What comes to mind after watching Desmond Ridder‘s debut is the following sequence of quotes from Flight of the Conchords:
I had held out some hope in my mind that Ridder would be able to invigorate a moribund Falcons passing game. Instead, he arguably managed to look worse than Marcus Mariota.
Next Gen Stats shows Ridder carrying a minus-11.5% completion percentage over expected in Week 15, a number that would challenge for the worst in the NFL in most weeks but that was somehow better than Trace McSorely and Mac Jones. Ridder looked overwhelmed in the pocket when his first read was covered, often trying to step up and getting nowhere for his efforts. After the game there was a lot of talk amongst the Falcons that the game wasn’t too big for Ridder -- I’d disagree with that sentiment based on what I watched.
My first instinct here is to apologize to Arthur Smith. No, really. The Atlanta media has been begging him to play Ridder all season, but I think this game showed us that there was some real rational coaching in leaving Ridder stapled to the bench until they had no choice but to evaluate him. He simply did not look ready for the task.
That is not to say that Ridder is dead and buried for fantasy purposes -- it was one game -- but I didn’t see a lot out of this game that would lead us to believe he’s got interesting fantasy football potential for the remainder of the fantasy playoffs. He had by my count one designed run play, the rest of his rushing yardage came on scrambles. He didn’t look terribly athletic while running. And the Falcons just aren’t going to pass enough in the current state of their roster to do much more than that.
Good news and bad news for Drake London
The good news for Drake London is that Ridder -- and Arthur Smith -- seems much more interested in tossing him the football lately. He’s got back-to-back games of 11 and 12 targets. He took on 37.8% of Atlanta’s air yards in Week 15, which is in the top 10 amongst all wideouts that played last week.
The bad news is that a lot of his targets bring up the idea of “prayer” yards rather than air yards.
Desmond Ridder targets Drake London Week 15 pic.twitter.com/6KxI9D5lF4
— rivers mccown (alt) (@mccownclips) December 20, 2022
There were a lot of targets very similar to this one for London in this game -- he goes over the middle and is asked to make a play in traffic -- and they did not go well. His fumble came on a play like this. He also had an additional pass broken up over the middle on a target like this after initially making a catch. This one the Saints saw coming the entire way. The Falcons either have an offense that is too simple for Ridder or Ridder hasn’t shown that they can tolerate him doing more in practice yet, whichever it is, these air yards were not as valuable as they look on paper.
Desmond Ridder targets Drake London Week 15 pic.twitter.com/XKYSYbUTKD
— rivers mccown (alt) (@mccownclips) December 20, 2022
Then there were throws like this, where, well, London would need to be 10 feet tall instead of six-feet-and-change. Ridder had quite a few throws like this that were totally impossible for his receivers to do anything with.
London probably has upgraded to a playable FLEX/WR3 on volume over the last two weeks after being largely unplayable for much of the season. But the shape that this passing game is in and the commitment to the run makes him feel more like a Chris Moore play than someone who you’re thrilled to start.
Ridder actually came out of this pretty lucky
Other than Tyler Allgeier looking to be on track to get a bigger share of this backfield post-Caleb Huntley injury, my main takeaway here is just that Ridder somehow had a prettier statline than I thought he would based on how he played. He was nearly picked off a couple of times. Look at this red zone sequence in the first half:
Desmond Ridder red zone Week 15 pic.twitter.com/W9F08ZCSwE
— rivers mccown (alt) (@mccownclips) December 20, 2022
Ridder has a second-and-3 to pick up to get to goal-to-go after a seven-yard Cordarrelle Patterson run. The first play is nearly brought back 90-plus yards for a touchdown -- not the only near-interception in the flat -- and the second shows him passing up a dangerous throw (good) but not really moving off the read fast enough to do anything with the ball. He eats a sack despite a fairly clear rush lane, and it’s not like he came off to read other targets before getting there. The whole process was too slow, from his decision to his athleticism to try to get past the Saints defender.
I’m always loathe to bury someone after one start. You never know who will get better, you never know how players will adjust, and so on. But Ridder’s got a lot to clean up to make it to fantasy-playable, and it’s very easy to look at how he played and how little interest the Falcons had in putting him on the field earlier in the season and conclude that they saw every reason he wasn’t ready and wound up with him starting purely by circumstance.
With a high draft pick likely incoming here, Ridder may only have these last three games to change the narrative. There are many players who have a lot to lose over this last stretch of the season. Ridder arguably has as much to lose as anybody by not playing well.
