Atlanta’s looking at the former Bengals defensive coordinator for their own job.
We now know the first defensive coordinator interview of the cycle for the Atlanta Falcons, who fired Jimmy Lake over the weekend. That interview is coming this weekend with ex-Bengals defensive coordinator Lou Anarumo.
NFL Network host Colleen Wolfe had the news, which was swiftly seconded by the web of agent text readers we call insiders.
I’m told the Falcons are interviewing Lou Anarumo for the vacant defensive coordinator position this week. A reunion with Jessie Bates ahead??
— Colleen Wolfe (@ColleenWolfe) January 14, 2025
The 58-year-old has been in the NFL since 2012, when he joined the Miami Dolphins coaching staff as their defensive backs coach and briefly their interim defensive coordinator in 2015. The Giants then hired him in the same defensive backs coach role before the Bengals brought him aboard as their defensive coordinator, and he had been there from 2018-2024. In the early years he put together middling defenses that could be feisty, but that changed in 2022, when the Bengals made it all the way to the Super Bowl in part because of a smothering defense that shut down the high-powered Chiefs offense. That unit was top ten in scoring that year, too.
In 2023 and 2024, as attrition started to hit the defense and draft picks did not work out, the defense badly regressed. Anarumo was still capable of coaxing strong stretches out of this group, but the overall body of work was dismal, and the Bengals fired him this year as a result. It’s fair to argue—and I have seen many Bengals fans do so—that Anarumo was scapegoated by a front office that has done a poor job of adding talent, but that’s never the full story.
Still, Anarumo was on my shortlist of potential candidates for a few reasons. The first is that he’s the kind of defensive mind a talent-light Falcons defense could use, in that he’s a schemer who likes to use subterfuge to confuse a quarterback and sow chaos. The second is that he’s got an existing connection with Jessie Bates, the all-world safety he coached from 2019-2022 before Bates blessedly bolted to join the Falcons, and was able to maximize both his considerable talent and the impact having a safety that good has on the rest of the defense. The third is that his adaptability in terms of schemes and fronts will be important for a Falcons defense that was incredibly poor at adapting to opponents’ strengths and strategies for long stretches of the 2024 season. The final is that his preference for four down linemen and 4-3 fronts on early downs means that under-utilized talents like Zach Harrison should be able to return to the positions they were more successful in back in 2023 under Ryan Nielsen, who had similar preferences up front.
None of that guarantees success for Anarumo, and we must note that he couldn’t lift a talent-drained Bengals defense over the past couple of seasons and would be asked to do that with the Falcons. The presence of Bates will help with that, but Anarumo is not a miracle worker and will only get so far on a preference for confusing offenses if the Falcons don’t take their task of improving this defense seriously enough. That’s particularly true on the back end of the defense, where the Falcons are currently very thin, given that good coverage is going to be necessary to make this thing cook.
Anarumo’s reputation as a bright defensive mind is a justified one even if the results have not been there the past couple of years, however, and lord knows the Falcons need someone with an answer to their defensive woes that goes beyond “let’s try harder.” We’ll see if he winds up being Atlanta’s preferred candidate soon enough.