Gregg DoyelIndianapolis Star
WESTFIELD – The Colts know fourth-string quarterback Jason Bean is fast. Like, Anthony Richardson fast, even if only three players at the NFL Scouting Combine this century have run a faster 40-yard time than Richardson’s 4.43-second explosion in 2023. Bean’s that fast – yes, he is – whether the numbers say so or not.
And the numbers don’t say so. The numbers lie, when it comes to Jason Bean. And the Colts know that, too.
The Colts know almost everything there is to know about Jason Bean, things most don’t, like the story behind the 2023 Guaranteed Rate Bowl Game in Phoenix. Bean was sensational that day, throwing for 449 yards and six touchdowns, winning MVP and rewarding a Kansas fan base that had fallen in love with his humility, leadership and loyalty. Most don’t know the backstory, though, that Bean was playing with the flu – yes, he was – and needing IV’s before, during and after the game. His weight plummeted that week. His weight plummeted again five weeks later at the East-West Shrine Bowl, when the flu got him again.
“I was in the 180s, maybe even the 170s,” Bean was saying Wednesday night after a joint practice with the Arizona Cardinals, alone on the field at Grand Park, the last one into the locker room as usual.
Behind Richardson, backup Joe Flacco and third-team QB Sam Ehlinger on the Colts’ depth chart, Bean doesn’t get many reps in practice, and on this day against the Cardinals he got exactly zero. Battling fellow rookie Kedon Slovis for fourth string, Bean gets the scraps, er the snaps, behind the top three. So he stays after every practice, directing an equipment manager down the field, toward the sideline – farther, farther – and throwing to him until two receivers down the depth chart, Laquon Treadwell and Derek Slywka, show up to run routes.
On Wednesday night, as the field emptied of two NFL teams and Colts players signed autographs until the last fans were heading home, Treadwell and Slywka ran routes for Bean. Eventually they were joined by a third receiver, Greg Ward, a free agent who had signed earlier that day.
Twice Bean threw a pass and dropped down to do push-ups. I asked him later: Why the push-ups?
“Bad throws,” he said.
But one throw was a catch, I’m reminding him of what I’d seen. And the other was dropped.
“The placement could’ve been better,” he says.
Played with Colts GM Chris Ballard's son at Kansas
Greg Ward spent his first seven NFL seasons as a receiver with the Eagles, but he played quarterback at Houston. Bean, who went to high school in Texas, attended several of Ward’s final college games, but their connection runs deeper – more eerily – than that. Ward had thrown for more than 8,700 yards at Houston, see, but in 2016 NFL scouts told him his future in their league, if he had one at all, was at receiver.
That’s the same thing scouts told Jason Bean seven years later, before his final season at Kansas, when he made the switch to receiver – yes, he did – and returned for his sixth year of college, his super senior season. Bean came back not to compete with Jayhawks starter Jalon Daniels, the preseason Big 12 offensive player of the year, but to catch passes from him.
“I worked at receiver all summer,” Bean says, another thing very few know, though the Colts know it because one of the KU quarterbacks throwing to Bean last summer was freshman Cole Ballard, a walk-on from Westfield and the son of Colts General Manager Chris Ballard.
But then Daniels showed up at Kansas’ 2023 preseason camp with a back injury, couldn’t play the opener, then missed the final three months. Bean never did make the switch to receiver. Instead, after a summer spent learning a new position, he returned to his old role and threw for 2,130 yards, 18 touchdowns and seven interceptions, completing 62.3% of his passes and leading Kansas to a breakthrough season. The Jayhawks went 9-4, including their first win against sixth-ranked Oklahoma since 1997 – their first victory at home against a ranked team since 1984 – capped by that win against UNLV in the Guaranteed Rate Bowl.
The Colts know all of that, and more. They know Bean is 24 years old, coming off six college seasons at two schools and still something of late bloomer who didn’t play football until seventh grade. They know he was a baseball star before that, a center fielder with that speed, a pitcher with that arm, before being talked into playing football.
The Colts know Bean weighs significantly more than his listed weight of 196, runs significantly faster than his Big 12 Pro Day 40-yard dash time of 4.55 seconds, and signed with the team as an undrafted free agent expecting, eventually, to switch to receiver.
