After the Atlanta Falcons gave him his release, Roddy White did not hold back his opinions about the team’s offense in 2015.
White spoke to ESPN’s Vaughn McClure at the UAB alumni football game on Saturday and he did not pull any punches when it came to his feelings about offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan, saying that he had an inkling that the team didn’t want him during the season and admitting that he wasn’t happy with Shanahan or his own role in the offense.
“What [Shanahan] expected from me and what I expected from him was totally different,” White said. “I expected to play a bigger role in the offense, and that’s what I wanted to do. But he didn’t have that in his desires. He had other people that he wanted to play my role, so he wanted me to be out of the [offense]. That was the whole thing. And it is what it is. I can’t do nothing about it. I can’t change his way of thinking or anything like that. I can just do what I did, which was just handle my business and get myself prepared for this moment.”
White denied that the offense was too complex, as it reportedly was for Matt Ryan.
“No it wasn’t, besides the things [Shanahan] was doing in making six variations to one route,” White said. “It was just episodes throughout the game where I think he mismanaged things and screwed up and we didn’t have the opportunity to win the game, which, I thought, was on him as the offensive coordinator. It wasn’t sound football, but it was things that he was used to doing and things we weren’t used to doing as an offense, and it literally cost us like two games.”
Did White try to confront Shanahan with his grievances?
“Man, I talked to him just about every day about everything,” White asserted. “But it’s like, ‘If I’m talking to you and it’s not getting no better, what do you expect from me?’ He kept trying to tell you all what he’s trying to do with the offense, but for the last 11 weeks of the season, we didn’t do anything. We didn’t turn no curves. The first four weeks were good. We went out there and scored a bunch of points and started off strong. But other than that, we didn’t do nothing the rest of the year.
“We weren’t going out there and averaging over 20 points per game, which is bad. Prior to him being there, we could score 20 points sitting down. Our offense was never really a problem before.”
It’s quite clear that Shanahan’s offense was met with resistance by at least part of the playing staff. During the season, White made his frustrations clear, but this is above and beyond what he said then.
