This offseason
Stitched Wes Schweitzer Jersey , Atlanta’s #1 priority is to get a new contract for Grady Jarrett. It won’t be cheap and it likely won’t be easy, but Jarrett
has been very good since he arrived in Atlanta and capped off a career-best
season that will ensure he gets paid. He’ll only be 26 years old in 2019 and the
Falcons are dependent on him as they re-build a largely disappointing defensive
line, so there’s no way they can afford to let him get away. The problem for the
Falcons and Jarrett is how to agree on his value. Jarrett is going to be looking
for a deal that makes him one of the highest-paid defensive tackles in football,
and the Falcons are going to have to find a way to make him happy and retain
some sort of long-term flexibility. How deserving of a big contract is Jarrett,
and what might his deal look like? Where he stacks upThere’s a habit in the NFL
of stacking good or even great players up against the absolute platinum standard
at their position, as he has happened with Grady Jarrett and Aaron Donald.
Jarrett is not and never will be Donald, a once-in-a-generation defensive tackle
who utterly dominates everyone and is probably underpaid. Jarrett is not Donald,
but a year ago, he was one of the best defensive tackles in football. He tied
for 12th in sacks from a defensive tackle with six despite playing only 14
games, finished tied for 8th in quarterback hits, tied for 2nd in forced
fumbles, and tied for eighth in tackles overall, which is a testament to how
active he is at the line of scrimmage. He enjoyed one of the best run stop
percentages from a defensive lineman in the entire NFL, and was top three for
defensive tackles. By any credible measure and at his age, he was one of the ten
best defensive tackles in football last year. Per Pro Football Focus
Youth Wes Schweitzer Jersey , here were the top five defensive interior linemen in 2018: 1.Aaron Donald2.Fletcher Cox3.DeForest Buckner4.Damon Harrison5.Grady Jarrett
Given that, the Falcons don’t appear to have an enormous amount of leverage over
Jarrett. He’s young, coming off a year that would lead to him drawing huge
interest on the open market, doesn’t have any significant health concerns to
point to, and is a high-character player and one of the most consistently
accountable men in the locker room. About the only opportunity they have to push
back is by stacking his raw production as a pass rusher against Donald, Cox, and
Buckner, because there’s not much else working against him. Jarrett and his
representation can and will argue for youth—he’s two years younger than both
Donald and Cox—but obviously his production has yet to match those two. He fares
much better against Geno Atkins, PFF’s third-highest 4-3 DT by salary and the
#20 DT last year and a man headed for his age 31 season in 2019, Kawann Short
(#4 in contract, 30 years old and #19), Marcell Dareus (#5 in contract, 29 years
old, #27), Gerald McCoy (#6 in contract
Stitched Blidi Wreh-Wilson Jersey , nearly 31, and #29, about to be cut), and finally Jurrell Casey (#7 in contract, 29, and #17). He has a credible case to
be the second-or-third highest-paid player at his position in the NFL, depending
on how far his youth compared to Cox takes him, and at the end of the day the
on-paper annual average is likely to reflect that. Where will his contract end
up? The Falcons will do their level best to balance Jarrett’s deserved pay hike
after four years on a rookie fifth-rounder contract with the long-term needs of
a team about to hand out significant extensions to other key players. That will
mean getting creative with structure, as the Falcons often try to do, to ensure
they’re not taking massive cap hits every year of Jarrett’s new deal.The annual
average for this deal is going to wind up being $16-18 million, if I had to
wager, and could go higher if the Falcons are comfortable with it. That will be
enough to put Jarrett somewhere between the second-highest and fifth-highest
paid defensive tackle in the NFL, which is a more than fair spot for him even if
the numbers make you wince. The Falcons will likely carefully weigh their free
agent needs this offseason before deciding whether they want their cap hits to
be fairly balanced or if they want to heavily front load this deal to try to
lessen the impact and guaranteed money as Jarrett marches toward his 30s. It’s
fair to expect a 4-5 year deal that will, one hopes, allow both parties to walk
away from the negotiating table happy
Youth Blidi Wreh-Wilson Jersey , though ideally the Falcons would be able to lock up Jarrett for six years and hopefully see him play out the entire
contract. All told, then, I think the template here is a little north of Cox’s
deal, which gave the gifted defensive tackle $102 million over six seasons, with
an annual average of $17.1 million when he signed it back in 2016. Jarrett’s
youth and the expanding cap should allow him to get closer to $17.5 or $18
million per year, and the Falcons will probably want to avoid structuring the
deal like Cox’s given that the dead money doesn’t dip below $13 million until
2022, when Cox will be 31 years old. But if they can hammer out something that
makes Jarrett the second-highest paid defensive tackle in the NFL and allows
them to continue to lock up key guys like Deion Jones and Keanu Neal in the
years ahead, the signing and this offseason will both feel like a success. What
do you think Jarrett’s contract will look like? Falcons rookie wide receiver
Calvin Ridley isn’t just leading the league in touchdown catches. He’s scoring
touchdowns at a historic pace.Ridley has six touchdown catches through four
games this season, which puts him on a pace to finish the season with 24
touchdown catches. The NFL record is 23, set by Randy Moss with the 2007
Patriots.Even if it’s not realistic to think Ridley will stay on this pace for
16 games and break Moss’s record, he has a good chance at another Moss record:
In 1998 Moss set the NFL record for touchdown catches in a rookie, with 17.
Ridley can break Moss’s record with 12 touchdown catches in the Falcons’ 12
remaining games.Ridley is benefiting from the fact that Julio Jones is drawing
coverage away while not vulturing touchdowns. With Jones on pace to break the
NFL’s yardage record and Ridley on pace to break the touchdown record, Matt Ryan
has a couple of great targets.
