Atlanta’s going to be tasked with getting healthy and making real fixes in a little under two weeks.
If I had told you back in August that the Falcons would be 6-5 and have a multi-game lead on the rest of the NFC South at the bye week, you likely would have taken it. In a vacuum, it’s a fine place to be for a team many of us expected to win nine or ten games in 2024. But as I am fond of saying, nothing happens in a vacuum.
These Falcons are foundering. They have been blown out twice in the past five weeks and have a narrow, dispiriting loss to the Saints to add to the pile; they’ve lost two in a row and are 2-3 in their past five games. Injuries have gone from a problem to the problem, as Atlanta either were without or lost north of ten players in Week 11, with vital cogs like Drew Dalman and Troy Andersen proving to be slow to return. The offense is prone to turtling, the defense is abysmal in first halves and at generating pressure, and the positive vibes from three weeks ago have evaporated in the face of all that.
That makes the bye week a crucial opportunity to stop the slide. The Falcons will have close to two full weeks to coax key players back to health, take a deep breath and a step back and look at their most persistent weaknesses, and prepare for a final stretch that features three tough teams that are legitimately contending and three bad teams jockeying for top ten picks. Daniel Flick at Sports Illustrated did a nice job of breaking down the way the Falcons will tackle that, but I’d like to use this customary feature to talk about what the team needs.
What are these Falcons heading into the bye week, and what will they emerge as?
Rankings
Today, the Falcons are a below average team with an above average record. They can move the ball effectively on offense most weeks, but they’re scoring at a lesser level, a combination of red zone mistakes and penalties driving that failure. When things are clicking, this is an intimidating offense filled with playmakers; when it’s not, Kirk Cousins is holding the ball too long, there are no running lanes, and even promising drives die thanks to errors of execution.
Defensively, though, the Falcons have bigger problems. They’ve been a below average team all year on that side of the ball, and while they’ve steadily dragged their run defense up to respectability, their passing defense and total lack of pass rush have cratered over time. The past two weeks have made that perhaps look worse than it is with everyone healthy, but this is once again a pretty lousy defense with an odd aptitude for second half shutdowns.
Throw in some lapses in the return game, a higher-than-normal number of missed field goals from Younghoe Koo, and some poor decisions on kickoff returns, and you have a recipe for a team underachieving its talent level, however slightly. You can argue that the Falcons are unlucky not to be 7-4, given that they should have beaten the Chiefs, but I’d be more likely to argue they’re lucky to not be 5-6 given their flaws and close margins.
Having a realistic picture of where this team is remains important; knowing that they’re still in a good spot in the NFC South and far from doomed is also key.
How the Falcons have changed over the season
Relatively healthy early on, the Falcons have suffered the same fate as many teams and have begun losing key players. Troy Andersen’s breakout game gave way to a long injured stint—he has yet to return after Week 5’s explosion—and that has proven to be a major problem given that Kaden Elliss and Nate Landman have both struggled in coverage and Landman hasn’t been his usually reliable self as a run defender. Ruke Orhorhoro looked good until he hit injured reserve, and fellow defensive lineman Ta’Quon Graham’s reliability will be missed now that he’s on IR as well. Going into last week, the Falcons were missing about a quarter of their Week 1 roster owing to injury, which contributed to (but did not solely cause) Week 11’s terrible results.
Those injuries and ones I didn’t mention—like the one to Lorenzo Carter—combined with ineptitude the team didn’t see coming—like Carter’s—has forced them to dig into their depth. In some cases, that’s been a positive, with JD Bertrand, Khalid Kareem, Demone Harris, and Orhorhoro showing flashes at different points this season. In other cases it has been a disaster, as it was in Week 11 with Clark Phillips starting, each time the Falcons have been forced to run Richie Grant in coverage, Antonio Hamilton at the nickel, and so on. That in-game look at those options and the likelihood that several players will return gives Atlanta the chance to make some informed lineup tweaks.
The trend lines for the roster and the team overall have been squiggly. The offense appeared to find its footing against Tampa Bay in Week 5 and then cratered, got going against Tampa Bay and Dallas and then cratered again. The defense has quietly made strides from being one of the worst run defenses in football to a merely mediocre one, but Atlanta’s fortunes against the pass have tended to depend on who is available and who they’re facing. Their success, too, has been anything but linear, with two losses sandwiching an early win, three straight victories, a loss, and then two wins followed by two straight losses.
That up-and-down nature has made it difficult to draw sweeping, lasting conclusions about this football team, though that hasn’t stopped a single one of us from trying. About all we can say with confidence is that this team should be good offensively and is bad defensively.
What to know
There are two central questions for these Falcons during the bye.
