Eighth overall pick in April’s draft Michael Penix Jr. was the main event during the Atlanta Falcons’ first preseason game against the Miami Dolphins on Friday night, and there was a question of whether or not he would live up to the hype and look as good as most people expected him to. Well, earlier today on The Morning Shift former Falcons quarterback and now Atlanta Falcons Radio Network Analyst Dave Archer joined The Morning Shift and gave his evaluation of Michael Penix Jr. in his NFL debut, and he said “he’s got the goods".
“He’s got the goods. He’s got exactly what they saw when they went up and evaluated him two times when they went to Washington and they took all the guys up there to look at him throw, and then when you put the tape on, did that come to life during training camp, during OTAs it did, during practice it did, and in the game you want it to translate to game speed, and Michael was completely comfortable in the game, ball came out on time, he had a good idea of what was going on.” Archer said.
Arch also made it known that even though it was a vanilla preseason game plan, Offensive Coordinator Zac Robinson still helped Penix succeed with a good game plan.
“Give Zac Robinson a ton of credit, they didn’t do a lot of different things, there wasn’t a lot of diversity in the personnel groups he had an idea of where guys were gonna get lined up. Miami did him a little bit of a solid because they were pretty vanilla defensively, so when he got press coverage and single high safety he knew he could take a shot on a fade route.” Dave said.
Finally, Arch finished his thought by talking about the Falcons first round pick showed all the qualities coaches want to see in a first round quarterback.
“He was comfortable, he was poised, he was confident, he had an idea of what they were doing, and so I think that Zac [Robinson] did a good job too of really giving him stuff he knew what to process through.” the former Falcons quarterback said.
Yes it was only one preseason game, but after seeing what Michael Penix did on Friday night, and then hearing it was as good as it looked from a former quarterback, Falcons fans can’t help but be excited about their future franchise quarterback.