Kyle Pitts just finished a historic rookie year for a Falcons team that just completed their fourth consecutive losing season (7-10) and second consecutive year drafting in the top-10. While Pitts showed flashes of what appears to be legit Hall of Fame-level talent, his statistical success didn't translate into a significant impact in the win/loss column. Was he the right pick for the Falcons at No.4 in the 2021 draft?
To answer this question more thoroughly, it may help to step back and take a wide-angle view of the league as a whole and what playoff teams are doing to be successful. In consuming one of the best weekends of playoff football in NFL history this past weekend four clear trends emerged among NFL's "Elite Eight":
1. High-level QB play
This isn't exactly rocket-science, but to put it simply -- QBs that got protection in the Divisional Round put up big numbers.
In the Chiefs/Bills game there were only four sacks and six QB hits on 81 pass attempts. Both Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen threw for over 300 yards with ZERO turnovers in what could only be described as an offensive fireworks show for the ages -- 25 points scored in the last two minutes of regulation.
Meanwhile in the NFC, Matthew Stafford of the Rams was only sacked twice in 40+ dropbacks and threw for 366 and two TD as L.A. narrowly avoided spitting the bit in a 30-27 victory over Tampa Bay.
2. High-level Pass Rush
Again, this may seem overly simplistic, but QBs that got pressured didn’t play well in the Divisional Round.
Aaron Rodgers was sacked five times and hit seven times on 29 pass attempts. He didn’t throw a TD and had a QBR of just 19.4
Joe Burrow was sacked NINE times and hit 13 times on 37 attempts. He didn’t throw a TD pass and the Bengals were only able to eek out a last-second victory because the Titans had 3 turnovers, including one inside the Cincinnati 10 and another as the approached game-winning field goal range.
3. High-level play-making at Wide Receiver
Everyone knows that good teams have good weapons, but the extent to which the wide receiver position dominated the Divisional Round may surprise you:
Seven of eight teams had a WR with at least 100 yards; six of them had a WR with at least 100 yards and one TD. The only winning team without a 100-yard receiver was San Francisco.
It's important to specify WR here because no TE topped 100 yards this week and only one caught a TD (Travis Kelce). The Divisional Round was dominated by throwing the football (teams averaged 34 attempts per game) and the leading rusher for the round was Patrick Mahomes with 69 yards. That's not a typo.
4. Clutch kicking
Special teams played a HUGE role in the Divisional Round. The last regulation play of EVERY divisional round game was a made FG. Three of the four games were decided on a last-minute FG and the fourth was sent into OT by a FG.
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Now to bring this back to the Falcons and Kyle Pitts -- looking at these four patterns, how many of these boxes do the Falcons check?
Barring Calvin Ridley either returning or getting replaced, the answer is just one. We have a hella-good place kicker in Younghoe Koo, but of the four factors that contributed to winning playoff teams this past weekend, the Falcons receive failing grades in the three that are most important. And here's the kicker...Kyle Pitts doesn't help you in ANY of them.
So knowing what we now know about this year’s draft class AND what has made teams successful in the playoffs this year, did the Falcons make the right call in selecting Kyle Pitts at No.4?
For starters, Pitts had the second highest yardage total of any rookie TE in NFL history (second to Mike Ditka) finishing No.19 in the league in receiving yards. That's the kind of start you hope for out of the highest-drafted TE in NFL history. While Pitts showed flashes of super-elite pass catching ability, his statistical profile pales a bit when compared to what high-level rookie WRs have done over the last few years.
The last two seasons have seen two of the best rookie receiving years in NFL history. Add to that the 1,137 yards and nine TD New Orleans WR Michael Thomas put up as a rookie and one point becomes abundantly clear -- wide receivers are simply more valuable weapons than tight ends.
This has ALWAYS been the case and it always will be.
As a case study we need look no further than Travis Kelce, who owns the top-two tight end seasons in NFL history. Kelce peaked with his ludicrous 2020 campaign, hauling in 105 passes for 1,416 and 11 TD. That was good for second in the NFL in yards and fifth in TD.
That's right...the best TE season in NFL history wasn't even as good as J'Marr Chase's rookie year.
