Arnold Ebiketie rolled after a slow start, and everyone else…did not.
The Atlanta Falcons threw a lot of bodies at their EDGE group—or outside linebacker group, depending on whether you prefer the team’s depth chart parlance or not—with results that were underwhelming much of the year.
The players the Falcons trotted out there were, with one notable exception, either lightly used, hurt, ineffective, or some combination of the three. The team’s defense cratered for long stretches for a variety of reasons, but we should not overlook that this group being a liability was certainly one of them.
The good news is that the team will get Bralen Trice back this year and have a chance to rebuild the room with only Arnold Ebiketie, DeAngelo Malone, Trice, and DeAngelo Malone under contract. The bad news is that this team hasn’t shown much aptitude for building this room outside of Ebiketie.
Let’s talk position review.
Arnold Ebiketie
Age: 26 | Experience: 3 seasons
2024 Stats: 17 games with 2 listed starts, 24 tackles, 6 sacks, 39 pressures, 21 run stops, 3.3% missed tackle rate, 5/6 receptions/targets against, 32 yards allowed, 2 penalties
If there is one player you can squint and call a building block for this group, it’s Ebiketie. He’s unlikely to ever ascend to a place where he’s one of the league’s most productive pass rushers, but he can be the kind of player who consistently gets you 6-8 sacks, especially if he can stop getting off to such slow starts. Ebiketie had just three pressures in the first five weeks of the season before he caught fire and delivered 36 over his final 12 games.
Once you get past the start and the identical sack total to 2023, you can see that Ebiketie was an improved player more or less across the board. He cut down on his missed tackles, improved his run defense, and was a more impactful pass rusher, generating 11 more pressures than in either of his first two seasons. The quiet stretch early on obscures that Ebiketie was the team’s most consistently useful pass rusher in the 2024 season, and his year-over-year improvement suggests there may be a little more there we haven’t seen yet.
Ebiketie is the one player who is young enough, good enough, and proven enough to have a major role off the edge this coming season. The Falcons are going to rely on him heavily, and they should.
Matthew Judon
Age: 32 | Experience: 9 seasons
2024 Stats: 17 games with 15 starts, 24 tackles, 5.5 sacks, 25 pressures, 21 run stops, 14.6% missed tackle rate, 10/15 receptions/targets against, 125 yards allowed, 1 touchdown allowed, 5 penalties
Some of it was Jimmy Lake’s scheme. Some of it was, perhaps, the ravages of time and recovering from an injury that robbed him of most of his 2024 season. Some of it was just a poor year from a veteran player. However you slice it, this was easily the worst full season of Judon’s excellent career, and it makes what sure looked like a sensible trade for him look like a disaster in hindsight.
Judon played about 100 more snaps than Ebiketie yet had 14 fewer pressures. He was disastrously slow in run support and coverage far too often last year, and while Judon had his good stretches as a pass rusher and occasionally against the run, too often he was just a shell of the very good player he has always been. The fact that the Falcons felt they had no other compelling options to take on his role reflects poorly on their preparation for the season, but I don’t think it was realistically reasonable to expect Judon to be this bad after his track record of success in Baltimore and New England.
His fate in 2025 with the Falcons likely depends on what the team views as the cause of his plummeting caliber of play; if they think it was injury and Lake more than Judon’s play slipping because he’s older, they may well make an effort to re-sign him. If not, he’s likely headed elsewhere.
James Smith-Williams
Age: 27 | Experience: 5 seasons
2024 Stats: 10 games with 5 starts, 12 tackles, 1 sack, 4 pressures, 11 run stops, 5% missed tackle rate, 2/3 receptions/targets against, 15 yards allowed, 0 penalties
Smith-Williams was exactly who the Falcons thought they were getting, minus the injury that robbed him of a good chunk of the year. JSW was a solid run defender, sure tackler, and a player who minimized the kinds of costly mistakes Judon and Lorenzo Carter were making in this group. If Carter had been better, Bralen Trice had been healthy, and so forth, JSW would have been a quiet background player and a fine one. Pressed into a bit of a larger role, he was still fine.
