Raheem Morris bets on someone he knows well from the past for a brighter future, but will it work?
You get the sense that Raheem Morris would have hired Jeff Ulbrich to be his defensive coordinator in early 2024 had it been an option, so the fact that he’s the defensive coordinator in 2025 is no great surprise. As Tre’Shon Diaz wrote Saturday night, Morris prizes his relationships with coaches he knows and trusts, so the hire we half-expected is the one we ought to have expected even as the list of interviews burgeoned in the past week.
The last time Morris was the head coach and Ulbrich was the defensive coordinator was in a 2020 season doomed from the outset, with both men thrust into larger-than-anticipated roles after Dan Quinn was fired and they were tasked with finishing out a season that began 0-5. The modest success that season—Morris and Ulbrich coaxed a 4-7 finish out of that team to finish with a 4-12 record, and neither one stuck around in Atlanta—would have scared many coaches away from going back to the same well. Morris is not one of those coaches, for better or for worse.
Why Ulbrich? The answer is actually an easy one to provide, but whether it’s a satisfying answer is much more of an open question.
Why Raheem Morris chose Jeff Ulbrich as Falcons’ DC
As I mentioned above, Morris is a relationships guy. He worked with Ulbrich from 2015-2020 continuously, which is a small eternity in an NFL where coaching staffs break up and get fired on a regular basis. In rough circumstances in their final year together, Morris and Ulbrich took a defense that had allowed 30-plus points in four of the first five weeks of the season and managed to allow 30-plus just twice the rest of the way, both against the eventual Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
If that stint and that relationship didn’t make an impact on Morris, Ulbrich wouldn’t be Atlanta’s defensive coordinator now. But Ulbrich is also much more experienced than he was when he took over that role in 2020, because he’s spent the past four years as the defensive coordinator (and eventually interim head coach) for a talented Jets defense. He and Robert Saleh had that group humming along in 2022 and 2023, but with Saleh fired and Ulbrich taking over in 2024, things went downhill last year.
Is Ulbrich a solid coordinator? I’d say his results in Atlanta and New York suggest that yes, he is, and if you give him quality pieces he’ll likely give you a solid defense. But while Morris will surely speak to Ulbrich’s acumen, this is at least as much about where Morris and Ulbrich share common ground on approach, trust, and vision for the franchise. Morris saw Lake flame out and concluded he needed someone who both knows him and knows what it’s like to be an NFL coordinator, and Ulbrich was the most experienced candidate in both those regards.
The 2020 season’s results also likely played a role in another way.
This time, Morris and Ulbrich can plan ahead
On one hand, the Falcons are limited in terms of dollars and draft picks right now, making a total defensive teardown and rebuild a challenge. On the other hand, there are avenues to adding both picks (trade down!) and cap space (restructures and cuts) that should allow both coaches to enact a vision for this defense.
You’ll remember that wasn’t an option in 2020. Hamstrung by years of Thomas Dimitroff and Dan Quinn working to keep the core of an increasingly creaky former Super Bowl team together, those Falcons were limited to one ill-fated defensive splash (Dante Fowler). Morris and Ulbrich, who went from defensive coordinator and linebackers coach to head coach and defensive coordinator in one fell swoop, did not have the opportunity to put together their own shopping list for the final 11 games of the 2020 season. They just had to work with what they had, and the fact that it was better than what Quinn and Morris achieved in the first few weeks of the season is something Morris clearly remembers well.
This time out, the duo will at least get a shot to work together to craft a defense that they might be able to squint and say resembles one they want. Morris had a year of watching this defense in action and some bye week tinkering from his end to give him a better idea of where he wants to take this thing, and Ulbrich is hopping over from four years running the New York Jets defense with ideas of his own. This will be less slapdash than 2020, which as I hope you’ve gathered by now is the pivot point I see this hire revolving around.
Will the Morris/Ulbrich pairing work out for Atlanta?
I’ll be blunt: It’s almost certainly going to be better, on balance, than the 2024 Falcons defense. A late run from the pass rush and a handful of impressive efforts against the Eagles, Chiefs, and Chargers couldn’t obscure the fact that the unit was as step slow, a touch lacking at every level, and not particularly well-coached. Ulbrich is far more experienced and competent than Jimmy Lake from any angle you want to look at him from, and while hiring Lake in the first place is an early disaster for Morris, he’s likely to trust Ulbrich to run the defense and can hopefully focus on improving his own in-game management in a way that should also be a positive after his struggles down the stretch in that regard.
Ulbrich has not shown, aside from arguably that 2020 stint, that he can significantly elevate what he has. What he has shown is that he can pull together a solid-to-quite-good defense with the right pieces. And that brings us to our next point.
I’ll be blunt again: I’m not sure how much improvement this team can expect unless the Falcons can work some minor miracles in terms of talent acquisition and development this spring and summer. Getting someone who has experience and respect from players and his head coach is a step in the right direction, but the Falcons are going to shed some talent from an already talent-deficient defense this offseason and are going to have to replace that talent effectively.
If you have to lose David Onyemata and/or Grady Jarrett, it’s going to be incumbent on Ulbrich, Morris, and whoever the new defensive line coach is to coach up the likes of Ruke Orhorhoro, Brandon Dorlus, and whoever else the team can add. They’re going to need to get much more out of a (hopefully healthy) Troy Andersen, JD Bertrand, and maybe Nate Landman if the linebacker group is going to be anything but Kaden Elliss and the Active Liabilities. They’re going to need to get Arnold Ebiketie to the next level and off to a stronger start, get Bralen Trice back from injury and making an impact, and cobble together a useful secondary outside of A.J. Terrell and Jessie Bates. There’s considerable work to be done for this front office that Morris and Ulbrich will have a say in, but they also have to take the players already on the roster and get much, much more out of them than all but a small handful managed in 2024. That’s a tall order, and one that is going to test the mettle of both men.
On one level, Ulbrich is likely to work out in the sense that he’s almost certainly going to be an upgrade over Jimmy Lake, which this team badly needed. In a broader sense, Ulbrich (and Morris in turn) will need to get much more than modest improvement out of this defense to make the 2025 season a success and ensure both men stay in their positions beyond the upcoming season. You will be able to talk me into that with a successful offseason and a strong summer, but before that, it’s vaporware.
If Ulbrich and Morris can enact something bigger and better than they managed during those hurried, anxious days as interim coaches in 2020, then they have the chance to be celebrated as wise hires and much of the criticism and wariness that is set to follow them through the spring and summer will be either laughed about or forgotten. If not, both the new defensive coordinator and the coach who has placed his trust in his old friend will likely find their reunion no more fruitful than the first go-around.