The first is whether they can get healthy, which is badly needed. The return of Troy Andersen feels like a dire need, given how much Nate Landman is struggling at linebacker, and while Ryan Neuzil has held up there’s little question that Drew Dalman will provide a boost at center. Getting Darnell Mooney and Drake London completely healthy, replenishing a decimated cornerback corps, and welcoming back key reserves and special teamers like JD Bertrand and Antonio Hamilton will be critically important. This team does not have the depth outside of a pocket of positions like the offensive line, quarterback, and running back to survive major losses, and the sheer number of injuries they’ve suffered in recent weeks makes this bye potentially very well-timed.
But a healthy Falcons team is not necessarily a winning Falcons team, even so, and our other big question is whether Atlanta can solve the issues that have plagued them all year. It’s unrealistic to expect magical improvement across the board, but it’s fair to say they need to coax legitimate improvement out of these areas to finish the season strong and lock up a playoff berth.
The first concerns Kirk Cousins. Cousins has thrown 10 of his 17 2024 touchdowns against a single interception in just three games, coming against the Buccaneers and Cowboys. In the other eight contests, he’s thrown seven touchdowns and eight interceptions, frequently patting the ball looking for an open man who doesn’t materialize in time. That lack of quick decision-making is conspiring with some pass protection woes to cause him to take huge, drive-killing sacks, and he’s already at 11 fumbles this year against his career high of 13 in a season. While this is not all on Cousins—improved blocking and play design are factors, for certain—the passing game going in the tank when he’s either forced to be or chooses to be hesitant is not a survivable problem for this Falcons team.
The Falcons have to get the ball out of his hands faster on a more consistent basis, either by giving him quick outlets or encouraging him to throw it away on plays that are falling apart. A short gain or toss into the bench area beats the hell out of losing six yards and/or the football.
The second has to do with the defense, and it’s a sprawling, persistent problem to tackle. Jimmy Lake and Raheem Morris have built a defense designed to allow the short passing game to flourish, the theory being that they will limit explosive plays (which was largely true until recently) and can either limit yards after the catch to force unfavorable third downs or eventually force offenses into mistakes. The problem has been that Atlanta has increasingly lost control over those explosives, owing in part to injuries and confusion in the secondary, and their sloppy tackling and angles are providing teams like the Broncos opportunities to pick them apart slowly and gruesomely the whole way down the field. Atlanta either has to get far better at picking up the energy early and making those tackles, or they need to consider tweaking scheme and personnel to aggressively limit completions and know the occasional big play is a possibility.
Of course, it would help the defense limit both the deep ball and those short passes if they had any semblance of a consistent pass rush, which they do not. Through 11 games, the Falcons have just 10 sacks, and practice squad call-ups like Demone Harris and Khalid Kareem are generating more consistent pressure than all but a tiny handful of Atlanta’s options up front. The trade for Matthew Judon was supposed to help offset the loss of Bralen Trice to injury, but nobody is getting home and the team seems unwilling or incapable of making adjustments to try to get more juice out of this pass rush. That’s at the feet of struggling players like Judon, David Onyemata, Grady Jarrett, and Arnold Ebiketie, but a defense that had many more sacks a year ago with many of the same players doing this poorly falls in large part on the staff. Perhaps the return of Andersen frees up Kaden Elliss to do more quarterback chasing—he’s been good at it—and perhaps Kareem gets a longer look and Brandon Dorlus gets his feet under him quickly. Finding new ways to generate pressure will still be a plus.
With the pressure on the coaching staff to tweak lineups and play calls to get more out of the offense and defense, the pressure is on players and coaches alike to tighten up in our final area: Penalties and missed tackles. The Falcons can and do coach fundamentals, but there’s an open question of how these lapses keep happening that has to be answered with genuine improvement.
You’ve seen the mistakes I’m referencing. They’re offensive holding penalties in the red zone that turn a potential six point drive into three points or fewer, and the Falcons are tied for the seventh-highest number of holding calls in the NFL. They’re the indefensible unnecessary roughness penalties, where Atlanta is tied for the fourth-highest total in the league. They’re the missed tackles, with Atlanta being 14th in the league in terms of those and many of them coming closer to the line of scrimmage where a sound tackle would stop a play cold. The Falcons are hardly unique in having sloppy, penalty-ridden games, and they’re not even among the most penalized or tackle-missing teams overall. It’s still happening too frequently for a team that needs to be extremely disciplined, given that they play a lot of games where the margins are very tight.
The health question can be answered easily, as the Falcons either will be in better shape or won’t be when they face the Chargers in Week 13. The second question, with all its many facets, will be answered over the final six weeks of the season with either needed improvement or a fatal adherence to the status quo. Positioned as they are with a still-standing lead on the NFC South and a far from awful final stretch on the schedule, the Falcons are well-positioned to make their first playoff appearance since 2017. They’ll need to use the bye to make needed changes, though, or they’ll fall short and face a long offseason of questions both familiar and new.