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Falcons head coach Arthur Smith hints more targets are coming for Kyle Pitts, Drake London

While the Atlanta Falcons were victorious over the Carolina Panthers on Sunday, head coach Arthur Smith earned some heat for how the passing game utilized tight end Kyle Pitts and wide receiver Drake London.

Since Pitts only had 356 yards and two touchdowns in 10 games with Marcus Mariota at quarterback before getting injured in Week 11 last season, some NFL fans have questioned if the 2021 fourth-overall pick wasn’t being properly used in the passing game.

There are plenty of reasons you could give for the tight end’s 2022, ranging from the amounts of times that Pitts got targeted and was missed by Mariota to the fact that the Falcons unlocked a run-heavy offense in 2022 to make up for the passing woes. However, the fantasy football community in particular was in uproar over Pitts in particular.

Well, those critiques didn’t settle down on Sunday as the Falcons only threw the ball to London, the eighth-overall pick in 2022, once for an unsuccessful attempt, and only got Pitts two catches for 44 yards (even if one of them was a game-altering play).

It got to the point that former NFL wide receiver Dez Bryant was lobbying Atlanta to trade Pitts to his former team, the Dallas Cowboys, on Tuesday.

 

On that play from Bryant’s screenshot, quarterback Desmond Ridder was under pressure and had to find a way to get the ball out before getting sacked for a major loss.

Well, Smith was asked about the seeming lack of targets after Sunday’s win, and he gave a pretty blunt answer about his concern about the topic.

However, Smith gave a much more nuanced answer about the passing game woes on an Atlanta radio show on Wednesday that supports the idea that this past Sunday’s Falcons game was more of a statistical anomaly than a glimpse of the future.

“Every game’s different; that was a rare NFL game,” Smith told 92.9 The Game’s Dukes and Bell. “In the next couple of years, I doubt any game will ever go like that.”

Smith chalked it up to the team’s struggle with allowing penalties and causing self-made errors that stunted the passing game’s potential. He also gave credit to the Panthers’ defense that features stars like Brian Burns and Derrick Brown.

Smith also said that the felt that there is evidence that the Falcons can get their top targets involved in the passing attack, specifically mentioning London.

“Nobody’s worried about Drake London,” Smith shared. “Go look at a lot of the film last season… Everybody wants to live in the prisoner of the moment. The ultimate goal is to win, and when you have the right guys, and they understand that, and there’s trust built back and forth.”

Smith is right that the results are there. London had 866 yards on 117 targets during his 2022 rookie year, and 333 of those yards came with Ridder under center for the final four games of the season. Pitts hauled in a historic 1,026 yards on 110 targets during his Pro Bowl rookie season in 2021 with Matt Ryan starting at quarterback. They are undoubtedly the main two options in the passing game for the Falcons, and that probably won’t change.

History shows that while neither player has been overtly prolific in the red zone, the Falcons have gotten them the ball aplenty since they’ve gotten to Atlanta. Pitts’ injury-plagued 2022 and Mariota’s inconsistent play hampered the tight end’s sophomore campaign, while London had a productive rookie season and has only played in one lackluster game of his sophomore season.

While the Falcons might not be able to help your fantasy football teams with a run-heavy approach in the red zone, the team has plenty of proof in the pudding of getting the ball into Pitts’ and London’s hands. Once Ridder gets more settled as the team’s starter, expect the yardage to go up for both. The team is qualifying Sunday’s passing output as a weird fluke.

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