2019 Summer Sleeper: Atlanta Falcons

In our annual 32-part Summer Sleeper series, DLF scribes identify a lightly-touted player on each NFL roster who may be worthy of your consideration. Our subjects all have varying levels of “sleeperness,” but each merits a bit of in-depth discussion here in the Premium Content section.

To help everybody along, we are going to be categorizing our sleepers under one of three headings:

Super Deep Sleepers – Players who aren’t roster-worthy in 12-team leagues, but are still worth keeping an eye on.
Deep Sleepers – An end of the roster player who is more often than not on the waiver wire in 12-team leagues.
Sleeper – A likely rostered player who makes for a good trade target. Their startup ADP puts them out of the top-175 or so.

Because we aren’t going to give you the likes of mainstream sleepers, most of these players will undoubtedly fizzle. All we are asking is for you to keep an open mind and perhaps be willing to make room for one of these players on your bench. You never know when the next Adam Thielen is going to spring up. Feel free to add your own thoughts about our choice for the designated sleeper, or nominate one of your own in the comments below.

The Atlanta Falcons offense is one of the most top-heavy in the NFL. With Julio Jones, Calvin Ridley, Mohamed Sanu, and Austin Hooper vacuuming up 73.5% of the targets in 2018, there aren’t a lot of extras to go around in the passing game. This is without factoring in a healthy Devonta Freeman who missed all but two games in 2018 and has averaged more than 4.5 targets per game over the last four seasons.

Because of the logjam in the passing game, we’ll turn to a deep sleeper at the running back position.