But the Colts don’t know everything about Jason Bean.
They don’t know, for example, that he can’t play quarterback in the NFL.
Michael Pittman Jr.: Jason Bean has hints of Anthony Richardson
The way Jason Bean moves? It looks different.
Even on a field with super athletes, Bean stands out. You saw it in the Colts’ preseason opener last week against Denver, when he entered in the fourth quarter as the Colts’ fifth quarterback and immediately began running read-option plays. He chewed off gains of 15 and 11 yards on his first two snaps, though the 15-yarder was nullified by penalty. He finished, officially, with four carries for 22 yards, but like most things involving Jason Bean, the numbers lie.
His speed, for example. At Big 12 Pro Day, Bean clocked that 4.55-second time, a result he says “was very disappointing.”
Go back and look at the times others were running that day – slower than expected, all of them – and you know something was up. Slow timer, whatever. Point is, how can Jason Bean run the 40 in 4.55 seconds?
When he runs 100 meters in 10.36 seconds?
Yes he did.
Bean was a track star at Lake Ridge High in Mansfield, finishing third in the state in the 100 and running the anchor leg on the fastest 400 relay team in school history, and two of the three fastest 800 relay teams. His personal best in the 200 meters is 21.85 seconds. As for his actual 40 time? During pre-draft training in South Florida, Bean was clocked at 4.41 seconds.
“He’s fast,” Colts receiver Michael Pittman Jr. was telling me Wednesday night, when I asked him an open-ended question: Tell me about Jason Bean. “He’s so damn fast.”
Pittman kept going.
“He’s kind of on the same line with AR,” Pittman said, referring to Anthony Richardson. “He’s not as big, but I feel like he can run all AR’s plays, he has all the same skillset, he has a good arm. I really think that’s why they brought him here – because they see a little bit of AR in him.”
That would make Bean the perfect backup to Richardson someday, would it not? That’s why Bean is here, by the way. Well, it’s why he’s still here in the quarterback room, not with Pittman and the other wideouts in the WR room. The Colts called Bean on the third day of the 2024 NFL Draft, during the draft itself – yes, they did – letting him know their interest in signing him as an undrafted free agent if he were available.
The Colts told Bean they wanted to give him a sincere look at quarterback, but would move him to receiver if that didn’t work out. Was he interested?
“I was,” Bean’s telling me Wednesday night. “Once I knew the Colts wanted me, I told my agent I didn’t want to go anywhere else.”
Bean reported to Colts rookie camp in May, one year after beginning serious workouts as a receiver at Kansas, wondering if he was nearing the end of his QB career.
“I’ve always said: Whatever it takes to get on a roster,” Bean says, “I’m willing to do.”
That rookie camp could’ve been his final shot at QB, if he hadn’t looked so good.
“Initially thought maybe WR,” Chris Ballard was telling me Wednesday by text, “but he performed well at QB in OTA’s so we kept him there and been pleased. Long way to go but a great young man who is humble and works.”
With Jason Bean, the same themes repeat themselves: He’s a quarterback who could move to receiver, if he’d only stop excelling at quarterback. And he's a great young man.
High school coach: ‘Be like Jason Bean’
What people say about Jason Bean? It sounds different.
“Be like Jason Bean,” his coach at Lake Ridge High, Kirk Thor, tells his players even now, six years after Bean last played there. “You want to know what it’s like to play with passion, no ego, about the team? Be like Jason Bean.”
Thor is preparing for his season opener in two weeks but he called back within hours Wednesday, called a stranger in Indianapolis, and started his side of the conversation this way:
“Anything I can do to help Jason, I’m willing to do,” Thor was saying, before I could ask a question. “To me, he’s the most unselfish guy I’ve ever been around.”
It was at Lake Ridge where Bean broke a teammate’s facemask visor for the first time. He threw a pass that went through the kid’s hands so fast, it still had enough velocity to smash the shield. Bean did it again at North Texas, where he played three seasons before transferring to Kansas in 2021.
Bean has arm strength, which we also saw in the preseason game against Denver when he was 4-for-6 for 51 yards and a touchdown. That included an 18-yarder off his back foot to Ethan Fernea.
