Anthony Richardson's response to his marijuana charge is that he has nothing to apologize for. Per ProFootballTalk, the Colts quarterback does not regret his recent arrest for marijuana possession.
That's the whole of the public record on his position, and it's worth taking at face value because it's the only thing he's given. The underlying case, per court records reported by Fox News and The Athletic, is a misdemeanor possession charge stemming from an Oct. 12 traffic stop in Carmel, Indiana. A bench trial is set. The charge landed in the same week the Colts fired general manager Chris Ballard, which is the kind of coincidence that shapes a narrative whether or not it should.
Here's the thing about a misdemeanor pot charge in 2026: legally, it's close to noise. A bench trial on a traffic-stop possession count is not a case that threatens a career. Procedurally, it's an inconvenience with a court date attached.
But the NFL's personal conduct policy doesn't run on legal severity. It runs on headlines, and a player announcing he feels no regret hands the league office a quote it can cite in a disciplinary letter. My read: the exposure here is a fine or a short suspension, not a significant one, because the record shows a misdemeanor stop and nothing more serious. I'd be wrong if reporting surfaces details of that Oct. 12 stop that go beyond what's currently in the court file.
The part Richardson may be underestimating is what this costs him inside his own building. He's the quarterback of a team that just fired its GM, which means the roster is about to be evaluated by people who owe him nothing. Every off-field story is a data point in that evaluation, and "doesn't regret it" is a louder data point than the charge itself. The Colts can live with a misdemeanor. They have a harder time with a quarterback who treats it as a non-event in the middle of an organizational reset.
There's a version of this where the trial date passes quietly and nobody mentions it again. That version requires Richardson to stop supplying the second sentence. He's a talented quarterback, but talent buys patience only until the next story. The no-regret posture is a bad play even if the law never touches him: it turns a procedural charge into a character question, and character questions follow quarterbacks longer than misdemeanors do.
My verdict, signed: the Colts will handle this internally and say nothing publicly, but somewhere in that building the file on Richardson just got thicker. What he does on the field this season is now the only thing that thins it back out.
