Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan has had a great deal of success pulling out late victories.
On Thursday, Falcons coach Dan Quinn put Ryan in one of those situations in practice.
With the Falcons trailing 16-10 and needing a touchdown for the victory, the Falcons had the ball on about their 35-yard line with 57 seconds left and two timeouts.
Ryan, showing his early mastery of the new offense, had the Falcons down to the 6-yard line with 18.2 seconds to play. He threw a pass to tight end Jacob Tamme, but the catch was made out of bounds.
On the next play, the Falcons had Tamme and two receivers to the left and two receivers to the right. Roddy White was outside on the right.
Ryan found Tamme, who got his feet down, with 10.2 seconds left. He put a move on safety Kemal Ishmael to get open.
“Those are the ones at the end of the game,” Quinn said. “When to use a timeout? When don’t we (use a timeout)? The must-get-out-of-bounds plays. We did it in this practice and we do them a lot at night (at the closed walk-throughs.)”
The second-team offense, which was guided by Sean Renfree, didn’t score. He drove them down to the 10-yard line with 3.2 seconds left. His pass intended for wide receiver Nick Williams in the endzone was incomplete.
“The whole goal is to make those times feel normal,” Quinn said. “Can we do right longer? Can we keep doing it right, keep doing it right and doing it longer and keep executing. We’re getting there.”
Quinn seems to have fun with putting the team into different situations at practice.
“There’s no script,” Quinn said. “I don’t tell the coaches and I don’t tell the players what it is before we go out. We may show some clips and say, this may come up. But we wait until we get to the live action to pull it out.”
