What do we know about the starting 2024 Falcons quarterback search?

Not much, but we have a few items of interest.

With Raheem Morris hired, the biggest subplot of the 2024 offseason by far is what the Atlanta Falcons will do with the quarterback position. The team has effectively had a rolling disaster there since the end of the 2021 season, when they tried and failed to trade for Deshaun Watson, traded Matt Ryan, and rolled out Marcus Mariota, Desmond Ridder, and Taylor Heinicke in turn over the past two seasons. No matter how good Morris and the new coaching staff are—and I hope they’re terrific—rolling with poor quarterback play will likely mean another lackluster season.

The Falcons are going to address the position. The big question concerns how and who, and while we can only guess at who the Falcons plan to pursue at the moment, they have given us a few concrete clues about what they’re going to do and what’s important to them.

They’re not on the roster

This is the one thing we do know: Barring miraculous improvement from Desmond Ridder and/or unfortunate circumstances ahead of him on the depth chart, the team’s starting quarterback in Week 1 of the 2024 season will come from outside the organization.

How do we know that? A veritable chorus of voices around the Falcons declaring they’ll be upgrading the position.

There’s Terry Fontenot, promising to be aggressive about doing so:

There’s newly minted quarterbacks coach T.J. Yates, who said he thinks Ridder can improve but the team will be looking at options.

“We’re just going to look at every option we have,” Yates said. “And obviously, we all know that position for this football team has to improve, and we’re going to do everything we can to improve it.”

And then there’s owner Arthur Blank, who was obviously and bitterly disappointed by the lackluster 2023 season and has made it clear quarterback was a major reason why things went south and Arthur Smith finds himself coordinator the offense in Pittsburgh instead of coaching Atlanta.

That all adds up to a fairly obvious conclusion: Ridder got his shot, faceplanted in his opportunity, and the Falcons have to get a starter that can run this offense effectively so this team can start winning. All options will be considered—a free agent signing like Kirk Cousins if he makes it to the open market, a trade for a veteran option like Justin Fields, using a draft pick on a top rookie—but it would be stunning if the Falcons let Ridder near the starting job again barring injury.

Accuracy is going to matter

New offensive coordinator Zac Robinson brought this up in remarks to the media, and it wasn’t exactly out of nowhere. The Falcons built up an offense with multiple capable targets in the hopes that the quarterback could simply get them the ball effectively, and that strategy did not exactly work as intended in either 2022 or 2023. Robinson is used to coaching players like Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford who deliver on-time, on-target throws, and he’s clearly going to be looking for that from the team’s next option.

This is not the first time Robinson has talked about the importance of accuracy for a quarterback, unsurprisingly.

Is this more bad news for Atlanta’s incumbents? Yes. The Falcons suffered through an inaccurate 2022 campaign from Marcus Mariota, who had nearly a quarter of his throws classified as “bad throws” by Pro Football Reference, and a shaky 2023 from Desmond Ridder, who threw too many passes either off-target or directly at a defender. Taylor Heinicke was also not exactly a font of accuracy in his own right. The Falcons will clearly prize having someone under center who can throw the ball on target, which will be excellent news for Atlanta’s pass catching corps. The Falcons did not spend top picks on Kyle Pitts, Drake London, and Bijan Robinson to lack the quarterbacking to utilize them effectively, but that’s been the unfortunate reality the past couple of seasons.

Robinson has mostly worked at the pro level with quarterbacks who are not famous for their mobility—Jared Goff especially so—but I don’t think that will be a major factor one way or another in who the Falcons choose. What will be important to the new offensive coordinator is landing a sharp, smart thrower of the football above all else, even if that player ends up not being a long-term solution for a franchise hungry to win now. There’s a reason Kirk Cousins keeps coming up as a name after Robinson found success working with an aging-but-effective Matthew Stafford in Los Angeles.

The Falcons aren’t committed to any one particular avenue…yet

Terry Fontenot talked about the team not closing any doors in their search for a quarterback, and I believe him…at this juncture. In early March, the team should not yet have its mind made up about its handful of top targets, nevermind the one guy they covet most of all.

What that effectively means is that the Falcons will not rule out a trade out of hand, even if I’m sure Fontenot would like to hold on to as many draft picks as possible. They won’t scoff out of hand at signing a free agent option, even though everyone out there is either older or simply not all that great. And it means that they will really mull selecting one of the top quarterbacks in this draft class, even if that means they’ll need to move off their familiar perch at pick #8.

Obviously, that kind of open-mindedness is welcome now, in the stage where the front office and coaching staff are trying to figure out their best options and getting the chance to get a closer look at many of them. But even now it’s probably safe to assume those options are narrowing, with the Falcons getting an opportunity to gauge the price for Justin Fields, get a ballpark price point for impending free agents like Kirk Cousins and Baker Mayfield, and having the opportunity to talk to every top quarterback prospect in the 2024 NFL Draft. They left Indianapolis with, if I had to guess, only two or three legitimate avenues they’re interested in pursuing, and through all the smoke and rumors we may get a couple of concrete hints about which paths those are.

For now, though, expect the endless swirl of breathless rumormongering to continue—the team has already been declared all but a lock to both trade for Justin Fields and move up in the draft—while the Falcons decide between their options. The only thing that matters is that the option they land on is the right one, something that hasn’t happened over the past couple of seasons.

The Falcons believe they’re (close to) a QB away

This last one is important to understanding the Falcons in 2024. Fontenot did a lot of work on roster-building last year, securing perhaps the most intriguing draft class of his tenure thus far and landing multiple quality players in free agency. The number of one-year deals the Falcons used last year means they have roster-building work to do again—that and the fact that safety, wide receiver, and a handful of other positions are depleted, that is—and no one will tell you with a straight face that the Falcons are just a quarterback away.

But there’s a real sense, from Arthur Blank to Fontenot to Raheem Morris, that it’s pretty damn close to that being the case. The Falcons will have to fill in the edges of the roster and add more impact talent, but it’s fair to argue they would have been a playoff team last year with quality quarterbacking. This year, that sense is clearly even stronger than it was heading into 2023, and the Falcons can no longer engage in half-measures or hoping there.

From Tyler Dunne’s interview with Terry Fontenot, published yesterday:

Find the right QB and, he believes, the 2024 Atlanta Falcons will contend.

“One-thousand percent. One-thousand percent,” the GM repeats. “We’re very confident in that.”

This doesn’t rule out the Falcons going for a rookie quarterback, and if I’m honest, I’m hopeful they’ll draft one regardless of what avenue they take unless they’re convinced they can get drastic improvement out of Ridder, which seems unlikely. But it does underscore the idea that they are not going to take a player who needs significant development time to realize his full potential and roll with that player as QB1 if they can help it; six straight years of losing have left the Falcons impatient to contend. That means we do have to take the prospect of a veteran addition very seriously, or the prospect that the Falcons will set some draft capital ablaze if it means they go up and get the guy in the draft.

Expect the kind of aggression that has been preached this offseason to be the kind of aggression that is practiced, in other words.