There is no ideal solution when you lose your starting right tackle and top reserve right tackle right before the NFL regular season. You can only try to weather that loss as best you can, either with in-house options or by going outside the organization for help.
The Atlanta Falcons did a little of both after losing Kaleb McGary for the season and Storm Norton for at least the first few weeks of 2025. They shifted Elijah Wilkinson back to right tackle, the position he primarily played early in his
career, and will be working to get practice squad option Brandon Parker and rookie Jack Nelson ready in case they need to play. They also traded for Michael Jerrell, a former small school right tackle who made a few starts for Seattle in 2024, and signed both ex-Jets tackle Carter Warren and ex-Dolphins tackle Ryan Hayes to their practice squad. The hope is that in that group of six guys, you find a workable solution until Norton is ready, and potentially one or two long-term pieces to give you more depth the next time something like this happens.
We don’t know who will wind up being the long-term swing tackle out of this group—if it’s anyone!—but we do have a pretty good idea who’s going to start. That would be Wilkinson, a player who has had a fascinating career that has seen him go from undrafted free agent to starting tackle to starting left guard to reserve and back to starting tackle again. Why Wilkinson, though, and what can we expect?
Why Elijah Wilkinson?
It comes down to experience, comfort, and a lack of other compelling options.
On the experience front, Wilkinson is a 20 game starter at right tackle, split between the Broncos and Bears earlier in his career. He has never been a great right tackle—he was better at right guard for Denver and left guard for Atlanta than at right tackle at any point in his career—but can offer stretches of quality pass protection. He’s going to need some help, which the Falcons will likely give him with Charlie Woerner, Feleipe Franks, and/or Teagan Quitoriano at times during the first few games, but the Falcons are counting on him weathering the storm there. They’ve seen his tape as a starter at right tackle and are comfortable with it, even though that version of Wilkinson came several years ago.
Wilkinson was graded better in 2019 than 2020, despite getting flagged with a rough nine penalties (three of which were accepted) versus just one penalty in 2020. He played over 800 snaps at right tackle in 2019 and earned a 59.7 grade from Pro Football Focus and a 62 in pass protection, despite also being credited with 10 sacks allowed and 32 pressures. In 2020, he was penalized just once and allowed just one sack on 18 pressure on 500 snaps at right tackle, which we can hope was partially due to growing comfort with the role. His only other right tackle experience in the pros came in 96 2021 snaps at right tackle for the Bears, where he allowed six pressures, one sack, and was penalized once.
The comfort piece matters, too. Offensive line coach Dwayne Ledford has now worked with Wilkinson for three years, having coached him as the starting left guard in 2022, as a reserve a year ago, and now as a fill-in right tackle for 2025. Ledford knows him well, has seen him man multiple positions, and trusts him to do what he’s asked to do at a high enough level to keep Atlanta afloat. That faith matters a great deal for a coach like Ledford, who has shown a level of patience in investment in players other teams have cast off or been unwilling to take a chance on in the first place, ranging from Ryan Neuzil to Kyle Hinton to Wilkinson himself.
The third piece is the lack of options. Yes, Atlanta could have imported a more seasoned player to take the tackle role, but did not appear willing to give up significant resources to do so. That meant the options they could have imported were all going to have significant flaws, and the Falcons decided to lean toward players they felt they could develop into quality options over time instead. That gambit meant they may have imported their swing tackle of the future, but it also meant their only realistic options to start Week 1 in their eyes were going to be Wilkinson, Nelson (a rookie), Parker (who arguably hasn’t been as good as Wilkinson at any point in his career), or moving Matthew Bergeron and creating a hole at left guard.
That combination of factors—a certain level of comfort with an experienced player who can move around and the team’s dearth of compelling options—means it’s Wilkinson’s job for now.
What should we expect?
I think the best we can expect is a solid multi-game stretch where Wilkinson has a handful of ugly reps per game but is able to avoid the kind of multi-pressure games that will get Michael Penix Jr. off-rhythm, plus solid enough run blocking to avoid dragging the rest of the line down. The Falcons are going to try to help him in a variety of ways, from chip blocks to (probably) avoiding running outside to his side as often as they would have done with Kaleb McGary, but Wilkinson is still going to have to hold up his end of the bargain.
