The Atlanta Falcons sport the second-longest active playoff drought despite being within one or two games of a playoff berth for several years in a row.
It’s become second nature for people to blame those shortcomings on the handful of things that seem to go wrong each year and cost them one or two games. Whether it’s quarterback injuries, questionable play-calling, or missed field goals, the margins are always razor thin in the NFL. However, the fact that something new and different comes up every
year that costs the Falcons in their postseason bid suggests there are deeper issues beyond the easy scapegoats.
That deeper issue is the Falcons’ organizational blind spot to their own shortcomings. Rather than a team that has missed the playoffs for a better part of a decade, Atlanta operates like an organization that has earned the benefit of the doubt. With new decision-makers at the top of the organization, it’s paramount that they regain that trust by breaking that playoff drought this season. Because unfortunately, the contracts the new top brass handed out over the past six weeks to tight end Kyle Pitts and guard Matthew Bergeron appear to be more exercises in that lack of self-awareness.
Not because Pitts or Bergeron didn’t deserve to get paid, but mostly because both players had a lot to prove in 2026 before earning such expensive contracts. But the Falcons decided to pay both players preemptively, which embodies the team’s inability to see their own imperfections.
Kyle Pitts and the illusion of All-Pro potential
Starting with Pitts, who in June inked a contract averaging $18 million annually, making him the third-highest-paid TE in football. It also makes him paid higher than a large number of No. 2 wide receivers, as Michael Pittman, Romeo Doubs, and Wan’Dale Robinson all signed deals in the $17 million-per-year range this offseason to be the secondary targets for their respective teams. It’s easy to see why Atlanta paid up after Pitts earned second-team All-Pro honors, until you actually scrutinize why he saw an uptick in 2025.
One thing that certainly helped Pitts’ All-Pro bid was that several of the league’s top tight ends in Brock Bowers, Tucker Kraft, George Kittle, and Sam LaPorta all had injury-plagued 2025 seasons. It also helped that Pitts was sharing the field with a Falcons wide receiver corps that was also ravaged by injuries, inconsistency, and absence. It’s no coincidence that Pitts’ best seasons were 2021 and 2025. The former was a season when he didn’t have to share the field with Drake London, and the latter was the season when London was most limited by a knee injury that basically wiped him out for the final seven games.
Pitts’ production is tied to empty receiver rooms
In 2021, with Calvin Ridley stepping away from the team after five games, Russell Gage had to step into the role as the team’s top wideout and didn’t really start living up to that billing until after Thanksgiving. That left a lesser version of Olamide Zaccheaus and Tajae Sharpe as the receivers that Pitts was sharing the field with. While people like to attribute Pitts’ rookie-season success to the steady presence of veteran quarterback Matt Ryan, it becomes clearer in hindsight that the lack of viable alternate pass-catching options at wide receiver led Ryan to force the ball to Pitts more.
History repeated itself in 2025. When London missed half the year, secondary options like Darnell Mooney, Ray-Ray McCloud, and KhaDarel Hodge vanished as well. Pitts wasn’t competing for targets in an elite passing attack, but rather monopolizing targets playing across practice-squad-level options like David Sills and Casey Washington. This led to a spike in production when he averaged 2.28 yards per route run per PFF after London’s knee flared up. That figure exceeded the 2.23 yards per route run by Ja’Marr Chase last year, exemplifying high-end No. 1 receiver production.
However, in the 10 games that Pitts played alongside a relatively healthy London before the latter’s knee injury, his yards per route run were 1.36, marginally better than his 1.33 figure from 2024. Comparatively, that figure matches the production of Noah Fant from 2025, who signed a deal averaging about $4.4 million per year this offseason. Pitts’ production in the front half of 2025 was marginally better than McCloud’s in 2024, who averaged 1.25 yards per route run, far from deserving of being paid like a premier tight end or No. 2 wideout.
The larger point is Pitts needed to show in 2026 whether he was worth such a high premium by again producing at a high level while sharing the field with London and, hopefully, not the dregs of the wide receiver position. Yet, the Falcons just handed out that massive contract, assuming Pitts will live up to the hype. It’s no different from how every year we hope the Falcons will bounce back and make the playoffs, yet they fail to deliver.
Bergeron got rewarded before even taking the test
With Bergeron, I don’t need a bunch of fancy stats to illustrate the team’s decision to jump the gun, beyond the fact that Bergeron has never graded out as a top-20 guard according to PFF. Yet, the Falcons felt it necessary to give him a contract that pays him like he’s the best guard in football.
The price of guards has been inflated in recent years, with high-end contracts handed out to other mid-tier starters like Robert Hunt, Aaron Banks, and Zion Johnson, so perhaps a market markup was inevitable whenever Bergeron’s extension came due. But the Falcons still had an entire season to evaluate him under offensive line coach Bill Callahan. They could have tested his fit in Kevin Stefanski’s new scheme before writing the check. Assuming he passed both tests, the team would have received far less pushback from paying a premium for the only starting lineman entering the prime of his career. But instead, the Falcons rewarded him with an “A” before he even sat down to take the exam.
Bergeron is a solid guard, but he hasn’t proven he’s one of the best guards in football. He needs to show that first before it’s just accepted. Just like the Falcons are a capable team that has missed the playoffs for eight years and needs to show it can break that streak before it re-earns the benefit of the doubt.
New names, same delusions: Why trust must be earned
It’s easy for many to dismiss these complaints and trust that the decision-makers in general manager Ian Cunningham, head coach Kevin Stefanski, and El Presidente Matt Ryan know what they’re doing. But I ask why? None of these people have established they can build a winner. Both Cunningham and Ryan are first-timers in their respective roles, and Stefanski’s recent body of work in Cleveland strongly hints that he lost all the mojo that earned him NFL Coach of the Year honors twice in six years. The man hasn’t produced a quality offense in four seasons, and twice had to strip himself of play-calling duties because he wasn’t capable of making it work.
From top to bottom, 2026 is meant to be a “prove-it” year for everybody in the organization, whether it’s the front office, the coaching staff, the quarterbacks, Pitts, or Bergeron. But the Falcons keep handing out top-of-market deals to unproven entities, and their only response is, “Trust me, bro.“
This organization has squandered any trust by its inability to get over the hump the last eight years. While we hope that Pitts and Bergeron, now fueled and inspired by their paydays, play the best we’ve seen from them to date, the new decision-makers seem to be falling right in line with those same delusions of grandeur that doomed their predecessors. Cunningham, Stefanski, and Ryan are not to blame for the past eight years, but they blew a golden opportunity to show that they are building it differently by avoiding the urge to reward mediocrity and unproven players.
Instead, they wrote blank checks for potential, proving that while the names on the office doors have changed, the delusion remains fully on payroll.
If this leadership group fails to break the playoff drought this season, those contract extensions won’t just look premature, but they’ll stand out as a receipt for the idea that this franchise still hasn’t learned to look in the mirror.
