The Colts' quarterback battle has produced a winner -- and a new starter in Indianapolis.
The Colts named Daniel Jones their starting quarterback for the 2025 regular season, the team announced on Tuesday. Indianapolis opens the season against the Miami Dolphins on Sept. 7.
NFL Network Insider Tom Pelissero first reported the news.
Jones earned the job over incumbent starter Anthony Richardson, the former fourth-overall pick of the Colts in the 2023 draft who didn't demonstrate enough improvement or developmental progress during their preseason battle to hold onto the starting role. Instead, the former Giants first-round selection and 2025 offseason addition Jones will lead the Colts' offense for the first time in his NFL career.
"He's the starting quarterback for the season," Colts head coach Shane Steichen said of Jones on Tuesday, via the Indianapolis Star. "I don't want to have a short leash on that."
On the field, the competition between the two was largely too close to call, but not because both excelled. Throughout Colts training camp, neither Jones nor Richardson was able to separate from the other with his practice performance, and while Jones and Richardson each improved from the first week of the preseason to the second, it seems as if Steichen was ultimately swayed toward selecting Jones because of how the veteran handles the offensive operation.
"You guys heard me talk about the consistency. That's really what I was looking for," Steichen said on Tuesday. "Really the operations at the line of scrimmage, the checks, the protection, the ball placement, the completion percentage, all that played a factor in it. I think Daniel did a great job doing that, and I think A.R. has made strides in that area, but I do feel that he still needs to continue to develop in those areas. I had a chance to talk to both of them this morning. They were both great. A.R. was great. He knows that he still needs to develop and learn in those areas, and he knows that he's one play away."
With six years and 70 games of NFL experience under his belt, Jones had the advantage in that department. Indianapolis also handed Jones a one-year, $14 million contract in March that included $13.15 million in fully guaranteed money, adding to the urgency and importance of testing him out as the starter as quickly as possible.
Richardson, meanwhile, encountered another health-related hurdle during the preseason competition when he was knocked out of the Colts' Aug. 7 game against Baltimore due to a dislocated pinky, an injury suffered when Ravens edge rusher David Ojabo drilled him for an uncontested sack. That premature exit cost Richardson all but six snaps in a game in which Jones saw 30 snaps before retiring for the day, giving Jones an advantage essentially by default.
Richardson will start Week 1 in a place he first encountered last season: healthy, but relegated to the sideline as a backup behind a veteran quarterback.
What does this mean for Richardson's future?
Richardson's career has been fraught with interruptions to this point. A shoulder injury ended his rookie campaign after one month, and an oblique injury forced him out of action in Weeks 5 and 6 last season in a campaign that also saw him briefly benched in favor of veteran Joe Flacco. Richardson has played 15 games in two seasons and offered Colts fans a glimpse of his potential as a rare athletic talent, but has also failed to demonstrate he's capable of handling the responsibility of a starting quarterback, frustrating the Colts enough to prompt them to sign Jones in the offseason with the goal of creating competition that might propel Richardson forward.
Instead, Richardson produced underwhelming results that included another injury and lacked tangible signs of progress during his 2025 battle for the job. He still offers the Colts a higher overall ceiling than Jones, but as he enters the third year of his rookie contract, time is undoubtedly beginning to run out on his opportunity to command the role of franchise quarterback.
This doesn't mean Richardson won't see the field in 2025. Jones' career history suggests he won't play the full 17-game slate for the Colts, and his recent struggles in his final two seasons in New York will lead many to believe he's not much more than the quarterback who posted a 10-13 TD-INT ratio over his final 16 games with the Giants. If that trend holds for Jones in 2025, Steichen will be motivated to insert Richardson again in a move that might seem more desperate than anything.
Still, Richardson's defeat in the preseason quarterback competition deals a blow to his long-term outlook, which was once promising enough to convince many the Colts had finally answered the question that has plagued them since Andrew Luck's retirement. Now, there's plenty of reason to believe they might be in the market for a new solution next year -- especially if Jones doesn't author a renaissance campaign.
What does this mean for Steichen/Chris Ballard regime?
The Colts have not reached the playoffs in four years, and after a disappointing 2024 season, general manager Chris Ballard narrowly avoided being terminated in January. Most of Indianapolis' recent struggles can be accurately attributed to their instability under center, where the likes of Carson Wentz, Matt Ryan, Richardson, Gardner Minshew and Flacco have consistently appeared, struggled and promptly vanished. Richardson's selection, however, was supposed to finally solve their conundrum.
In lieu of stability, uncertainty has reigned. The decision to draft Richardson -- a player with incredible potential but only one full season of starting experience in college at Florida -- with the fourth-overall pick required courage and a bit of blind faith, and to this point, the skeptics have been proven right. Whether it was health issues or struggles with accuracy and professionalism, he's failed to provide the Colts with consistency and after losing this competition, his selection looks more like a big swing and miss than ever.
That responsibility falls on Ballard, a general manager who has constructed a team good enough to consistently hover around .500 and flirt with playoff berths, but ultimately disappoint over the last four seasons. Patience has all but run out on him already, and his fate might now rest on the shoulders of Jones.
Steichen is also feeling the heat. He did a commendable job of keeping the Colts competitive with Minshew under center in 2023 but also fell short of the postseason in heartbreaking fashion by losing a winner-take-all Week 18 game to the Houston Texans to close that season, and instead of improving upon that result in 2024, his team proved to be nothing more than average and uninspiring.
Choosing Jones might seem like a risk but truly could be the opposite. If the offensive-minded coach is going to keep his job beyond 2025, he'll likely only do so with a quarterback he can trust to follow his orders and execute. If this decision doesn't pan out and Steichen reverses course, we'll know he's feeling the heat. After last season ended with a thud, his seat is already warm.
