Trent Richardson opens up about tough NFL career, second chance
In a little more than a month a new draft class will enter the NFL, and some of the prospects who look impeccable now will fail. No matter how much draft analysis is done — it’s impossible to spend 30 seconds on Twitter this time of year without seeing someone breaking down a draft prospect — some of the mistakes will be unavoidable.
The story of Trent Richardson is proof of that.
Try to find someone who didn’t like Richardson in the early spring of 2012. He was a can’t-miss running back prospect out of Alabama, and went third overall to the Cleveland Browns. And people forget, but he was not terrible as a rookie, with 950 rushing yards, 11 touchdowns and 51 catches. Not Hall of Fame stuff but a good start.
And it fell apart after that. Maybe there were flaws in his game that were ignored, but it seems like a lot of the damage was done away from the field.
Matt Zenitz of AL.com wrote a great piece on Richardson, as he prepares to sign with the Baltimore Ravens and get what is likely his last chance to prove himself in the NFL. In the piece Richardson candidly talks about what went wrong after he was traded in 2013 to the Indianapolis Colts, giving insight into his decline that led to him being considered one of the bigger draft busts in recent history.
First, he was stunned and disillusioned with the trade. He thought he was doing well with the Browns. He said he didn’t trust anyone after that, and his last year with the Colts got bad in part because he didn’t get along with general manager Ryan Grigson.
“(T)o get traded, that took a lot out of me,” Richardson said, on the video that went with the AL.com story. “I lost the love of that game, at that time, at that moment.”
He also admittedly didn’t work hard enough. The AL.com story said he was considered one of the hardest workers on his Alabama teams. So it’s hard to fault the Browns or Colts for seeing that coming.
“It’s very easy to get lazy in the NFL — not having everything scheduled and not having everything like at Alabama where it was so structured,” Richardson told AL.com. “We had study hall or we had to get a workout in in between classes and had five classes a day. It was just so structured. In the NFL, everything’s on your own.”
Then there’s the side we hear about often, and that’s the family members and friends constantly asking for money. The AL.com story says Richardson paid for cars, five funerals that cost at least $12,000 each, even a week-long trip to Disney World. Richardson told AL.com that the constant texts and calls for money exhausted him mentally and took his focus away from football.
This is why the draft is an inexact science. It’s not because the front offices and scouting staffs that spend their lives analyzing football players are incompetent. They’re not. Sometimes it’s impossible to know how 21-year-olds being given large checks for their first real job will react to life in the NFL.
Richardson is only 25, so there’s still time for him. He sounded very excited for a new start with the Ravens. After being cut by the Raiders at the end of last preseason, AL.com said Richardson was depressed, sleeping a lot and barely working out. Now he’s back in shape — the Ravens have an agreement with him but won’t make a signing official until Richardson is less than 225 pounds, and it sounds like he has met that requirement — and appreciative.
There’s that human element that gets overlooked too, that for all the fair criticism of Richardson and his meager 3.3-yard rushing average in the NFL, he’s just a guy who wants to succeed in a sport he’s given his life to and make a living at it.
“Hands down, this is the happiest I’ve been since I was at Alabama,” Richardson told AL.com.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