As a true reserve on early downs, that’s a useful player, but Smith-Williams offered very little as a pass rusher and was not such a standout against the run that he justified the lack of production getting after the quarterback. As a low budget, perfectly solid reserve, he’ll likely be welcomed back. If Smith-Williams has to play a major role for the Falcons in 2025, though, something has gone wrong.
Lorenzo Carter
Age: 29 | Experience: 7 seasons
2024 Stats: 13 games with 11 starts, 25 tackles, 7 pressures, 13 run stops, 10.5% missed tackle rate, 4 pass deflections, 1 forced fumble, 11/12 receptions/targets against, 112 yards allowed, 0 penalties
The Atlanta Falcons could were stretched for depth and talent in this group to begin with. After the injury to Trice, they really couldn’t afford much more in the way of attrition, and they certainly couldn’t afford one of their most reliable players being both hurt and shaky when he was on the field. Unfortunately, that happened with Carter.
A player the team depended on in coverage and as a run defender during his first two seasons in Atlanta, Carter took a major step back in both regards in 2024, and he went from offering decent pressure totals and skill to virtually nothing. With Judon also having a career-worst year, it took some heat off Carter, but this was nothing short of a disastrous season for a once-reliable player. With the big plays largely gone and the strengths of his game not showing up, plus having to work his way through injury, it was a brutal campaign at a position group that didn’t have much to write home about.
It’s difficult to imagine him returning to Atlanta given that he’s an impending free agent with a new defensive coordinator and his freefall last year, but perhaps there were injury-related issues that we didn’t hear about that limited him in 2024.
Demone Harris
Age: 29 | Experience: 7 seasons
2024 Stats: 9 games, 5 tackles, 2 pressures, 4 run stops, 0% missed tackle rate, 1 pass deflection, 2/3 receptions/targets against, 15 yards allowed, 1 penalty
While most of Atlanta’s high-profile players scuffled at outside linebacker, Harris delivered a solid season once he entered the picture in Week 7. An active and disruptive run defender, Harris proved to be a sure tackler who gave the Falcons far more in that regard than they got from the likes of Carter or Judon. His minimal pass rushing production meant he essentially wound up serving as a replacement for James Smith-Williams down the stretch, but I’d argue he played better than the veteran.
The Falcons have got something in Demone Harris
sets the edge and works his man backward. doesn’t buy Baker’s look off for a second, and makes the tackle for a negative play pic.twitter.com/i0R6EUcNmI
— Tre’Shon (@tre3shon) October 28, 2024
He’s an impending free agent again, and the Falcons will have to choose between the likes of Carter, Smith-Williams, and Harris for a reserve role and probably do not need to sign more than one or two. I think Harris played well enough to be the guy.
DeAngelo Malone
Age: 25 | Experience: 3 seasons
2024 Stats: 17 games, 4 tackles, 2 sacks, 6 pressures, 4 run stops, 37.5% missed tackle rate, 1 pass deflection, 1 penalty
Malone chiefly has played special teams in his career in Atlanta, but he got some late run on defense for the Falcons. The book on Malone was that he could deliver some juice as a pass rusher but everything else was pretty iffy, and that’s more or less how things played out, as he delivered more pressures (per Pro Football Focus) on fewer than half the snaps than Harris, Smith-Williams, and almost Carter, but struggled against the run, missed tackles, and committed an ultra-costly penalty in coverage. He should not have been in coverage on that play, but nonetheless.
Under contract for 2025, Malone should get special teams run and may get some obvious passing down work as a rotational option, but seems unlikely to push for more than that.
Khalid Kareem
Age: 26 | Experience: 5 seasons
2024 Stats: 2 games, 3 tackles, 3 pressures, 2 run stops, 0% missed tackle rate
A very pleasant surprise who played just 30ish snaps over two games, Kareem showed up as a pass rusher and plus run defender in those rare opportunities. He was one of the team’s few effective defenders against the Denver Broncos, piling up three hurries against Bo Nix along the way.
Signed to a reserve/future deal, Kareem should compete for a reserve role and should have a real shot at getting it, given how he played in his very limited chances in 2024.
Bralen Trice
Age: 23 | Experience: Rookie
2024 Stats: N/A
He didn’t play this year, but I just wanted to remind everyone again that he should be an asset for this group in 2025.