halfway through In the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LI, Matt Ryan dropped back to pass on what would unfortunately be the most memorable play of his career. You remember the stakes: He was trying to hold off the charging Patriots, who once fell 28-3. To this point, Ryan has been an unequal playoff player throughout his stellar career, seemingly limited not only physically but cosmologically, and lacking the charm of the greats.
He did a lot, helping to revive a franchise reeling from the fallout from Michael Vick, however, as he became one of the best quarterbacks in the league, he also became famous for what he couldn’t do. For a while, he couldn’t win the playoffs. Then he couldn’t take a team to the Super Bowl. He certainly couldn’t escape. Whenever he tries, he seems to unleash a kind of football bingo card for the worst kind of disaster and less costly moments.
Each mistake compounded the fact that Ryan was interested. He wanted to be great, and everyone knew he wanted to be great, and so when he failed, whether it was his fault or not, you didn’t just hear the athletic debates question him — wondering if he was “elite,” a description that barely existed before Ryan and his classmates. Class of 2008 quarterback Joe Flacco – but you can feel Ryan questioning himself. He seemed to resent that the outer narrative reflected his inner voice.
But during the 2016 season, everything changed. Ryan was the MVP of the regular season. During that playoff run, he threw nine touchdowns and had no interceptions. He bested Aaron Rodgers in the NFC Championship Game and, up until that point, bested Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. Not only was he less than nine minutes away from the championship, but also the potential to clinch a spot in the Hall of Fame. He was a quarterback in the 98th percentile of his craft, on the verge of moving up to the 99th overall.
So he dropped back, and while we remember everything that went wrong on the play – Patriots linebacker Donta Hightower lunged from the far edge … the basic sequence on a comeback that changed a lot of legacies – some Falcons coaches will remember one thing. In private conversations upon reliving that agonizing loss, they remember that Ryan, after doing so much right—shunning pressure and spotting an open receiver on the field—did something wrong: He got close. He paused, for a split second, with the ball in his hands, rather than cutting it off. There’s a reason Bill Belichick later said he was “a split second away from being a bad play” for the Patriots. However, since there’s always a “however” with Ryan, if he had just decided to release the ball, he trusted what he saw a little faster, and did what immortal quarterbacks do by habit and instinct, if he had just died Ryan would have.. .
I will admit it I was sad to watch the 2022 season games as Matt Ryan did, which is strange considering all his problems are first world problems and first world quarterback problems. He announced Monday that he will air games for CBS this year, an official unofficial retirement as he waits for the Colts to pay him the $12 million owed under his contract. By all accounts, Ryan has had a great career and a happy life. Until he was demoted this year, he didn’t have to fight for playing time. He worked hard and produced. He was an All-Pro, a four-time Pro Bowler, and the second-fastest thrower for 60,000 yards. He threw 383 regular season touchdown passes and completed nearly 66% of his passes. It was an Atlanta civic treasure. He has amassed a fortune and has a beautiful, expanding young family and his health.
What saddened me about him wasn’t that he failed to win the Super Bowl, or even that he failed to get back to his form in 2016 and 2017, when he was probably at his best. He never quite became what he wanted most: the undisputed great midfielder. His drive was addictive, seductive, and inspiring, helping him transcend limited material gifts. And he was very close, better than 98% of quarterbacks in NFL history. But the last 1% — well, Ryan and I have talked many times over the years, and the subtext to every conversation is how to take the last step, from very, very good to great. Nobody knows how you do it, there’s no evidence, and the gap is so narrow that you could argue he achieved it or not, depending on performance, and you’d be right either way.
But he settled into that dark, vague space of ignorance. In 2013, after the Atlanta Falcons lost to the Patriots when Ryan’s last-second pass fell incomplete in the end zone, I stood with Tony Gonzalez and his family and friends in a parking garage attached to the stadium. Ryan and his wife Sarah walked by. After their deaths, Gonzalez said, “Matt is an excellent quarterback. But he’s not elite. He’s very close. He’ll get there, but he’s got some learning to do.”
