Sleepers, Busts and Bets: The 2022 Atlanta Falcons

Tyler Loechner and Josh Larky continue with the 2022 Sleepers, Busts and Bets series to preview all 32 NFL teams for the upcoming year. Next up: The Atlanta Falcons.

Tyler and Josh will list their picks with confidence in “The Answers,” then expand upon their picks with more detailed reasoning in “The Explanation.”

The Answers

Favorite Sleeper

Loechner: Cordarrelle Patterson
Larky: Drake London

Biggest Bust

Loechner: Every WR not named Drake London
Larky: Cordarrelle Patterson

Boldest Bet

Loechner: Kyle Pitts a top-2 TE
Larky: Kyle Pitts TE1 overall

The Explanation

Sleepers

Loechner: Cordarrelle Patterson

Patterson finished last year as the No. 7 overall RB in fantasy football. His primary competition for backfield touches (Mike Davis) is no longer on the team, and Atlanta will spend all of 2022 without target hog Calvin Ridley after spending most of 2021 without him.

Yes, the team added Drake London and lost Matt Ryan. But Patterson’s situation is not lining up to be that different than it was in 2021. And he’s currently being drafted as the RB28 — benchwarmer and/or flex territory. I’m not saying Patterson is due for another top-10 finish, but ending the year as a fantasy RB2 seems likely in PPR leagues.

Atlanta drafted Tyler Allgeier, but it was only with fifth-round draft capital. They also added Damien Williams, but he has been a career backup. Patterson only had 153 rush attempts last year (10 per game), so it’s not like the threat of an RBBC is terrifying for his fantasy purposes. And in PPR leagues, Patterson could easily top his 52 receptions from last year. The target tree in Atlanta could very realistically be Pitts-London-Patterson. 

Larky: Drake London

I understand Marcus Mariota is not an ideal Year One QB for Drake London. Third-round pick Desmond Ridder had his own accuracy struggles in college, too. Both QBs project to take pass attempts out of the offense due to scrambling. However, the history of top-10 WR draft picks and London’s profile make him worth considering in the middle rounds of redraft leagues.

The past 15 seasons, the 17 WRs to go top-10 in the NFL Draft average over an 18% target share in their rookie season, and that includes John Ross (2%) and Mike Williams (7%). Looking at the Falcons’ sparse depth chart at WR, I can confidently say London has next to no chance of joining those two. The other 15 WRs averaged over 20% of their team’s targets as a rookie, and roughly half of them (8) put up over 900 receiving yards in their first season. Six of them went over 1,000 yards. Just by virtue of being a top-10 draft pick, London is already part of a high-upside group.

London averaged 71 receiving yards per game as a true freshman, 84 in Year 2, and finally 136 receiving yards as a junior in 2021. In the eight games he played in that final season at USC, he had an unheard-of 43% of his team’s receiving yards during that stretch. For those well-versed in the college game, that’s the kind of number you usually only hear about for small-school players, not for someone who attended USC. Think of Drake London as Michael Pittman, if he were more natural at playing football, and on a depth chart with mainly practice squad-caliber receivers. 

Busts 

Loechner: Every WR not names Drake London

The Falcons spent a top-10 pick on Drake London at WR in this year’s draft, but the rest of their WR room for 2022 is abysmal. Olamide Zaccheaus, Bryan Edwards, Auden Tate, Damiere Byrd, Khadarel Hodge, Geronimo Allison — the Falcons appear to be doing their best Chicago Bears impression.

Absolutely none of these WRs needs to be on your fantasy draft board. Just don’t do it.

Larky: Cordarrelle Patterson

Many have chosen to forget that Cordarrelle Patterson hadn’t reached 600 scrimmage yards in a season since his 2013 rookie year before he broke out in 2021 at age 30. For Patterson, it was a mix of injuries and inconsistency prior to the Falcons unleashing the hybrid back for almost 1,200 yards in 2021. My concerns with Patterson lie in his age and his first- and second-half splits from last year.

Patterson is already 31 years old, and he projects to be the oldest starting RB in the NFL by three years — Derrick Henry at 28 is the next closest. We know the position is brutal on athletes’ bodies, so the massive age discrepancy between Cordarrelle and every other back in the league should give you immediate cause for concern.

Then, we need to break down his strange 2021 season. Over his first eight games, Patterson averaged 9 carries and 57 receiving yards per game — he was in the Deebo Samuel role. The next eight games, Patterson averaged 10 carries and 11 receiving yards per game. With both Mariota and Ridder having decent mobility, it’s fair to worry about both his target ceiling and target floor in 2022. I don’t want to heavily invest in a 31-year-old committee back whose 2021 receiving production largely fizzled as the season went on.

Bets

Loechner: Kyle Pitts is a top-2 fantasy TE

Travis Kelce or Mark Andrews? Travis Kelce or Mark Andrews? Tough choice. What about waiting and drafting Kyle Pitts instead, who will outscore at least one of these two players and finish as no worse than the No. 2 overall TE?

Despite leading the team in end zone targets last year (6), Pitts finished the season with only 1 TD. Everyone knows that stat by now. But while Pitts is an obvious contender to score more TDs due to positive regression, he’s also primed to vault into absolutely elite usage as a receiver during Year 2.

As a rookie, Pitts posted a 110-68-1026-1 line. A major leap to 85-plus receptions, 1,200-plus yards, 6-plus TDs is not out of the question. Such a stat line would have him competing for the top overall spot among TEs. He’s a big-play threat — maybe the biggest at the TE position — evidenced by his 10.8-yard average depth of target last year, first among TEs with at least 15 targets. Only Mark Andrews (10.3), Rob Gronkowski (10) and Darren Waller (9.9) were close. Nice company.

Pitts already has elite top-two usage in at least one sticky category: He ranked second among TEs in air yards last year with 1,118. Want more reason to believe Pitts will score more TDs in 2022? He was one of only two TEs that had more than 450 air yards but 1 or fewer TDs (Cole Kmet, 612, no TDs).

Larky: Kyle Pitts is the overall TE1

Kyle Pitts had 1,026 receiving yards last season, the most by a rookie TE since Mike Ditka had 1,076 back in 1961. Over the past decade, rookies with 1,000 or more receiving yards average over 1,200 yards and nearly 17 fantasy points per game in Year 2. Mark Andrews was the TE1 last season with 17.7 PPR points per game, so Pitts is perfectly positioned to “average” what last year’s TE1 produced.

There are overall offensive environment fears with the likely shaky QB play and the lack of receiving talent after Drake London. We did see rookie Marcus Mariota facilitate TE Delanie Walker’s only season above 1,000 receiving yards back in 2015, so he has at least shown the ability to feed a TE in his offense before. With Pitts, I’m mainly betting on the talent and the historical data on rookie super-producers. While I think it’s most likely that Travis Kelce once again reigns king at the TE position, why not — for this very article — bet on the greatest TE prospect in NFL history.