That’s going to be interesting. Wilkinson gets Haason Reddick on the Bucs in Week 1, a challenging matchup for a player who has not manned right tackle frequently in a long while, and follows that up with a resurgent Jonathan Greenard in Week 2 for the Vikings. Things get a little easier from there facing Patrick Jones for the Panthers (7 sacks in 2024, but that was by far his career high for an excellent Vikings front) and Dorance Armstrong for the Commanders (5 sacks last year, 7.5 in 2023), but the Falcons are likely going to have to utilize their tight ends as help and use Bijan Robinson to chip in order to avoid leaving Wilkinson on an island all game. He’ll be tested immediately in pass protection.
Wilkinson has been an improved run blocking lineman compared to early in his career, but…early in his career is also when he played tackle. You can decide how much you want to read into that. The Falcons know they’re working with significant downgrades from McGary regardless of who they trot out there, given that Norton is not phenomenal in that regard either, and will have to design their ground game for 2025 with that limitation very much in mind. I don’t think they’ll necessarily shy away from running to the right, but toss plays and other slow-developing outside runs are probably going to be used more sparingly, especially if the Falcons try them early and Wilkinson proves he can’t hold up. This is another case where having Woerner’s excellence and Franks and Quitoriano available to spell him as blocking options to help out on the right side is likely to matter, and may well explain why the Falcons kept so many block-first tight ends around.
Nothing in Wilkinson’s history at tackle suggests he’s going to be brilliant, but he has been capable for stretches there in his career. The Falcons are going to hope they get his best and try to help him out as much as possible, especially during those first two weeks when Reddick and Greenard are going to test his abilities.
If Wilkinson falters, what then?
We have to be realistic here. The chances that Wilkinson is great are slim, and the chances that he gets hurt are nowhere close to zero; he’s been placed on injured reserve three times in his career and has never played a full season. If either scenario unfolds, what will the Falcons do?
The unsatisfying answer is that we don’t know. I can’t imagine the Falcons actually think Jack Nelson is ready for primetime, and Parker has plenty of right tackle experience but a real mixed bag of a career to this point playing that position. Jerrell would appear to be the player the Falcons have their eyes on as a fill-in, but Raheem Morris indicated the Falcons will take time to get him up to speed before they’re comfortable starting him. A shift over for Bergeron should only be a realistic option if nobody’s capable of filling in and Norton’s going to miss more significant time.
I’d expect Parker and Jerrell to duke it out in the coming weeks for the right to fill-in if needed, with Parker being the slight favorite right now despite not being on the active roster. The Falcons will gladly burn his practice squad call-ups if things aren’t going well with Wilkinson and hope Jerrell is a realistic option to back up Norton and/or Wilkinson once Norton returns.
But we also have to remember that if all goes well, Storm Norton could be back after the first month of the season, and their early Week 5 builds in some runway for that. If Wilkinson is healthy and isn’t an abject liability, he’s unlikely to lose the starting job, and will remain the team’s swing tackle of choice for the rest of the 2025 season once Norton’s back. In that case, all the many options the Falcons have assembled behind him will be jockeying to prove they belong over the long haul, which is still a need given McGary’s now-uncertain future and the fact that Jake Matthews, McGary, and Norton are all over 30 at this point.
For now, Wilkinson is the guy. The Falcons are throwing their faith and support behind him at a difficult time, which has to feel good for a player who has bounced around the league and across the line throughout his career. My hope is that Wilkinson starts every game until Norton is ready and acquits himself well, both because it would be a huge thing for the Falcons and because it would help him secure roles in the twilight of his NFL career. The Falcons have assembled the options and have the time to ensure that it’s not Wilkinson or bust if things don’t go well, or at the very least that it’s not Wilkinson working on an island for multiple weeks.
We’ll soon learn whether that faith is justified and Wilkinson is up to the task of manning right tackle for a would-be prolific offense. There are plenty of reasons to wonder how well it’s going to go, but I’m rooting hard for him—and this Falcons team—to succeed.
