The Atlanta Falcons turned in two glorious weeks where they beat down the Packers and Saints, giving us hope they were rounding into form and becoming something more than the mediocrity we had seen for nearly a decade running. Those hopes are not entirely dashed, but they are certainly dimmed by the past two games.
Facing good coaches and good teams, the Falcons have stumbled. Last week they played a close, solid game that fell apart late against the Ravens with a backup quarterback, and this week they managed
to turn a 31-7 game into a 31-23 game late. Notably in both cases, they lost owing to excruciating special teams mishaps, defensive lapses spurred by injuries, and whatever the hell has been going on offensively. That has taken them from 2-2 to 2-4, hovering just above the dismal basement of the NFC South, and has effectively blown a hole in all the arguments for taking them seriously.
Did you believe in the offense? They’ve been weirdly allergic to Bijan Robinson early in games and their quarterback, while capable of brilliance, is faltering under pressure. Do you love the defense? It’s down multiple cornerbacks, both starting linebackers, and is showing the cracks you’d expect when major injuries pile up. Did you have high hopes for special teams after an encouraging summer? They have a massive, persistent return game problem that has repeatedly put the offense in bad spots and given opposing teams life. And so on.
Against a very good Bears that punched above its weight defensively for much of the afternoon, this team was only intermittently competitive. They were within one score early but kept dropping further and further behind until they were down 31-7, at which point the defense got a couple of stops, the offense kicked into high gear, and they climbed back within eight. After the team’s last ditch drive fell short, the defense couldn’t keep the Bears from running out the clock and they dropped their third game in three tries at home this year. There’s a wide swath of blame to go around here, and what makes efforts like these even more frustrating is that this team can pull together stretches of something approaching excellence, but has been unable to sustain them these past two weeks.
Look, this is a team with a clear laundry list of needs, a massive amount of 2027 cap space, and enough picks to potentially go out and grab the high end players they need to fill those holes, and generally the decisions the front office has made to this point encourage us to feel hopeful about the future. If you came into this season expecting an up-and-down first season for Kevin Stefanski and company, the broad contours of this season to this point aren’t shocking. We probably need to retain the capacity to look at the future in a reasonable way to endure the roller coaster we are most assuredly riding now. We should also remember that outside of that dismal effort against the Panthers, the Falcons have been competitive in every game they’ve played despite the many rookies and one-year signings they’re relying on to get the job done in 2026, which is worth something.
But! The here and now is deeply frustrating. It’s hard to explain why Bijan Robinson had one carry in the first two drives against a weak run defense and only nine carries overall when he’s so dynamic that he can change the flow of a game, even if you’re down by a lot. It’s hard to watch this team’s returners repeatedly elect to make a go at it with punts and kicks they have no business fielding and believe there’s not a ton of work to be done in that phase. And it’s hard to see such a game effort from a bruised and battered defense—please get well soon, Kendal Daniels—undone by injuries and other phases of the game, especially when they’re having to contend with Ben Johnson and Caleb Williams.
It is just frustrating to be a Falcons fans right now, as it long has been, and difficult to see them reversing this skid against a 49ers team that ranks among the NFL’s best next week. Too long this team has been defined by what it can’t do rather than what it can do, and if the ceiling feels a bit higher this year with the glimpses of great play we’ve seen, the downside still seems destined to define their 2026. At 2-4, they’ll need to prove that sentiment wrong in a hurry if they’re able to do so.
On to the full recap.
The Good
- Michael Penix seems destined to be in both The Good and The Ugly every week with the way things are tracking. The good is not difficult to see—Penix got going against the blitz in the second half, he made some tremendous throws to Jahan Dotson, Kyle Pitts, and Drake London along the way—and I’m hopeful that him going out there and slinging three touchdowns after exiting last week with a rib injury will quiet some of the unjustified criticism of his toughness. When you can keep him clean or he knows where the pressure is coming from, Penix can do tremendous things.
- Bijan Robinson did well with his limited touches, with the only (very real) blemish on his day coming in the form of a rough holding call. The shame is that he didn’t get more work.
- It was another fine day from Drake London, who hoovered up every target he had a reasonable chance at, but this was the Kyle Pitts breakout game. He reeled in five of his seven targets for 60 yards and a pair of touchdowns, both excellent efforts and one of which saw him extend to make the score happen. After a three week drought to start the season that saw him with just two grabs for 20 yards on six targets, Pitts has 13 grabs for 149 yards and three touchdowns over the past three weeks. Tommy Rees appears to be figuring out how to utilize him, and if the team can just do so more consistently earlier in games, the offense should be in better shape.
- I’ve had Jahan Dotson in a dynasty league for a while now, so I’ve tracked his career with interest and have long felt he was better than his production has indicated. I was a fan of dropping him into this offense given his ability to win deep, and we saw that in Weeks 4 and 5. What we hadn’t seen necessarily was the ability to win contested catches, but Dotson did that on a great touchdown grab against the Bears where he was blanketed but reeled in a pretty ball from Michael Penix Jr. for the score, and Dotson finished as the team’s leading receiver with 87 yards and a score on three grabs. The one where he came back on an underthrown Penix deep ball and spun out of a tackle to pick up additional yardage afterwards was also worth calling out. The team needed a non-London receiving threat to step up, and Dotson is doing it in a major way.
- That Gervon Dexter/Brandon Dorlus duo is as good as it gets. They were one of the few consistent sources of pressure in this one and came up with two of Atlanta’s four sacks, with LaCale London and Za’Darius Smith also chipping in one each. All four have been assets this year, but Dorlus and Dexter simply blow up pockets week after week and even made a quarterback as elusive as Caleb Williams uncomfortable.