Two snaps later Bean dropped back and was blitzed. A catastrophic breakdown in Colts pass protection allowed 6-3, 240-pound Broncos linebacker Alec Mock and 6-1, 185-pound cornerback Quinton Newsome to conduct a meeting at the back of the pocket. Before being sandwiched by Mock and Newsome, Bean threw a 16-yard dart to Treadwell for the touchdown. Well, looked like a dart to me. After practice Wednesday I tracked down Colts coach Shane Steichen and asked him “how the ball comes out of Jason Bean’s hand.”
“Pretty darn good,” Steichen said. “He can really spin it.”
Now I’m asking Steichen about Bean’s speed, about his 40-yard time of 4.55—
“He’s faster than that,” Steichen says, interrupting. “Yeah, we were talking about that in the quarterback room the other day.”
Here’s how that happened:
Bean routinely runs the read option in camp, breaking into the open field, a sight to behold. Take it from longtime Colts analyst Rick Venturi, who coached 36 years in college and the pros, including two years with Bill Belichick in Cleveland.
“He brings something special, and when you have something special, you keep it around,” Venturi says of Bean. “I’ve seen him run the read option out here, and he’s just gone. He brings special speed to the quarterback position.”
That’s what they were discussing in the Colts’ QB room, coaches and players breaking down film, when quarterbacks coach Cameron Turner stopped the tape after one of those read option plays – Bean was just gone – to ask him about that 4.55-second time in the 40.
Only then did Bean, such a quiet young man, tell the Colts’ QB room about his track days, his 10.36-second 100.
“I was like, “Damn!” Steichen says.
No. 1 overall pick of UFL's Memphis Showboats
The numbers have it all wrong about Bean, including his listed weight at 189 pounds or 196 pounds, depending where you look. He’s been adding weight slowly but steadily since his second bout with the flu in February. He weighed in Wednesday at 206 pounds.
The Colts know what they have in Jason Bean in some ways – actual size, actual speed – but not in the way they are most curious: Can he play quarterback in the NFL? They first raised the question last season when Bean was at Kansas, playing quarterback because of Jalon Daniels’ injury. With Cole Ballard’s dad in the crowd, Bean was 23-for-34 for 410 yards and five touchdowns against Oklahoma State, and 13-for-17 for 250 yards and two TD’s against Cincinnati. He also ran for scores of 43 and 50 yards against the Bearcats.
His next game was the Guaranteed Rate Bowl.
“Because my son was at Kansas I had an opportunity to see him play live a few times,” Ballard was texting me. “I thought Oklahoma State and Cincinnati games, he played lights out. I knew he was a great kid, so why not see what he can be at this level?”
Lots of curiosity about Jason Bean. Last month the Memphis Showboats of the United Football League made him the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 UFL Draft. Bean says he knew of the UFL but didn’t know the draft was July 17, or that he’d been selected first overall, until “my phone started blowing up and I called my agent to see what was going on.”
Bean hasn’t spoken with the Showboats – “My agent has,” he says – whose season begins in the spring. By then the Colts will know what they have, and Bean will know his NFL future: Developmental receiver, or developmental quarterback? The next big hint comes Saturday, when the Colts play Arizona in their second preseason game at Lucas Oil Stadium. Their third and final exhibition is Thursday at Cincinnati. With Richardson and Flacco needing more protection than practice, Bean will get more work in those games than he gets on the practice field.
“It’ll be good to get him some reps in these next two preseason games,” Steichen said, “but he did some good things in the first game, which was really good to see. So we’ll see where it goes.”
Where it goes for Jason Bean could be where it’s been heading for more than a year, to an NFL receivers room near you, but he’s not so sure anymore. That preseason game Saturday against Denver?
It felt different.
“I’ll forever in my heart feel I’m a quarterback until I’m told 'no' a couple times,” he says. “It’s going to take me a couple times to get that through my head. I feel like I have every sort of ability to be able to play at this level, and kind of proved it to myself this past weekend. That made me look forward to this week that much more, and I’m very excited for this weekend.”
Check social media: So are Colts fans. Ask around: So are the Colts – players, coaches, general manager. So is a high school coach in Mansfield, Texas, still telling kids six years later to be like Jason Bean.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStaror atwww.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
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