Atlanta Falcons ripped on Twitter for poor decision making

These past couple of weeks have been chaos for the Atlanta Falcons. From their pursuit of Deshaun Watson to their trade of Matt Ryan, there has been barely any downtime for fans.

One thing that has gotten overshadowed is the Falcons’ free agent signings. They quietly have had a solid free agency. Many expected the team to be value shoppers and they certainly have been but they made a huge mistake with one of their signings.

Falcons signing Lorenzo Carter creates other consequences

If you are unfamiliar, in the NFL there are things called compensatory picks in the draft where you get extra draft picks depending on players you lose vs. the players you sign, and the Falcons have lost out on a pick due to their signing of Lorenzo Carter.

It is pretty degrading to read the first part of that tweet, but sometimes the truth hurts.

Atlanta lost Foye Oluokun and Russell Gage via free agency and they were bound to receive fourth-round and fifth-round compensatory draft picks, however, as the tweet says, they lost out on those two picks due to the signings of Marcus Mariota and Lorenzo Carter.

Now, the Marcus Mariota signing you can excuse, they needed a quarterback in the worst way after trading away Matt Ryan, and Mariota was the best fit for the team.

What you cannot excuse is losing out on a draft pick because you sign a rotational linebacker to a one-year deal.

This is essentially using a fifth-round draft pick on a player who has had limited production in his career and only getting him for one year.

This simply is poor planning by the Falcons front office and as the tweet says it’s “how bad teams stay bad.”

This decision to sign Carter is hard to defend as this is bound to be a lost year and Carter is not going to help the Falcons make the playoffs.