Feleipe Franks is a legit contender to replace Matt Ryan as the quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons.
Omitted from that jarring lede are a few keywords if I'm being honest. Ones such as: potentially, future, etc. Still, it's very real.
Franks was one of the weirder prospects in the 2021 NFL Draft. Scouts tended to believe he was pretty bad. Folks who spend their day looking at numbers, spreadsheets, and other stuff that deals with data, they were much higher on the former Arkansas gunslinger.
Matt Ryan is 35 (he'll actually be 36 later this month). This isn't to knock him, but his best days are behind him. In turn, that's why the Falcons bringing in someone like Feleipe Franks makes all the sense in the world.
An undrafted free agent signing by the franchise, Franks is no risk, all reward. If he ends up being as bad as the scouts believe, no sweat off anyone's back. If he ends up being even close to as decent as some of the fancy-math people believe, the Falcons may have found a cheap and viable replacement for their franchise gunslinger.
Moreover, at least in the immediate future, there's no reason for Ryan to feel threatened by this, as Feleipe Franks is still a bit of a project. Starting at Florida before finishing up at Arkansas, he's a bit of a do-it-all decent gunslinger who doesn't seem to excel at anything. To be fair, it wasn't like he was given much of a chance to show much in college.
A lot of that can be due to his role in college and being a bit raw. Some analytic folk do believe his arm-ability — both strength and accuracy — is far better than given credit for. His college stats are rather underwhelming, at least the counting variety, which makes the argument of him mostly focused on the idea of him and less so the evidence of such. It's weird the number folk are on this kid's side, but here we are!
Nevertheless, even the Falcons are insanely high on him.
“Feleipe has a really unique skill set,” Falcons QB coach Charles London said, via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He has a big arm. He’s a really athletic guy. He had traits that as an offensive staff we were excited about and we wanted to work with them. We were thrilled to get him in the undrafted process.”
The headline of this post is a bit hyperbolic, but it's not incredibly unrealistic. Outside of Feleipe Franks and Matt Ryan, the only other gunslinger on the roster for the Falcons is AJ McCarron. Let's see some chaos in Atlanta!
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