Falcons legend Matt Ryan retires

The greatest quarterback in Falcons history rides off into the sunset.

The Atlanta Falcons of 2007 were bereft, rudderless, and in rough shape. With no franchise quarterback after Michael Vick’s legal troubles and a carousel of Byron Leftwich, Joey Harrington, and Chris Redman in 2007, the team needed hope and direction. They needed to land a player who could lead them to better days.

The choice was Matt Ryan. The Boston College product was not immediately embraced by many fans, including yours truly, and certainly there were quarters of the Falcons fanbase who always held him at arm’s length. Yet there’s no doubt whatsoever that Ryan was the right choice for the franchise, a man who elevated Falcons football and poured time, money, and soul into the community he lived and played in for 14 years, leaving as the team’s sole MVP, one of just two quarterbacks to pilot the team to a Super Bowl berth, and the all-time franchise leader in every single passing category worth mentioning.

We said goodbye to Ryan when the Falcons traded him to the Colts for a third-round pick ahead of the 2022 season, but Ryan didn’t officially hang it up after a disastrous year in Indianapolis marred by Jim Irsay’s meddling. Ryan’s retirement only became official today, when he finally announced he’s hanging up his cleats for good and sticking to the booth, where he’s already proven to be the kind of high-end professional he always was on the field.

He signed a one-day contract with the Falcons to ceremonially retire as a member of the team that drafted him.

As you’d anticipate, Arthur Blank and former teammates were in the mood to remember his time in Atlanta fondly.

With Ryan retiring and the Falcons importing Kirk Cousins to try to give themselves Ryan-caliber play at quarterback again, it’s worth reflecting on his remarkable career in Atlanta. You have to remember how low the expectations were in 2008—I was urging fans to be patient with Mike Smith and Ryan even though I was not overly optimistic about the young quarterback’s fortunes—and how immediately Ryan, Roddy White, Michael Turner, and John Abraham helped flip those expectations around.

The Falcons would post five straight winning seasons with Ryan at the helm after never posting back-to-back winning seasons in the prior 40-plus years in franchise history, doing so despite the rise and fall of coordinators, Turner, and an ever-changing defense. The common denominators were Ryan’s quiet excellence, Smitty’s sorely missed steady hand at the tiller, and Roddy’s work as a force of nature, with some tremendous additions in Julio Jones and Tony Gonzalez along the way.

Ryan’s next three seasons were spent toiling away on losing teams, including the most forgettable non-Colts season of his career in Year 1 with Kyle Shanahan, when he threw just 21 touchdowns against 15 interceptions. But Ryan bloomed anew in the second year with Shanny, winning league MVP and throwing 38 touchdowns against just seven interceptions and getting the Falcons all the way to the Super Bowl, where he played very well despite the team’s heartbreaking loss. Ryan would endure another good-but-not-great year in 2017 with Steve Sarkisian’s offense before once again picking it up in 2018, putting together a 35/7 touchdown-to-interception ratio on a tragically bad team. Ryan played well on three more bad football teams until the Falcons pursued Deshaun Watson, failed to land him, and shipped Ryan away.

His career in Atlanta wrapped up with, as I mentioned above, the franchise’s only MVP award, all the major passing marks in franchise history, and numbers that are generally in the top 10-15 of all NFL quarterbacks, period. Ryan was a durable, reliable quarterback in even his worst years—he missed just three games for the Falcons—and at his best he was among the greatest quarterbacks in the league in an era where some of the most legendary players ever at the position played alongside him. He did all of this quietly, steadily, while on a franchise where quietly steady excellence has been consistently difficult to come by.

Off the field in that span, Ryan became known for the money and time he poured into helping local youths in particular, including spearheading a donation drive for Atlanta’s Black community that raised over $1 million and donating $500,000 himself toward that goal. He’s remained active in that regard even after the trade, and has been in Atlanta enough and around the team that there was blessedly very little question of whether he’d not just retire with the franchise, but remain a part of the city.

By the time he was done, Ryan had undeniably made his mark on the Falcons and Atlanta, with the team achieving a level of success and consistency they had never managed before (and, though it has been just a couple of years, since). He left his mark on the NFL, too, as he’s 7th in NFL history in passing yards, 9th in passing touchdowns, 8th in yards per game, 13th in completion percentage, 4th in fourth-quarter comebacks, and tied for 19th in passer rating. By any objective measure, Ryan left the Falcons ranking as one of the 20-to-30 best quarterbacks in NFL history, depending on how you want to slice and dice the data. As a visible, affable face and voice for CBS Sports, he’ll likely gain a new appreciation from NFL fans who previously knew him solely as a Falcon. For Falcons fans, he should be remembered as one of the all-time franchise greats, because he is.

We wish Ryan well in retirement and in the booth, where he’ll no doubt thrive, and we’ll fondly remember the great moments in Atlanta.