Former Atlanta Falcons wide receiver and current free agent Roddy White isn’t holding back his opinion on his departure from the Falcons, the team he spent 11 seasons with, and his role with the team during last season. In fact, White is going in on his former team’s utilization of him, or lack thereof.
“They had a role for me coming into the season, and I feel it wasn’t told to me prior to the season,” White said, via CBS Atlanta. “I’m completely fine if someone sits me down and says ‘This is what we want you to do’, but I didn’t get fully where they were going with me.” White continued, “After that I sat down with (offensive coordinator) Kyle (Shanahan) and I thought things would change, and they didn’t change.”
White stated that despite his constant campaigning for a bigger role on offense, the Falcons simply ignored him.
“The reason I didn’t argue and complain, is because it wasn’t going to change anything,” White said. “We started off hot, so there was no need for me to complain about anything,” he said. “As things got worse throughout the season, and you go in and complain about some things you think should change, and nothing changes, you just sit back and say what happens happens.”
White, 34, stated that he wants to continue to play and firmly believes that the Falcons would have been more successful had they used him more often.
This echoes comments White made criticizing Kyle Shanahan in 2015:
“For me, at the end of the day, I want to catch passes,” White told ESPN.com. “I’m not out here just (expletive) around just to sit around to just block (expletive) people all day. It’s not what I want to do.
“I’ve contributed to offenses for this franchise for the last nine, 10 years. It always bothers me when I go out and don’t catch any balls in a game because it hasn’t happened in so long.”
White maintains that his departure from Atlanta was a good thing.
“Being released wasn’t a bad thing for me, because I wasn’t going to be on that team and accept the same role the following year, or then I would have self-destructed around there,” he said. “I would have went crazy if I would have had to go through that another year. I can’t play football like that, I was miserable.
“A lot of times we had opportunities to win games, and I wasn’t put in that position to make that play, and I felt like we lost those games because I wasn’t in put in that position to make that play. And I felt like if I was, then we would have been in the playoffs.
“That my side of the story.”
It’s hard to tell if White catches on with a new team. He is likely to get at least a look once training camp gets underway and injuries start setting in. But White may have to wait until the regular season before getting a chance to suit up for another NFL game and there is no guarantee that that will ever happen.