However: it didn’t get there. Or, if he did, he didn’t stay there long. Along the way, he became known for something far worse than a career most quarterbacks dream of: he became known for losing. It was an awful kind of loss, too. He wasn’t a heroic loser, throwing for a million yards on missed efforts, like Detroit’s Matthew Stafford. Nor was Ryan an actuarial loser, because anyone with access to Pro Football Reference can look up his stats and find out that he won the majority of his games, and that he also won more games than famous winners like Eli Manning, who has a similar sample size.
No, after going 28-3, Ryan has become known for death spiral losses, losses that crush lives, uproot coaches’ families and mourn not just a person and a team but a city, losses that still seem unexpected, losses associated with the quarterback. Instead of being defensive, no matter how big of a cushion Ryan would gift his team, she lost with a post-Super Bowl lead of 17 points to Miami, 10 to Carolina, 20 to Dallas, 16 to Chicago, and 17 to Tampa Bay and Tom Brady (because of course), 10 to Washington. Losses that didn’t stop last season when Atlanta traded Ryan to Indianapolis — when Ryan became the kind of franchise quarterback whose franchise decided to look for another franchise quarterback — and the Colts went up 31 against the Vikings, just so you know.
Now that he’s gone, it’s more than just the supposed end to a great career. His struggle is over. He will never get where he wants to go. The size of Ryan’s losses seems inconceivable against the tiny margin between very good and very large, between the 98th and 99th percentiles. But perhaps that margin is small in numerical terms only. Perhaps when we talk about quarterbacks, and the indistinguishable traits that separate them, the traits are more obvious than any of us want to admit, certainly the NFL decision makers who build teams led by near-magic players. Perhaps there is a great gap, and the failure is not in exploration but in the obstinate desire we have to make hope, when everyone seems to know how it will end, even the man under the center.
Back in 2012, after a long talk about how badly Ryan wanted to take that final step and how difficult it would be, I wished him well.
“Well, if you find out, call me,” he said.
I said, “I wish it was that simple.”
“You and I are both.”
For me, HIGHTOWER’S The ribbon sack wasn’t Matt Ryan’s most memorable game at Super Bowl LI. This came after a few minutes. It was a 28-20 Falcons win, but now a Patriots win looks likely, even if no one knows how it will happen, only that it will happen, due to the stark certainty of Tom Brady. But then Ryan Freeman hit it for 39 yards. And two plays later, he not only executed one of the greatest plays in Super Bowl history, but something that at the time sounded like a man declaring his presence on the most exclusive stage in the highest position possible, overcoming not only circumstances but himself. The hours of work, trying to turn his mistakes into something less than a flaw, seemed to be paying off.
First, he backed off and avoided the impulses, which he didn’t do very well. Then, he threw a runaway, which often ended in disaster in past playoff games—like when he threw a pick-six against the Packers in 2011. But his throws to Julio Jones on the sideline were better than perfect, better than Bradshaw to Swann, Montana to Taylor, From Favre to Freeman, from Elway to Smith, from Warner to Bros., from Brady to Brown, from Manning to Tyree, better than anything like Bart Starr, Joe Namath, Bob Grace, Phil Simms, Doug Williams, Jeff Hostler or Mark Rybien Or Troy Aikman or Steve Young or a lot of Super Bowl winners throw them on their pre-world day. It was the kind of scroll that seemed destined to change history and legacy, that was played back for generations with heroic music behind it…
But we know what happened next, a disaster with a world championship on the line that even now is hard to comprehend. The Patriots stuffed an inning. Then Ryan was sacked for a loss of 12 yards, which is the only kind of sack you can take as Ryan’s career continues, he always seemed to take it. A completion to put Atlanta within field goal range—a completion that would have restored Ryan to a Super Bowl champion—was erased by a holding call. Then an incomplete punt went back to New England, and Tom Brady took over again.
We know Matt Ryan wasn’t solely responsible for it, but he contributed to it, and he couldn’t stop it, and that was even the following season, when he led the Falcons to the playoffs and won the playoffs. On the road and almost getting the better of the eventual champions, the Eagles, he couldn’t stop what would happen over the coming years. Matt Ryan will never forget history. He might end up in the Hall of Fame. But he labored with his life to bridge the chasm between very good and very great and ended up as a model of charm itself. His most memorable throws are most memorable for what he wasn’t, for what he wasn’t, if anyone remembers them at all.