The now-second year head coach may well be shuffling his staff, but in his end of season press conference, makes it clear he believes brighter days are ahead.
If you had any doubt that Raheem Morris would be coaching the Atlanta Falcons in 2025—and as I’ve written repeatedly, you shouldn’t have—it was erased when he arrived at the podium for his season-ending press conference on Monday. Morris is back for Year 2.
The job in that second season is to improve on the first one, something Morris acknowledged early and often. While offering few specific prescriptions for what ails the Falcons or addressing what moves are to come directly, which is as you’d expect for this sort of press conference, Morris did offer thoughts on what’s behind and ahead for Atlanta.
We’ll start with the one on everyone’s minds.
Is Jimmy Lake gone?
Probably. Morris was talking about his defensive coordinator like he talked about Kirk Cousins right before benching him, which is to say with the kiss of death that masquerades as “we’ll evaluate everything” language.
Raheem isn’t gonna give a straight answer about internal moves or changes (not a surprise). If anything happens, you’ll hear it when the team account announces it. pic.twitter.com/WzorelvC7a
— Tre’Shon (@tre3shon) January 6, 2025
Lake presided over a defense that fell down in embarrassing fashion on several occasions, few more embarrassing than Week 18 against the Panthers, and regressed in nearly every area versus the Falcons of 2023 under Ryan Nielsen. Perhaps the most jarring statistic? Nielsen’s defense was third in the NFL in terms of third down conversion rate allowed; Lake’s was 31st.
The fact that Morris alluded to defensive miscommunication in Week 18 reinforces that something continued to be very wrong with that side of the ball until the very end of the year.
Raheem Morris compared the defensive performance vs. CAR to the Vikings game where there was confusion in communication especially on the backend.
To put it simply, “We had an awful game.”
— Amna (@amna__subhan) January 6, 2025
Morris gave Lake a shot and it really did not work out, and the head coach would need to feel extremely confident in Lake’s improvement to risk year two. It doesn’t particularly sound like that will be the case, but we’ll see.
Younghoe Koo is still kicking around
Assumes he returns to good health, it sure sounds like Koo will get a chance to prove 2024 was an injury-marred fluke. Morris acknowledged the Falcons missed way too many kicks this past season, something that implicates Koo and Riley Patterson both, but also talked about the importance of getting Koo back after he hit injured reserve late in the year.
“We missed entirely too many kicks,” Falcons coach Raheem Morris said about the kicking game.
— D. Orlando Ledbetter (@DOrlandoAJC) January 6, 2025
This will only really get interesting if Koo isn’t healthy by the summertime, in other words.
The Falcons don’t want to waste this moment
I wrote earlier today that the Falcons did not want to squander Michael Penix’s career, which is perhaps a touch dramatic for a soon-to-be second year player. But Raheem Morris sees that this team has genuine stars in Drake London and Bijan Robinson and an ascending quarterback in Penix while they’re all relatively affordable, and it’s important to take advantage of that right now while that’s the case.
A very important point that Raheem Morris just said about the way the young offensive weapons performed yesterday. Said their play “does create a certain urgency” to string wins together to get the most out of these players.
— Tori McElhaney (@tori_mcelhaney) January 6, 2025
Urgency would be welcome this offseason as the Falcons try to clamber back ahead of the rest of the NFC South, so let’s hope Morris and Terry Fontenot (who is scheduled to address the press on Thursday) can cook up something better than what we saw in 2024.