2023 NFL Breakouts: Second and third-year offensive players ready to explode ft. Desmond Ridder, George Pickens and more
After talking about the veteran NFL players changing places, the rookies entering the league and the biggest needs for each team, I went back to watching guys who recently entered the fray and could emerge as household names in 2023. In particular, this exercise is aimed at finding the NFL.
In order to bring some fresh names to the table, I didn’t include players who have already recorded 1,000 rushing or receiving yards, 4,000 passing yards, scored double-digit touchdowns or earned a Pro Bowl or All-Pro nomination so far.
Furthermore, I didn’t list somebody like New York Jets running back Breece Hall, who was on pace for those kinds of benchmarks prior to getting injured (or some other names that are largely already considered to be young stars).
Let's get to it:
#1, Desmond Ridder, Atlanta Falcons (Q)
Probably the most surprising part about last year’s draft was how the NFL collectively handled the quarterback class. After the Steelers selected home-grown Pitt signal-caller Kenny Pickett 20th overall, it took all the way until pick 74 for Desmond Ridder to become QB2 off the board.
The 6’4”, 215-pound passer improved all four years with Cincinnati, coming off the bench in the second game of his redshirt freshman season and never relinquished the job. He ended up throwing for over 10,000 yards and rushed for another 2,180, combining for 116 touchdowns across 50 career games (28 interceptions).
As a rookie for the Falcons, he didn’t see the field at all through Weeks 1 to 14, despite a highly inconsistent passer in Marcus Mariota holding down that spot. Ultimately, he started the final four games against the Saints, Ravens, Cardinals and Buccaneers.
Atlanta lost the first two of those on the road and then won the latter two at home. Overall, he completed 73 of 115 passes (63.5%) for 708 yards and two touchdowns (both in the season-finale), with no interceptions, along with 16 carries for 64 yards.
Ridder is an excellent rhythmic thrower, who delivers the ball right as that back-foot hits the turf, reading high-low concepts and working timing-based routes with the boundary receiver. He’s clearly very intent on not leading his receivers into traffic and protecting them from hits (at times almost to his demise, where he puts it slightly behind his target and now the trailing defender can disrupt the catch-point).
However, that awareness and mindset generally is a positive. Specifically, he excels at hitting benders and seam routes, understanding when he can split the safeties or has to drive it to the back shoulder of his guys.
The chemistry with fellow rookie Drake London was apparent, as Ridder targeted him at least eight times in each of his four starts and overall the receiver hauled in 25 of 36 looks his way for 333 yards and one touchdown. In particular, he really liked going his way over the middle on key downs.
On quick-game, he’s mature enough already when the concept is dead, to understand where his “throw-away option” is and to not force anything. Yet, he’s also comfortable turning his back to the defense off play-action and waiting a beat for his targets to clear zone defenders, in order to hit them behind those.
There were lots of two-man concepts down the field for Atlanta, where the QB didn’t have anybody open, but he showed the presence of mind to find some space to slip toward and at least flip it out to the back in the flats or take off through a lane up the middle.
The rookie signal-caller understands where the pressure may be coming from pre-snap and slightly drifts that way during his drop at times, in order to have just enough time to deliver timing-based throws further down the field. You see some impressive lateral movement when defenses overload one side and he slides away from it whilst staying in a throw-ready position.
When there’s somebody flashing up the field and Ridder needs to climb towards the line of scrimmage, he shows a pretty flexible arm to where he doesn’t have both cleats in the ground and he drops down the arm angle to get it out a little quicker. He generates plenty of velocity on the ball when getting back downhill after rolling outside the pocket, to drive deep comebacks and out routes off their bootleg game.
Yet, even when he can’t get his base aligned properly and is almost fading away with the backside edge defender staying home and teeing off on him, Ridder can flick it to somebody working along with him. Along with that, while he may not be top-tier in terms of the explosive rushing threats, that 4.52 speed shows up when he has room to build and run away from most front-seven defenders.
Ridder has the slipperiness to him, where you saw him wiggle out of some muddy pockets and arms swinging at him. There are moments where you watch the All-22 and it looks like he’s getting swallowed up in the pocket, but all of a sudden he pops out of there, where you need the end-zone angle to even understand what happened.
This young man has always shown great toughness not only to hang in the pocket with rushers charging at him, but also taking a draw up the middle in Baltimore and getting banged around by guys, yet still trying to fight for the goal-line.
Looking at the advanced numbers, Ridder only finishing 33rd in terms of EPA per play (-0.028) among quarterbacks with 100+ plays last season. He really struggled to throw to the left side, in particular on passes of 10+ air yards, where he completed just two of 11 attempts for 26 yards. And he definitely had the training wheels on, in terms of what he was asked to do over that final month of the season.
According to PFF, 55.7% of his pass attempts either were screens and came off play-action (64 of 115). Several of those screens came on second- and third-and-long, rather than Atlanta allowing the rookie to make those crucial decisions.
Mechanically, you see him drag that back-foot along at times instead of leading the motion with those hips, which is where you see some inaccuracies relying on his arm to do all the work, sailing passes a little bit or forcing guys to go to the ground instead of setting up YAC opportunities.
He shows a wide base and fairly long release, which made him just late on some of their play-action concepts and generally in terms of timing up when he could attack windows, whilst still working to find the right trajectory on deep balls along the sideline.
Ridder at this point is a rather lethargic progression-style passer, which is indicated by a time-to-throw mark of exactly three seconds and a big reason he took nine sacks during his limited time on the field, with a massive pressure-to-sack conversion rate of 20.9%.
Too often he would escape the pocket towards the side without any eligible receivers and basically put himself into a one-on-one with a hang-defender or linebacker sitting there. Plus, then he’d hold on to it for way too long and either take a (near) sack or just an unnecessary hit.
Going back to Ridder’s pro debut at New Orleans, seeing the offense start the day with a couple of punts and what should’ve been interceptions, before they tried to take the ball out of his hands in an end-of-half drive, I got really worried.
Things started to turn around a bit from the Arizona game onwards, where Arthur Smith would spread out the formation and allow his QB to attack more static zone-coverage looks with quick-game, keying conflict defenders and ways for his quarterback to identify and take advantage of leverage advantages.
Looking at his passer ratings vs. man (75.3) or zone (97.7), that was clearly helpful to Ridder. He didn’t have a unicorn-like pass-catcher in Kyle Pitts at all, who was already on IR with a torn MCL at that point, and you saw opposing teams play a lot of man-coverage in obvious passing situations, without any real separators across the board for Atlanta.
This is something I don’t believe casual football fans realize – playing quarterback in a run-heavy offense, before they ask that guy to deliver in key situations is tough – which is why you can’t blame the coaching staff for protecting Ridder from himself to some degree, in order to not build up bad tendencies.
Now they enter year three under Arthur Smith in ATL, where the O-line really started coming together in 2022, Drake London is coming off a promising rookie campaign and Ridder showed a definite rapport with him as by far his favorite target – a healthy Kyle Pitts. Add a generational running back prospect in Bijan Robinson, who can split out wide and be far more than just an “eligible” in the pattern.
With a potential superstar in Bijan handling the ball, plus Tyler Allgeier as a solid hammer inside, along with the big-play opportunities they can create off play-action, the insane positional flexibility across their skill-position group and hopefully a bigger focus on creating favorable passing looks on early downs, I believe Ridder can absolutely take advantage of that situation.