The biggest event in sports has arrived, and the NFL’s final game of the season brought the biggest names in the sport to the West Coast this week. On Sunday’s episode of “The Athletic Show,” former MVP quarterback and new Atlanta Falcons president of football Matt Ryan joined the show to break down Super Bowl LX and the expectations for next season after a winter of change across the league.
Ryan, who was named to the Falcons front office in early January, spent this season as a studio analyst for CBS Sports after retiring from football after 15 years. Having watched the league from the outside all season, he marveled at how complete the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots are while being led by quarterbacks who took very different routes to this level of performance.
“You saw this growth and development of Drake Maye and him really explode onto the scene in the second half of the season and jump into the MVP category,” Ryan said. “I think, probably about mid-November, we were all sitting there on the desk watching, like, ‘New England is for real.’”
Maye was a close second in MVP voting to Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford but still finished an eye-popping statistical campaign in just his second year. As Ryan watched, he noticed Maye’s best assets were the key to great quarterbacking: his arm and head.
“I think he’s been really accurate. His downfield throwing — in the first half of the season, nobody was doing it better than he was. Hitting on seemingly everything when they pushed the ball down the field,” he said. “And then the maturity to be able to handle the success they have had. He seems unfazed by it in his disposition, so I’ve been impressed by that.”
On the other side of the field is Sam Darnold, whose early career struggles nearly washed the 2018 No. 3 pick out of the league. But in Year 7, he blossomed with the Minnesota Vikings, and this season showed his belated breakout wasn’t just a flash in the pan. He signed with the Seahawks and continued to excel, becoming one of the best deep passers in the league and leading Seattle back to the Super Bowl in his first season there.
Darnold’s late-career breakout looked familiar to Ryan’s, who started well as a young quarterback but also suffered a performance lull before succeeding later in his career. After winning rookie of the year in 2008, Ryan was up and down until winning the MVP in 2016 at age 31. Darnold’s success, like Ryan’s, has been a testament to perseverance and adaptability.
“It’s awesome because I feel like experience only counts if you can go out there and perform,” Ryan said. “So when you get to that space where you’re like, ‘OK, I’ve been through this situation before, and my physical skill set is still at its absolute best, I can still make it happen,’ that’s an awesome place to be at. I think for me, it was Year 5 to about Year 11 or 12 was that space of, ‘Man, I’ve got all this good experience underneath, and I’ve got all of this ability that I’ve always had. I can do exactly what I want to do physically and know exactly what I want to do mentally,’ and that produced the most consistent results of my career.
“I think Sam is at that space. He’s gotten there a different way, but I do think he’s in that spot. You watch him throw on the run, you watch him get outside the pocket, you watch his accuracy, his velocity — that is all there. But he also looks comfortable doing it. He’s in the sweet spot right now, and he’s got the right coaches around him. And I think that’s been the case for the last three stops he’s been.”
But as exciting as the Super Bowl is, it marks the conclusion of the season and the start of next year’s work. Ryan is among the many new faces organizations brought in across the league to help either rebuild lagging franchises or get talented ones over the hump. He inherits a team with quarterback questions of its own, with Michael Penix Jr. undergoing another ACL surgery amid questions about whether he can make it in the NFL under center. But Ryan says he’s seen his new quarterback up close and believes the talent is there to build a great quarterback.
You can watch the full conversation in the latest episode of “The Athletic Show” on Fire TV and wherever you get your podcasts.