Julio Jones is a great player on a bad team. New Falcons coach Dan Quinn said last week that he wants to “celebrate great players” and “collect more great players.” Since Quinn will have control over the roster, we can assume that Jones, whose contract is set to lapse after next season, is in line for an extension. And moving to secure the future of a great player has to be considered a great move, does it not?
Here’s where I play contrarian. Here’s why I suggest that keeping Jones — whose selection at the cost of five draft picks I endorsed in April 2011 — mightn’t be the best course. This isn’t to say Jones hasn’t been as good as advertised. He has. But he’s a wide receiver, and you don’t need the league’s best receiver to be its best team.
If anyone should know that, it’s the man just imported from Seattle. Quinn’s Seahawks came within a yard of consecutive Super Bowl titles without having a 1,000-yard receiver. Twenty-one NFL wideouts gained 1,000 yards last season; 23 did it in 2013. Of those 44, only two played in the subsequent Super Bowl, and both of those (Demaryius Thomas and Eric Decker in 2013) had Peyton Manning at quarterback.
Wide receiver has become a devalued NFL currency, same as the feature back. Tampa Bay had two 1,000-yard receivers (Mike Evans, Vincent Jackson) in 2014 and won a total of two games. The NFL’s best wideout of the past seven years has been Calvin Johnson, whose teams have made the playoffs twice and gone 0-2 therein.
The Falcons drafted Jones because they deemed him a difference-maker, and there are games when he’s the best player on the field. (Even on a chilly Monday night at Lambeau Field when Aaron Rodgers, who would be named the league’s MVP, was slinging for the other side.) But the Falcons lost that game. And in the grand scheme, how much difference has Jones made?
The Falcons are 33-31 in the four regular seasons since his drafting, having made the playoffs twice; they were 37-27 in the four seasons before he arrived, likewise qualifying for the postseason twice. The 4-12 of 2013 occurred at least in part because Jones was lost after the season’s fifth game, but the Falcons were already 1-4. And the 37-27 from 2007-2010 includes the 4-12 season when Michael Vick went to prison and Bobby Petrino lit out for the Ozarks.
In a perfect world, a team would cling to a talent like Jones until he retires. Owing to the NFL’s unyielding salary cap, roster-building is a zero-sum game. Whatever you pay a superstar is money that could be spent on three or four useful players elsewhere. The Falcons didn’t go 6-10 after 4-12 because they had Jones; they went 10-22 because they had almost nothing else.
In a feature on ESPN.com, the website Pro Football Focus rated the Falcons as being 10 above-average players from a Super Bowl. According to PFF’s ratings, the Falcons have four above-average players: Jones, Desmond Trufant, Matt Ryan and (curiously enough) Steven Jackson. That’s three skill players, albeit one who’ll probably be cut, and a cornerback. Every lineman or linebacker is rated average or worse.
This tells us the Falcons need help almost everywhere. They can’t cut Ryan because they’ll be Tampa Bay if they do, but they’ve spent the past few years proving they can’t win a Super Bowl with just Ryan and his excellent receivers. I defended the drafting of Jones because he was a top-shelf talent. (And those five picks sent to Cleveland haven’t availed the Browns much, have they?) But the way of the NFL, even now more than in 2011, is that the quarterback makes his receivers, not the other way around.
Two wideouts gained more than 100 yards in the most recent Super Bowl. One was Julian Edelman, a college quarterback who was the 232nd pick of the 2009 draft. The other was Chris Matthews, an undrafted free agent who’d never caught an NFL pass until that night in Glendale.
No one disputes that Julio Jones is a splendid player, but the Falcons’ roster is too flimsy to afford a luxury item. Their long-term money would be better spent on upfront heft.
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