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USA Today
12-07-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Long-time NFL analyst confident in who will win Colts' quarterback competition
One long-time NFL analyst seems quite confident in who will end up winning the Colts' QB competition between Anthony Richardson and Daniel Jones. 'Daniel Jones will be the starter for them.''Jones is athletic as far as running out of the pocket. But one thing Jones has never done well, and I think it's really hurt him, is he's not very good at movement within the pocket.'@GregCosell on the Colts Quarterback: Long-time NFL analyst and film guru Greg Cosell seems to be very confident in who the Indianapolis Colts' starting quarterback will be this season. On a recent appearance on the Ross Tucker Football Podcast, Cosell was pretty direct when discussing the Colts' quarterback situation. 'Daniel Jones will be the starter for them," said Cosell. The Colts brought in Jones to compete with Anthony Richardson for the starting job in what is supposed to be an open competition, with both players splitting first-team reps. Unfortunately, Richardson would miss most of OTAs and all of minicamp with a shoulder injury. This left Jones to take all of the valuable first-team reps. As head coach Shane Steichen said, he was "very pleased" with what he saw from Jones. "This is a really good opportunity for him," said Cosell of Jones. "Because Jones needs a really good O-line. He did not have one with the Giants. Jones is athletic as far as running out of the pocket. But one thing Jones has never done well, and I think it's really hurt him, is he's not very good at movement within the pocket, and those are two different things." Given the additional reps that Jones got and the ones that Richardson missed out on this offseason, Jones may enter training camp with the upper hand, but the competition is far from decided. Richardson is optimistic that he will be available for the start of training camp, and once he does return, the Colts will jump right back into the quarterback competition. Ultimately, as Steichen has said, he's looking for the most consistent player. Whoever ends up starting at quarterback for the Colts has a really strong roster around him, from the offensive line to Jonathan Taylor in the backfield, and the rest of the skill position players. "It'll be really interesting because they can run the ball," Cosell said of the Colts. "I don't know of how many people were aware of what Jonathan Taylor did over the last eight or nine games last year. He's a terrific back and their O-line is really solid and they're really good at running the football. And you know what, they got good skill players too."
NBC Sports
04-07-2025
- Sport
- NBC Sports
Jack Easterby attributes the Texans firing him to fan criticism
Jack Easterby's NFL career evaporated even more quickly than it suddenly materialized. Now, nearly three years after the V.P. of football operations was abruptly fired by Texans owner Cal McNair, Easterby has offered an explanation for how and why things fell apart. Appearing on the Ross Tucker Football Podcast, Easterby suggested that he was done in by rampant fan criticism. 'There also were a lot of people that, quite frankly, we had to transition out of there,' Easterby told Tucker, via Matt Young of the Houston Chronicle. 'So, that was probably one of the other things that I would say that was really hard for people to understand on the outside. Fans love football, man. So if they're like, hey this is in between me and where I want to be, there's going to be criticism and justifiably so. That comes with it, right? That's just part of it.' It's also perhaps just part of why McNair made what at the time was a surprising decision to part ways with Easterby. He glossed over the fact that his ouster happened in 2022, the second year of G.M. Nick Caserio's tenure with the team. If things were bad enough from a fan standpoint to get McNair to dump Easterby, they weren't bad enough for McNair to also sever ties with Caserio — the G.M. who was reportedly hand-picked by Easterby, in defiance of the formal Korn Ferry search process. Blaming the move on fan reaction adroitly glosses over reality. The Texans, while Easterby was still employed there, pulled off one of the all-time coups, dumping quarterback Deshaun Watson onto the Browns for three first-round picks, and then some. With the Watson trade-and-sign becoming the single worst transaction in NFL history, the Texans deserve plenty of credit for engineering it. Consider the circumstances. Watson didn't play at all in 2021. He had more than 20 civil lawsuits pending, each of which arose from allegations of misbehavior during massage-therapy sessions. And yet the Texans managed to get four teams to submit acceptable trade terms, allowing the Browns, Panthers, Saints, and Falcons to compete for Watson's contract. Easterby was there when it happened. And yet, only months later after the Texans pulled it off, Easterby was gone. Was it really a product of fan discontent, or was there something else going on that caused McNair to break free from what seemed like the strange and inexplicable hold that Easterby had over him? The perception, if not the reality, was that Easterby climbed far faster than he should have. That he landed in a key football position without the objective skills or abilities that many other candidates possessed. If anything, fans and some in the media saw through the façade at a time when McNair did not. Something got McNair to view Easterby differently than McNair had. While Easterby's reputation, earned or otherwise, among the fan base didn't help, it's not as if McNair faced losing his role as owner over it. As Jed York once said, you don't dismiss owners. The other thing that undermines Easterby's effort to blame his firing on fan opinion is the simple reality that the Texans went from being hopefully dysfunctional with Easterby in a position of significant influence to highly competitive without him. If his firing was simply an effort to give disgruntled fans a pound of flesh, it had the incidental (and perhaps, in his mind, coincidental) benefit of pivoting the team toward becoming the perennial contender it now is. The fact that none of the other 31 teams has been linked to the potential hiring of Easterby underscores that it was something more than 'the fans didn't like me.' Easterby, whose arrival sparked among other things questions about the accuracy of his resume, has been unwanted by any other NFL team. Easterby is currently back in North Carolina. So is his former boss in New England, Bill Belichick. And despite some stray speculation and rumors that Belichick could be bringing Easterby to Chapel Hill, it hasn't happened. That possibly says it all. Unless, of course, Easterby's sudden emergence during the NFL's slow time is a trial balloon in advance of Belichick giving him a job. Regardless, like Belichick, it seems that Easterby's time in the NFL has ended. If that's because of any fan base, it would be a rare example of fan opinion overruling the whims of the people who own the teams.
