Despite not actually playing in the game, Anthony Richardson was one of the main characters on Sunday Night Football.
After all, it’s not often that a former first-round quarterback gets benched, in part, because he asked to come out of a game due to his conditioning (or lack thereof).
Only that’s exactly what happened this past week, with the Indianapolis Colts benching the Florida product in favor of Joe Flacco ahead of their primetime matchup against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday night. And that led to an inevitable conversation regarding Richardson during NBC’s broadcast of the contest, in which the quarterback clearly wasn’t aware he was being shown on camera to a national audience.
“There’s been a lot of noise about Richardson. A lot of it stems from not just the inaccuracy, but also this play… when he asked out of the game, something you don’t see from quarterbacks that has been talked about all across the country this week,” NBC’s Mike Tirico said during the second quarter.
“You can ‘tap out,’ if you will, at any position but quarterback,” Cris Collinsworth added. “Because you’re the general. You’re the one everybody’s watching. And it looks like the general waived the white flag at least for one play. And that makes your offensive line look bad and gets the defense fired up. He learned it.”
That may be the case, but the brief segment didn’t do much for Richardson from a perception standpoint. That’s because he happened to yawn at the worst time possible — just as Tirico and Collinsworth were discussing him having asked out of a game.
There’s nothing that says a backup quarterback can’t yawn on the sideline and as Dan “Barstool Big Cat” Katz pointed out, we did turn the clocks back over the weekend. Still, it’s hard to consider the sideline shot of Richardson yawning as anything except ill-timed considering the circumstances that led to this very segment.
It was just a few days ago that Cam Newton warned Richardson about giving his critics “ammunition” to use against him. And while he surely didn’t know the camera was on him at the time, his poorly timed yawned managed to do exactly that.
[Sunday Night Football]
About Ben Axelrod
Ben Axelrod is a veteran of the sports media landscape, having most recently worked for NBC's Cleveland affiliate, WKYC. Prior to his time in Cleveland, he covered Ohio State football and the Big Ten for outlets including Cox Media Group, Bleacher Report, Scout and Rivals.