New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - Can we stop being nice and charitable to Matt Ryan now?

I have never liked Matt Ryan. I thought he was a choke artist. I thought he was a poor leader. I thought his stats were inflated by a desperate Atlanta front office that broke the bank and mortgaged the future to load up an average QB with an arsenal of weapons that at one time included Roddy, Julio, Tony Gonzalez, and Michael Turner and continued to be stocked up with first round picks.

Yet, most Saints fans seemed to have quiet respect for Ryan and consider him a franchise QB and great human being who just happened to have the bad luck of going to the Falcons. I got booted from SR by Andrus Peat and company partly for disrespecting Matt Ryan.

Well, now we see who Matt Ryan is. He is on an average offense that has a great RB and one solid WR but not a ton of depth. He is a little old but not so old for a true franchise QB. And he is totally washed and can't overcome adversity. If you gave him Justin Jefferson and Travis Kelce in addition to what the Colts already have, he would probably look good, because so would Jarred Goff. And thats what the Falcons did during his prime basically. And what they got was the worst QB, who would take them to the playoffs due to a loaded team and guarantee low picks, then choke in the key moments.

So now that its becoming clear I will say it. Matt Ryan is not a golden boy. He is not a franchise QB. He may be a fine person but he is not a good leader on the field. He was never any of these things. He did not make the players around him better, giant salaries and blockbuster draft trades put better players around him and they made him better, while he probably made them worse. He was a system QB on a team that loaded him up with weapons at the expense of the defense and future to make him look better than he was, and even then that look always crumbled in the key moments in the playoffs. He wasn't a respectable equal sparring partner to Brees. He was another Cam, Jameis, Dalton, etc if that. He was the Mark Sanchez to Brees's Tom Brady, but with better weapons than Mark Sanchez. Cam did it with less weapons than Matt Ryan and was in his prime the better QB. I think one other person on the Saints realized this. Unfortunately he became GM of the Falcons and orchestrated a half hearted play for Deshaun Watson as a ploy to dump Ryan.