- Jessie Bates forced a fumble, the second straight week he’s been involved in a big turnover, with Harold Perkins Jr. scooping the ball up. After a quiet start to the year, Bates is heating up.
- I give Harold Perkins Jr. and Josh Woods a lot of credit for needing to come into this game and play major snaps with Divine Deablo and Kendal Daniels both out and holding their own, particularly Woods given that his role is typically exclusively on special teams.
- While special teams has been something of a disaster for Atlanta in 2026, it’s not because of Jake Bailey. The punter absolutely boomed multiple punts today despite unfavorable field position, giving Atlanta’s defense a fighting chance, and has been solid-to-terrific all year long.
- If you want to focus on encouraging signs, the fact that the Falcons did not simply roll over completely down 31-7 qualifies. It’s the mark of a team willing and able to fight that they even made it a game that late, despite everything, and we just need to say that fight a hell of a lot sooner.
The Ugly
- Football is a brutal game, something we’re reminded of on a weekly basis. But it’s rarely as scary as it was for Kendal Daniels in this game, when he made a big tackle and was down on the field, and the stretcher came out and the team’s trainers continued to work on him through multiple commercial breaks. He was ultimately carted off strapped down to a stretcher, and while the Falcons put out an update during the game that he was alert and had movement in his extremities and he returned to the locker room this evening, we don’t know what’s next for him. I’m just glad he seems to be okay, because that was scary as it gets.
- Penix got into a groove against the blitz late, as I mentioned, but he remains a frustrating player to watch under pressure. He took five sacks on Sunday, fumbled twice, and both makes sloppy throws and appears to not feel the pressure until it’s too late when teams bring heat. That combined with the tendency Tre’Shon Diaz mentioned to lock onto his first option led to frustrating stretches of sputtering offense for a team heavily reliant on the pass Sunday, and undermined some of the fine work Penix did the rest of the day as a passer. If he can scan the field a little faster and more consistently hang in there and deliver sharp passes under pressure, as he does a handful of times every game, Penix can still be a phenomenal player. Right now, he’s a good one with significant holes in his game, and teams are exploiting that.
- Of course, it helps when the offensive line is keeping pressure away from you, something that just didn’t happen Sunday. The Bears blitzed often and got a free rusher multiple times, which led to three sacks for defensive back Kyler Gordon, and the line has been struggling mightily to handle extra rushers and sometimes just a standard number. If the line—and Atlanta’s larger cast of position players—can’t do a better job of keeping Penix clean, there’s a hard ceiling on this passing game.
- The Falcons have long made things more difficult on offense than they need to be, and Tommy Rees was infused with the spirits of Dirk Koetter, Arthur Smith, and Zac Robinson on Sunday. Bijan Robinson got one six yard carry on the first two drives of the game, with two terrible screen passes to Bijan (for negative yardage) and passes on every other play as the Falcons meekly limped off the field twice. Given the state of Chicago’s run defense—they’re not great—that was a bizarre decision that undermined Atlanta’s obvious strength. The fact that Bijan got just nine carries overall when the passing game was so up and down is, I understand well, a function of falling behind. It still feels like this team has to come up with ways to get their most dynamic playmaker the ball if game script calls for not giving him carries—and given how dynamic he is, they should probably still give him carries—and those ways probably can’t be slow-developing screens.
- Caleb Williams is a wizard, and in my opinion is one of the maybe three most talented quarterbacks in the NFL, even if he isn’t necessarily one of the three best just yet. The Falcons saw that firsthand on Sunday, when Williams evaded pressure, made tight window throws, and just generally made himself an agent of chaos against a defense that looked mighty overmatched. The Falcons got a better handle on him in the second half, but the damage was done at that point, and this team is having an enormous amount of trouble preventing capable quarterbacks from picking them apart on short-to-intermediate routes.
- Zachariah Branch has all the talent and potential in the world, but he’s had limited chances to prove himself thus far and has not been an impactful returner. He was worse than that against Chicago, when he went to field a punt deep in Atlanta territory in the late second quarter and simply muffed it, with the Bears picking up the fumble and scoring three plays later to make it 21-7. Lapses in concentration can happen to anyone and I’m not going to beat Branch up too much for this, but it was an incredibly costly mistake that might cost him opportunities in the short term. The fact that he fumbled again later on a kickoff return will hopefully help him avoid doing so again in the future, because even with limited options, I can’t imagine the Falcons will yank him off returns. He just has to do a better job securing the ball, period.
- There’s a larger issue with special teams this year, which have just been sloppy and making way too many mistakes as a unit. Branch’s muffed punt and fumbled return are execution errors, but Branch, Olamide Zaccheaus, and Brian Robinson Jr. keep fielding kicks and punts they have no business picking up
The Wrapup
Game MVP
Hard to award one for this game, but Jahan Dotson, Kyle Pitts, Brandon Dorlus, Gervon Dexter, and (if you ignore the bumpy ride) Michael Penix Jr. are among those who deserve some credit for the highs we did see.
One Takeaway
The Falcons have too much attrition, make too many mistakes, and frankly aren’t quite talented enough to play four quality quarters against quality opponents, which figures to matter a lot next week.
Next Week
The San Francisco 49ers are on deck, with one of the best teams in the NFC hoping to run the Falcons over. It’s the last game of a three game homestand and the Falcons are winless at home.
Final Word
Notfun.
