The unshakable confidence of Falcons’ Mohamed Sanu

“He celebrates when he makes plays and takes ownership when he doesn’t, that’s for sure,” said his quarterback, Matt Ryan.

But recovery is swift.

“I’ve never seen a player in the NFL who hasn’t dropped pass, ever. It’s going to happen. You’re human,” Sanu said. “Obviously, you try to catch every single pass. But you just move on.”

There, let’s talk of that subject no more, until, at least, the next inevitable drop.

For it’s when Sanu makes a play that the good stuff happens.

In these most political and opinionated of times, you can’t pry so much as a mild public rebuke from Sanu. (As during the Super Bowl, when the media briefly flocked to the lone Muslim in the game to get to get his views on President Trump’s then-new travel ban from certain majority Muslim countries. His response then, as it is now: “I’m just here to play football.” Or, “I’m a football player, not a politician.”)

On the field, though, Sanu overflows with observations. Mostly on how sorry that fellow across the way happens to be. The quiet man lights up like a Broadway marquee when the ball’s in the air.

Fellow receiver Taylor Gabriel calls Sanu the Falcons’ most accomplished talker of smack, hands down.

“If you’re whipping somebody and telling him about it, it doesn’t really help him,” Sanu said, explaining the deeper meaning behind shallow talk. “It’s a physical and mental advantage. It’s a long game. You got to be able to talk your smack and break their confidence down little by little.”

Imagine some of the sharper, more deflating adjectives, gerunds and phrases, suitable only for the premium channels.

And then repeat them after taking a big gulp of helium.

That’s Sanu after a catch.

When Sanu, the Falcons’ second-leading receiver and their leading in-game orator, begins the biting commentary, his teammates smirk and the neighborhood mutts howl.

“(His voice) is higher than you think sometimes for a 220-pound big guy,” coach Dan Quinn said, raising his own several octaves, to near dog-whistle level as a demonstration.

“He has a little bit of a high voice when he gets excited. Most of the stuff you can’t really say in an interview. He just gets excited. Which is good,” Ryan, said.

With the rare exception as per the Lions game, this soprano trapped in a baritone’s body continues to supply the Falcons’ offense with a most useful combination of the graceful catch and the difficult one, as well as a brashness tempered by toughness.

As ever, Julio Jones is the headliner of this receiving corps. Someone on the other side has to produce when Jones has defensive backs hanging from him like acorns from an oak. Someone has to keep the drive alive when there is no other option. Someone has to go get the ball, focusing on it alone with some safety bearing down, determined to separate his solar from his plexus.

Joyful, his coach calls Sanu, toward those pursuits.

“What I love about him (is) he really represents how much fun you can have playing this game,” Quinn said. “It totally comes out in practice, and it comes out in a game. I’d like this time in their lives to be the best time they ever had playing football. Kick butt and work really hard at it. He exemplifies all those things.”

Fearless, Ryan calls him.

Sanu would agree on all counts. Especially the fearless part. Maybe he’s subject to a touch of claustrophobia now and then, but otherwise he can name no particular fears, rational or otherwise. Certainly, catching a pass over the middle in the land of bad intent is not something to activate his flight response.

“I love this game so much, and I have so much confidence in myself that I can make any play out there – there’s nothing to be scared of.

“I am fearless. I know what I signed up for when I go across the middle. If you’re going to come hit me you better hit me, because I’m not just going to go down easy.”

When Sanu arrived in Atlanta in 2016 after signing a five-year, $32 million free-agent deal to sub in for Roddy White, there were nitpickers out there who fretted that the Falcons had overpaid. He, after all, labored in the shadow of A.J. Green in Cincinnati and was coming off his least productive season since his rookie year of 2012. He had built the first impression of someone given to lapses in concentration and the careless drop.

That same player has ranked atop wide receivers for the lowest drop rate in the NFL the past two full seasons, according to Pro Football Focus. Last season, he paired the highest catch percentage of his short career with the second-highest output of receiving yardage (653). At the pace of his first three games this season, Sanu would set career highs for catches (80) and yardage (853).

Figuring things out, that’s part of Sanu’s makeup. The son of immigrants from the west African nation of Sierra Leone, he spent a large part of his childhood in New Jersey living with his older, married sister after his mother returned to her native country. (Aminata Koroma is visiting Atlanta now, keeping her son well-stuffed on fufu, a cassava and plantain dish).

Sanu believes he developed a heightened self-reliance and self-confidence at a tender age. He figured out how to get rides to and from high school football practice then just as he figured out more recently that he really needed to latch onto the football before trying to run with it.

The attitude is a perfect match for the ability. You’d be confident, too, if in addition to building an enriching career as a catcher you had a perfect completion percentage as an NFL thrower. Having played a little quarterback in high school and dabbling with the forward pass at Rutgers, Sanu attempted five passes in Cincinnati. And completed five, for two touchdowns.

If the Falcons wish to let him throw out of the Wildcat, he’s ready. “You call it up, I’m going to do it. If you don’t, we ain’t going to do it. But if you call it, it’s going to be executed,” Sanu said.

And overpaid? Don’t hear that so much anymore.

Sanu said he took little of that kind of talk to heart. Questioning his self-worth never has been a hobby.

“Playing in Cincinnati a lot of people wouldn’t see what I could do. The Falcons organization saw something in me. They believed in me like I believe in myself,” he said.