ORLANDO – Shane Steichen can't wait to work with Anthony Richardson again.

You can feel it in the way the Colts coach shifts his hands from side to side and then up to his ear, like a quarterback ready to launch a pass. He's launching into coach mode before the clock has hit 8 a.m. at the annual owners' meetings in Orlando, before the coffee has had a chance to kick in.

What excites him most about Richardson's expected return to full-go practices this spring after a six-month layoff after shoulder surgery isn't the 4.4-second 40-yard dash speed, the 6-foot-4 or 244-pound size or even the electric arm, all of the traits that drew the Colts to Richardson at this time a year ago. They know all that.

No, the draw to seeing Richardson in his first full offseason program is to build on something more mundane but also just as important.

"He had a really good feel of where to go with the football early," Steichen said. "It might not be his first read, but it'd be a guy on a jet motion and it's like, 'I'm going to throw an over,' and nobody covered the guy on the jet motion."

As much as Steichen lives for the upside in a quarterback like Richardson or Jalen Hurts or Justin Herbert, and as badly as he covets the gifts he wanted back when he was an undersized quarterback at UNLV, he will forever be most fascinated by what lies between the ears.

As a coach, he lives to find answers to problems, to solve riddles that haven't been posed yet and to test the imaginary boundaries of a game stitched into 1st-and-10s and fields with dimensions of 100 yards by 53. And he knows that no matter how sharp or new the look of the X's and O's on a whiteboard, the true potential lies in what the quarterback can read in real time.

So, in Orlando, he was talking with his hands to describe a play everyone else missed between Richardson's electric ones and the run that hurt his shoulder. It was in that Titans game, just moments before he suffered the AC joint sprain.

"He popped one early against Tennessee. It was early to (Josh) Downs," Steichen said, recalling a jet motion route the defense didn't cover. "And boom, Downs went down the sideline for 20. I was like, 'Oh they didn't cover him,' and he saw it too and it was like, 'Here, ball.' That's playing quarterback. He knows that stuff, and that's huge, and it helps coaches. That processing speed of like, 'Oh, you guys busted and here, ball.'"

It was a start to answering those accuracy questions from his brief career at Florida, where he completed less than 55% of his passes.

"I’m going to tell you one of the things that really surprised me with Anthony because I was concerned about it: This guy is a passer," general manager Chris Ballard said. "Here’s this big, talented athlete. I mean, this guy is a legitimate passer, and I believe that. I think he’s going to continue to get better and improve the more he plays. But Anthony can play from the pocket and throw the ball accurately."

Richardson is excited to get back to work, too. He's been throwing inside and outside of the Colts facility in recent weeks. He wants to build upon a rookie year that featured just 84 pass attempts. He wants to gain the reps he hasn't had yet after starting just 17 games since high school.

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The Colts will roll back plenty of familiarity for him, from five members of an offensive line to his top three receivers to Steichen as his play caller, Jim Bob Cooter as his offensive coordinator and Cam Turner as his quarterbacks coach. But he'll have some additions, too. The Colts brought in Alex Tanney from the Eagles to be their passing game coordinator, and they replaced Gardner Minshew with Joe Flacco as his backup quarterback.

Flacco knows what it's like to tap into Steichen's competitive wiring and program it into a younger teammate. He had that role in Philadelphia, when the Eagles were building Hurts in the 2022 offseason. Now, Flacco is in Indianapolis to step in if Richardson were to get hurt again but also to assist a quarterback who is younger than him by 18 years and 181 starts.

"It’s teaching him how to simplify, play fast and use those tools as opposed to trying to process certain things that you don’t really need to worry about and you go out there and you’re not even able to use your skillset the way you want to," Flacco said.

"... I think we see the athlete he is, the arm he has and the talent that he has, so as long as he can utilize those skills and play in a fast and efficient manner, then I think the sky is the limit.”

Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Why Shane Steichen can't wait to work with Anthony Richardson again