T10YL - T.J. Yates for Akeem Dent
Bringing the first of T.J. Yates' three or four Texans tenures to a close.
The Names: Houston Texans receive: Akeem Dent. Atlanta Falcons receive: T.J. Yates.
The Team Context: The Texans had not played any games since trading away former starting quarterback Matt Schaub in March. Schaub’s departure was preceded by the arrival of Ryan Fitzpatrick in free agency and followed by the arrival of Tom Savage in the draft. With the short-term and long-term quarterback needs filled by new coach Bill O’Brien’s chosen men, the Texans continued to empty out their quarterback depth chart. On June 18, they announced that Fitzpatrick would be the team’s starter and that they were releasing T.J. Yates (more on that later).
The Falcons were mentioned frequently in our Matt Schaub post, but not the early-2010s Falcons. Their 2011 first-round pick, Julio Jones, had already proven himself as an electric talent with the capacity to elevate an offense. Jones made his first Pro Bowl in 2012, spearheading Matt Ryan’s passing attack along with veterans Roddy White and Tony Gonzalez on a 13-3 Falcons team. But in 2013, Jones fractured his foot five weeks into the season. His playing time went to Harry Douglas, and defenses increased their attention on White and Gonzalez, resulting in an uninspiring 4-12 record commensurate with the team’s 20th-best offense and 27th-best defense.
The Player Context: You may recall that Matt Schaub led the Texans to the playoffs in 2011 but was prevented from playing by a Lisfranc injury. In truth, Schaub only led the Texans to a 7-3 record before picking up his injury at the end of Houston’s tenth game (a blowout of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers). The next man up was Matt Leinart, who spotted the Texans a 17-10 lead over the Jacksonville Jaguars before exiting with a broken collarbone and ceding the floor to Yates to hold on for a 20-13 victory. Yates started the first game of his career against the Falcons (who were pretty good that season) and won it, then beat the Bengals the next week to get the Texans to 10-3. Houston lost their final three games of the regular season but backed into the playoffs where they had a first-round rematch with Cincinnati. Yates went 11-for-20 and only threw for 159 yards, but you wouldn’t know that from the 31-10 final score that brought the Texans their first playoff win in franchise history.
But we weren’t coming off Yates’ 2011 glory days; we were coming off his 2013 gory days where he replaced an injured Matt Schaub mid-game and then threw a pick-six before losing his job to Case Keenum. With two new quarterbacks added by the Texans already, there would only be room for one of Keenum or Yates on the roster.
Akeem Dent was born and raised in Atlanta, matriculating at the University of Georgia before he was drafted in the third round of the 2011 NFL Draft. Given the quantity of extremely talented football players who hail from Georgia, the respectable proportion of those that go on to attend the University of Georgia, and the fact that the Falcons are the only team in the state, you may expect that this is a pretty common occurrence. You would’ve been correct with respect to recent history – the Falcons had drafted Georgia-native Bulldogs in 2006 (D.J. Shockley), 2007 (Martrez Milner), and 2008 (Thomas Brown). Perhaps because those three players combined to play only eight games in the NFL (Shockley didn’t even earn a Pro-Football Reference page), the Falcons cooled on Georgia products, with Dent the only UGA player selected by the Falcons until the 2022 Draft.
Dent was by far the best Bulldog that the Falcons had drafted in the 21st century, though that’s less impressive praise than it sounds. He played a depth role as a rookie, became a regular starter at middle linebacker in 2012, and then lost that starting job midway through the 2013 season. While nominally starting, Dent had been playing roughly half of the Falcons’ defensive snaps; after his benching, he played six snaps on defense over the seven remaining games. Dent’s benching is understandable as an attempt to shake up a totally deflated defense, which had allowed at least 23 points in every game thus far. The week after Dent was benched, Atlanta allowed a season-high of 41 points, but the week after that, they allowed a season low of 17 points. They lost both games, so hard to say whether it “worked.”
The Trade: Bill O’Brien expressed his intent to cut the Texans’ quarterback room down to three on June 9, explaining that “you can really get three guys reps in practice” and that “three out of four have been getting reps.” With Fitzpatrick and Savage as presumed roster locks, this left the Texans to choose between Keenum and Yates. Both had been pretty bad in 2013, but Keenum at least attracted interest from University of Houston fans, which have greater representation in the city of Houston than University of North Carolina fans. This, plus the greater leash that the Texans had given Keenum in 2013, indicated that Yates didn’t have much of a chance.
About one week later, news broke that the Texans had released Yates. This is the sort of thing that you benefit from talking about very loudly, ideally with reporters, before filing any paperwork. When news breaks that you’ve released T.J. Yates, your friends across the NFL may call you to check-in. “I wish you would’ve called me before you released T.J. Yates, we might have been interested,” they’ll say. Once you get over your annoyance that they missed your June 9 quotes, you smile serenely and say “is that so…” with the ellipses trailing long enough for them to know you mean business. Their eyes will widen like dinner plates as they fantasize about the tantalizing possibility of T.J. Yates holding a clipboard on gameday (you won’t see this part since you’re just on the phone). Before you know it, they’ve offered something of potential value in exchange for somebody that you had already decided to cast into free agency.
