ATLANTA – There's no doubt about it, losing to your division rival in overtime at home stings.
With that being said, there were still a lot of bright spots to come out of Atlanta's gut-wrenching loss to the Saints, including the promising play of rookie wide receiver, Calvin Ridley.
After scoring his first career touchdown in the Falcons' Week 2 win over the Panthers, Ridley followed up the performance with an even better game.
A seven catch, 146 yards and three touchdown type of performance.
Ridley became the first rookie in franchise history to score three touchdowns in a game.
And of course, Ridley would rather have the win, but he did acknowledge that setting that record "means a lot."
"It was pretty good … those scores. [I} felt good out there," Ridley said.
Atlanta's most explosive play of the day came from Ridley when he ran a go-route and quarterback Matt Ryan found him deep, turning it into a 75-yard scoring play.
All throughout the preseason and through the first two weeks of the season, Ryan, offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian and wide receiver Julio Jones talked about the continued emphasis of taking deep shots down the field.
That emphasis paid off in a big way on Sunday.
"We felt like we had an advantage in the passing game," Ryan said. "And we had a lot of really good matchups for us. We created a lot of explosives in the passing game today and when you do that and you continue to have success with it, you continue to take those chances."
The addition of Ridley to the offense was a key asset and Ryan explains just why we could there's reason to believe we could expect to see more of these types of performance from Ridley.
"He stepped up when he had the opportunity too," Ryan said. "It was clear from the start the game plan would be having two guys to account for Julio and a safety coming down from the opposite side to account for where Mohamed was at. That leaves Calvin singled up in one-on-one coverage. I thought Sark did a great job of taking advantage of that ... calling plays to get him shots down the field. But at the end of the day, Calvin has to go out there and make those plays and he's done that for us all season but today was special. I was proud of him."