And again, this wasn't Kelce's only historic season:
Kelce originally set an NFL record with his 1,336 yard season in 2018 before breaking his own record in 2020. Kelce's record-breaking 2018 yardage ranked just 10th in the NFL. TENTH.
This underscores the biggest issue with the Pitts selection – high-level TE play is N E V E R as valuable as high-level WR play.
So all this means J'Marr Chase should have been the selection, right? Well, in the Falcons defense, they expected to return one of the NFL's best young receivers in Calvin Ridley and his 1,300+ receiving yards and nine TD to pair with Pitts. So you can excuse them for passing on J’Marr Chase since the team entered 2021 believing they had a legit WR1 if and when they decided to move on from Julio Jones.
But what about the other areas we talked about? Quarterback play? Pass rush? No rookie QB was going to provide elite QB play with the 2021 Falcon's roster that allowed Matt Ryan
to get sacked/hit 124 times and lacked any semblance of a running game and outside playmaking. Trevor Lawrence and Zach Wilson were AWFUL for very bad teams and Trey Lance barely played. Justin Fields was in & out of the lineup in Chicago and wasn’t much better when he did play. None of them could have succeeded behind a line with the worst left guard in football and a rookie TE as their top weapon.
Pass rush? Micah Parsons ended up being the best defensive player in this entire class, which wasn’t hard to predict. What NOBODY could’ve predicted was that he would play reach an All-Pro level at a different position than he did in college – as a do-everything edge rusher as opposed to a run & hit inside linebacker. Parson showed pass rushing potential as a very good interior blitzer in college, but few could've predicted 13 sacks for a rookie who only collected 6.5 sacks in his entire college career. Still, it’s so easy to look at Parsons and facepalm wondering why the Falcons didn’t take him to fix a pass rush that finished dead last in the NFL with just 18 sacks.
What about Penei Sewell? The rookie tackle graded out better than every OL for the Falcons except for Chris Lindstrom (according to Pro Football Focus). How much better would the team have been with him at RT instead of Kaleb McGary -- who in 20 fewer pass blocking attempts allowed nine sacks to Sewell’s five?
With all that laid out, we ask the question again...was Kyle Pitts the right pick?
Was Pitts the right pick as a player whose talent & production can elevate the Falcons back into contention? No. Is Pitts the right pick as a foundational piece of a franchise turnaround?
To be determined.
The evaluation on Kyle Pitts is utterly incomplete. He was forced to be the No.1 option on a team with a terrible offensive line, no run game, a rookie head coach, and a QB learning a new system. He had good stats that didn’t really impact winning and struggled to find the end zone. But through 17 games he showed flashes of legitimate Hall of Fame-level talent on par with other great tight ends of this era that became cornerstone pieces of Super Bowl contenders (Rob Gronkowski, George Kittle, Travis Kelce, Zach Ertz).
The evaluation becomes even muddier when you consider how many players taken directly behind Pitts had exceptional rookie years (Chase, Sewell, Parsons, & Patrick Surtain). All of
those players except Sewell landed in a MUCH better situations with talent that complimented them and a much lighter burden to carry than what was asked of Pitts. Parsons landed on a talented defensive front alongside DeMarcus Lawrence, Randy Gregory, and Leighton Vander Esch while J'Marr Chase joined a Cincinnati offense with a QB taken first overall in the 2020 draft and proven weapons in Joe Mixon and Tyler Boyd. To put it simply -- this year's most successful rookies played on units with other really good players.
Kyle Pitts seems highly likely to become the player fans hope him to be -- an elite pass catching weapon. However, his impact on the trajectory of the franchise depends on a lot of factors beyond his control. Elite TE’s don’t win championships, but elite weapons are CRUCIAL to succeeding in the playoffs. The problem is that outside weapons are reliant upon quarterback play -- which is largely impacted by line-of-scrimmage play. Ultimately, the No.4 pick in the 2021 draft is WASTED if you don’t fix the same holes that have mired this franchise in mediocrity for the last five years. Until those issues are addressed, Kyle Pitts and his unicorn-like skills will be nothing more than a spectacular sideshow largely ignored by the rest of the NFL on a cellar-dweller team.
Let's pray that's not the case.
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