NFL Breakout Candidates 2024: Saints WR A.T. Perry
A.T. Perry caught 152 passes for just under 2,400 yards and 16 touchdowns across his consecutive first-team All-ACC selections at Wake Forest. In a wide receiver class that saw four straight guys selected in the 20s of the first round, rankings seemed to be all over the place beyond that.
Things didn’t start optimally for him, as he didn’t dress over the first seven weeks due to being placed on the non-football injury list and having to wait his turn before Michael Thomas ultimately got hurt again. Perry only logged 24 combined snaps over his first two games in action, but then stepped in and functioned as a quasi-starter over the final eight weeks of the season.
Altogether, he hauled in 12 of 18 targets for 246 yards and four touchdowns, for a passer rating of 149.3. What’s impressive about that limited production that he did have, was the fact that all but two of his receptions resulted in first downs while only dropping one pass.
Now with New Orleans finally ending that weird relationship they had gotten to with Thomas and Cedrick Wilson as the biggest name added to the mix, following two disappointing years in Miami.
Why Saints WR A.T. Perry could break out in the 2024 NFL season
Watching A.T. Perry’s first game of extensive action at Minnesota in Week 10, the first thing that was encouraging to me right away was seeing him line up and run routes from every single receiver sp. That speaks to a lot of trust from this coaching staff for a rookie.
You can put him outside and run deep post routes off heavy play-action, where they want to put the single-high safety in conflict with a crosser in front of him, as Perry stays disciplined with the stem and tests the defender’s peripheral vision before breaking across behind him.
Yet, A.T. Perry can also run hooks over the middle of the field as the number three in trips, where he sits down and splits that space between guys on the second level. He shows quality initial bursts out of his stance to get up near full speed quickly. Then he can glide through dig cuts effectively and present an attractive target over the middle, as the linebackers expand and safeties haven’t erased that space in front of them.
I like his presence as a vertical big slot, but he also looked good running those in-cuts from the backside of the formation, which is how teams across the NFL open deploy their best wideout.
Perry is twitchier than you’d expect for a guy with his body type, hesitating and fooling DBs with extensive releases or breaking across the face of defenders further down the field, paired with a well-timed and effective swipe-by move.
He’s sudden with pulling his shoulders away from contact and not having his progress impeded by defenders, particularly when working against more static zone looks. On several occasions, I saw him break free from press and then tempo himself to expand that window between the corner and safety in cover-two when running fades.
Unfortunately, he didn’t receive many opportunities on those types of looks, and overall, he only averaged 1.18 yards per route run as a rookie. That’s about half of what his teammate Olave registered in his debut campaign.
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Something that made A.T. Perry one of the biggest creators of highlights at Wake Forest is his ability to play above the rim and come down with catches over the heads of defenders. He can do this even when they’re in a solid position to make plays on the ball themselves.
Perry hauled in four of six contested targets as a rookie and all but one of his six targets of 20+ yards, where he can kind of hang up in the air and extend those go-go-gadget arms to pluck balls off the top shelf. I really like the way he tracks the deep ball and gains positioning for back-shoulder placement, but doesn’t panic or allow his man to go for the punch-out early.
The area he’s always been sort of underwhelming at is creating with the ball in his hands. Less than 20% of his collegiate production came after the catch and he only gained 20 YAC this past season.
You can certainly argue that this is more of a function of the type of downfield usage he’s received, but for a guy with his flexibility and the way he can cut outside his frame for a tall player, you’d expect him to add a little more in this capacity.
As a blocker, A.T. Perry operates under good control, eating up the cushion to off-defenders and gathering himself without loading up his punch excessively, which would allow guys to elude him potentially. When the run is designed away from him, he adjusts his angles accordingly, to cut off the path for his corner.
You can put him at the tip of the bunch and he’ll occupy a slot defender over him, in order to not scrape from the backside. It’s not a matchup that’ll favor Perry, but in lighter sets, him having a linebacker pulled out with him and creating solid initial movement on that guy to help the running back blow through the line.
Because Perry is lanky and rather light, when defenders do get their hands inside his chest as a blocker in the run or screen game, they can dictate terms to him largely.
A.T. Perry isn’t a name you see pop up in a lot of written pieces about potential breakout candidates. The fantasy community doesn’t have any under-the-radar metrics they can really grasp here to predict him being a sleeper for 2024, but based on the signs he was able to show when given playing time, he should become a productive pass-catcher.
Obviously, Olave remains first in the pecking order and they got a lot out of Rashid Shaheed this past season, with the speed he provides vertically and horizontally. However, with offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak coming over from San Francisco and the offensive world he comes from, this shouldn’t look like what we saw from Pete Carmichael there for so many years (where they just hammer throws short of the sticks).
Moreover, understanding that this team is aging defensively and needs to take pressure off those guys, they will encourage Derek Carr to not blindly check it down to his running constantly and drive up the usage of play-action.
A.T. Perry operating on the intermediate level of the field, being able to take advantage of isolated matchups at the X, but also work the soft spots vs. zone looks when moved inside, is something I see as a more prevalent piece of the pie.