This all feels really savvy when you imagine yourself doing it but feels more cruel when you imagine yourself as T.J. Yates. First, your employer brings in your replacement(s) and freezes you out over the course of three months, dropping hints to the media to suggest that your time with the team is ending. You get called in to the office of somebody ominous and they break the news that you’ve been expecting — they’re going to go in a different direction and you need to find a new job. You go home, tell your family, and prepare for the next steps in your career. The NEXT DAY, you get another call which informs you that, actually, you’re the one going in a different direction, specifically towards Atlanta. Sorry for the confusion, but you couldn’t expect the team to pass up on a chance to acquire Akeem Dent. You only have a faint memory of who Akeem Dent is from when you beat him in your first career NFL start.
This story is an exaggeration that likely doesn’t apply to Yates, who played his high school football in Marietta and was named to the Atlanta Metro First-Team after his senior season. But still.
The Results: In Week 3 of the 2014 season, the Atlanta Falcons went up 49-0 on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the third quarter and provided a sufficient window for T.J. Yates to play mop-up. He completed a 40-yard pass on his first attempt before handing off to Antone Smith to make it 56-0. Yates’ second pass also produced a touchdown, but unfortunately that came on a 27-yard interception return by Danny Lansanah to make it 56-14. His final two passes of the game were 11-yard and 13-yard completions that left him with a statline of 3-for-4 for 64 yards and an interception. Those would be the final statistics of Yates’ tenure with the Falcons, as Matt Ryan stayed healthy all season. Yates was released as a part of final cuts going into the 2015 season.
Dent started in a special teams role with the Texans, but became a starter on defense by the end of the 2014 season as he returned to the type of usage he experienced with the Falcons in 2014. That ended up being short-lived and he spent most of his time in Houston playing on special teams. He did spend three seasons in Houston, suggesting that the Texans got more from this trade than the Falcons did, but this feels like declaring a car insurance company the winner of a trade because you don’t get in an accident during a given policy year; you’re missing the point even if I can’t articulate why you’re wrong.
The Aftermath: After being cut by Atlanta, T.J. Yates returned to a dramatically different quarterback room in Houston midway through the 2015 season. Tom Savage was still there, but had been on injured reserve all year. Fitzpatrick was gone. Keenum had been cut ahead of the 2014 season when the Texans acquired Ryan Mallett, returned to the team during the 2014 season, and was gone again after being traded for a 7th-round pick. And now Mallett had been cut, which provided the roster opening for Yates to reclaim his job as Texans backup quarterback (this time behind Brian Hoyer).
In Week 10, the Bengals made the foolish mistake of injuring Brian Hoyer while leading 6-3. If there was one team that T.J. Yates knew how to beat, it was the Cincinnati Bengals. He kicked off the fourth quarter with a game-winning touchdown pass to DeAndre Hopkins, improving his record against Cincinnati to 3-0 (he did not have multiple wins against any other NFL team). Yates started two more games that season and won both, but tore his ACL in the second. He spent 2016 as a third-stringer in Miami and got action for precisely one snap in the Dolphins’ Wild Card loss to the Steelers.
In November of 2017, Texans rookie sensation Deshaun Watson tore his ACL in practice, elevating Tom Savage to the starting role. Yates was quickly scooped up by the Texans to serve as Savage’s backup, then pressed into action after Savage suffered a nasty concussion against the 49ers (but not until Savage had already tried to return to the game for some reason). Fortunately for Yates, Savage had gone 1-6 as starter in 2017 and the season was out of reach by the time he took over. Yates lost the final three games of the season to close out his playing career, mostly in noncompetitive fashion.
The entirety of Dent’s post-Texans playing career consisted of spending four days of the 2017 preseason on the Jaguars’ roster before being cut. However, both Yates and Dent kicked off their NFL coaching careers in the same fashion: on February 5, 2019, they were each hired as assistants on Bill O’Brien’s coaching staff. Both stuck around for the 2020 season, with Yates taking on the title of assistant quarterbacks coach, but their ascents were thrown into jeopardy when O’Brien was fired after an 0-4 start to the year. Dent spent time with the Packers’ staff as part of the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship and his LinkedIn indicates that he did the same with the Seahawks and Panthers. His (private) Twitter account bio says that he’s an assistant defensive line coach at Elon University, a position he only started this month per LinkedIn, but he isn’t listed as part of the coaching staff on the school’s website yet.
Yates’ coaching path is a better note for us to conclude on, since he joined the Falcons after leaving the Texans to bring everything full-circle (and provide support for the theory that he didn’t mind being traded to Atlanta). His first job title was passing game specialist, then he got promoted to wide receivers coach ahead of the 2022 season. After two seasons, somebody noticed that T.J. Yates had actually played quarterback in the NFL rather than wide receiver and he is now the team’s quarterbacks coach. His tenure coaching the position has already witnessed the arrival of both Kirk Cousins and Michael Penix Jr.
Miscellaneous: Akeem Dent recorded 1.5 sacks in three seasons with the Falcons and they were all in the second half of this game. There is a new NFL player named Akeem Dent (greatly complicating research), who played safety for Florida State before signing with the Chargers as an undrafted free agent. T.J. Yates’ nephew played quarterback at Georgia Tech before transferring to Sam Houston State and subsequently losing his starting job last year. T.J. Yates is the only graduate of Pope High School to play in the NFL, though the school has produced two active MLB players from the same family.
Next Week:
2014 NBA Draft Special
June 27:
Pirates receive: Ernesto Frieri
Angels receive: Jason Grilli
Tremendous stuff, love the UGA/Falcons note (and the Atlanta image usage)!