would land a head coaching gig somewhere and Stroud would have to start over with someone new and it would give us a chance to gain some ground. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. With that said, the Colts were one game away last season with Gardner Minshew as their starter and if Anthony Richardson is healthy and plays as well as he did in his limited snaps last season, the Colts offense is going to be vastly improved from where they were a season ago. So while the Texans absolutely have the edge right now, the AFC South could end up being a very compelling division over the last third of the season.
BRB: Our new partner FanDuel has the Houston Texans (-2.5) favored to win on Sunday. How do you see the game going? Are there any prop bets you feel comfortable recommending?
CS: I have a hunch that ole Gus Bradley has been in his bag of tricks this off season and is going to throw some things at the Texans that a Gus Bradley defense has never done before. In short I think Indy is going to pull out all the stops to get a win in week one. They might not even have travel plans to Green Bay for week two after the way last season ended. Gus showed just a couple of wild (for Gus) concepts in the pre-season and I have to believe he has a plan to deal with Stroud, who absolutely chewed up Indy’s base cover three defense a season ago. So with this knowledge (and a metric ton of hope) I would take the points and consider betting the Colts moneyline in week one.
We want to thank Chris so much for joining us and for his professionalism throughout this process. He has always been one of the more enjoyable correspondents to deal with for this regular feature. We want to wish Chris and the Colts the best of luck this season. Of course, we hope that luck starts on Monday morning.