From rain in Florida to sunny skies in Spain, from a punishing rushing attack to a high-flying aerial assault, from a division rival to an AFC powerhouse in the making. The Falcons are facing a very different kind of challenge in very different circumstances this week, and they must be ready to rise and face that challenge after a sloppy, stupid loss against the Buccaneers in Week 8.
What do the Bengals bring to the table? How will the Falcons have to attack this game if they’re going to win? Here’s
a primer for Week 9’s big game in Madrid.
Team rankings
The Falcons can run the ball better than the Bengals and are less inclined to let offenses march up and down the field on them—though maybe not after last week!—but Cincinnati outclasses them virtually everywhere else. Their passing game is elite, they’re better at not turning the ball over, and they’re better at forcing turnovers, all of which will make life difficult on Sunday.
The Falcons just don’t have the profile of a good team right now, both based on their up-and-down play and their broad statistical profile. We’ll see if they can buck that this week.
How the Bengals have changed
We haven’t seen the Bengals in a while—these two teams last played in 2022—but we’ll just focus on this offseason.
The biggest move was a loss, as the Bengals let Trey Hendrickson walk to the division rival Ravens. They made up for that by trading their first round pick for Lawrence, who has absolutely kicked ass, and adding Boye Mafe, Jonathan Allen, and Bryan Cook to the defense. Their offensive additions were essentially a pair of new starting offensive linemen in tackle Orlando Brown Jr. and guard Dalton Risner, and every one of their draft picks is currently a backup, though some of them have considerable promise. There’s a real high-ceiling nucleus here already, though, so the additions at key positions have clearly put the Bengals in a better spot this year, so long as Burrow stays healthy.
What to know about Week 9
This is almost the exact opposite of the challenge the Buccaneers presented in Week 8. The Falcons will have agreeable weather in Madrid, more than likely, but they’ll face a Bengals team with a weak rushing attack, weak run defense, and excellent passing game.
That’s playing into Atlanta’s relative strengths much more than the past few weeks, but as Caleb Williams showed us in a surgical dissection of the Falcons’ back end, a great one-dimensional attack is still a tough problem to solve. Joe Burrow has 13 touchdowns and and nearly 1,000 yards over the past three games against just three interceptions, and if he’s picked on some lackluster secondaries in Miami and Tennessee in particular, he’s still remarkably dangerous. The fact that he’s throwing to the best wide receiver tandem in football in Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, alongside capable options like tight end Mike Gesicki and running back Samaje Perine, helps his cause a great deal.
The Falcons can and basically have to get pressure to counter this. Burrow can be a wizard in the pocket but in his last full healthy season, he absorbed 48 sacks and can hold on to the ball too long to try to make a play. He’s been excellent against pressure the last two seasons but has thrown four picks under pressure in 2026 and is still markedly worse when pressured than when he has a clean pocket, which makes Atlanta’s attacking front a must. The Falcons need to resign themselves to allowing a few big plays and having a day that’s statistically not super pretty, but if they can force a couple of turnovers and a handful of Burrow misses and throwaways, they can potentially swing the outcome.
Part of that is because the Bengals cannot run the ball. Atlanta’s run defense has been badly exposed the past few weeks, but the Bengals aren’t equipped to take advantage. Chase Brown and Samaje Perine have had league average success rates, roughly, and Brown is averaging a meager 3.5 yards per carry behind a line that has a couple of shaky run blocking options, most notably Amarius Mims. The Bengals will try for some balance, but hopefully that will be a fool’s errand.
If the Falcons can keep Burrow from completely taking over the game, the offense will have to pull its weight. That will start with a major bounceback game from Michael Penix Jr. and the passing game, which just endured an absolute nightmare effort in the rain against the Buccaneers. DJ Turner has been pretty excellent in coverage in 2026 and Kyle Dugger is solid, but the rest of their secondary has struggled with big plays, struggled on a down-to-down basis, or both. Atlanta has a particularly juicy matchup if they can get Kyle Pitts or Bijan Robinson working against linebackers Demetrius Knight Jr. and Barrett Carter, who have combined to allow 49 completions on 62 targets for 607 yards, or fully one-third of the team’s total allowed passing yards and receptions. The back seven can be picked apart and the defense can be overcome—they justallowed the most points the Titans have scored in five years—should Penix have the time to do so. They do have to watch out for an opportunistic team that has already forced ten fumbles in 2026.
That’s not a given, because Cincinnati’s pass rush has been dangerous. Their interior of the lethal Dexter Lawrence, Jonathan Allen, and Kris Jenkins have combined for nine sacks already, and Boye Mafe has another 4.5 coming off the edge. The Falcons will need to be very good on the interior in particular to avoid Lawrence and company blowing up Penix’s pocket, which has reliably led to bad outcomes in 2026, whether those be sacks, fumbles, interceptions, or just costly throwaways.
The remedy to that will be not letting the Bengals pin their ears back, which means running the ball effectively. Fortunately for Atlanta, the Bengals run defense has been merely decent, as they’re 19th in yards, have missed a lot of tackles against opposing run games, and don’t really have any elite run defenders outside of Lawrence. If there was ever going to be a week to get this ground game going again, it would be this one, when the Falcons will badly need to achieve some balance.
The formula here is, once again, clean but complicated to actually execute. If you can slow Burrow and the passing game and take advantage of a talented-but-not-great Cincinnati defense while limiting turnovers, you stand a chance. Falling down in any one of those areas—not being able to run, letting a pressured Penix make costly mistakes, allowing Burrow to really get rolling—likely will mean a rough day in Madrid.
