The team’s promising second-year back is dealing with an ailment, but there appears to be little concern in Atlanta.
Bijan Robinson’s rookie season was a promising one, but the talented Atlanta Falcons back wants a word stronger than “promising” or “good” to describe his sophomore campaign. Touted as a generational back out of college, Robinson should find his way to game-changing output sooner than later, and the Falcons are counting on that.
Of course, he can only do that if he’s healthy, and at the moment Robinson is not. The bad news is that Robinson is, to use the parlance, dealing with an ankle that will prevent him from going full-tilt during minicamp. By late July, however, the team expects that to be resolved.
Bijan Robinson dealing with ankle injury that will limit him during minicamp but is expected to be full go by training camp, Raheem Morris said.
— Josh Kendall (@JoshTheAthletic) May 21, 2024
This is something to file away until it’s not, because if Robinson is healthy by training camp all will be fine. If he’s not, one of the team’s most dynamic weapons will be a question mark in the late summer, which is something we’ll have to worry about. Assuming all is well here—and Raheem Morris has not yet shown himself to be squirrelly about injuries the way Mike Smith and Arthur Smith could be—then the Falcons will be in good shape with Robinson, Tyler Allgeier, and new draft pick Jase McClellan heading into the 2024 season.
And they’ll need to be, because the run game’s importance hasn’t faded just because this offense should be more passing forward than anything Arthur Smith put on the field. Kyren Williams was an absolute stud for the Rams offense in 2023, averaging five yards per carry on 228 totes and posting over 1,100 yards and 12 touchdowns, and the Falcons would surely like to see Bijan achieving a level of production that is in that neighborhood. They’ll have the luxury of not needing to lean as heavily on him as the Rams did on Williams—their #2 back was Royce Freeman, who last cleared 100 carries in 2019—but expectations should be high for a player as talented as Robinson in an offense that won’t be one-dimensional.
We’ll hope that Robinson is out there full tilt at training camp, because he will be an essential piece of what we all hope will be a much improved Falcons offense in 2024. All that’s left is to cross our fingers until training camp starts.