Three players the Falcons could replace Calvin Ridley with

One of the big stories heading into the Atlanta Falcons’ defeat to the Panthers was the loss of Calvin Ridley. Atlanta’s WR1 was announced to be missing the game with a “personal issue”, a recurrence of the issue that kept him from the Falcons trip to London three weeks previous. Mid-game, Ridley released a statement announcing that he would be making the decision to step away from football to focus on his mental wellbeing.

While the Falcons have expressed their support for Ridley, with Ryan saying “we love him and we support him” in his post-match press conference, the Falcons are in a bind, in a football sense. Following Julio Jones’ departure, it was expected that Ridley would occupy the spot of WR1. Even with Ridley on the active roster, the receiving corps was mighty thin. The cupboard is bare, in that sense, and the Falcons managed a paltry 131 passing yards on Sunday.

If Atlanta is going to seriously contend for the remainder of the season, until Ridley is back in the fold, they need to add to their receiver’s room. There’s only so much you can achieve with Kyle Pitts and Cordarrelle Patterson, and with trips to New Orleans and Dallas on the horizon, they need viable targets for Ryan to hit in order to take attention away from the aforementioned Pitts and Patterson, as well as free up Gage, Sharpe, and the like.

With that in mind, here are three players the Falcons could look to bring in in order to keep their air game clicking.