Falcons – Bengals recap: Adios to hope

Seasons start to slip away, and in any other division, they can come to a very swift end. The Falcons losing to the Ravens wasn’t a huge deal, but the Falcons losing to the Bears right after that was a big deal, because it put them at 2-4 and raised the specter that quality football teams were simply going to be too much for them. Atlanta tried to put that to bed by beating the 49ers, but after a 16-0 drubbing in the rain at the hands of the Buccaneers, it was beat the high-flying Bengals in Spain

or sit at three games under .500 and in a weak position even in the ultra-weak NFC South.

The Falcons did not beat the Bengals, and did not come particularly close to doing so. After a spirited first quarter things started to go sideways and then kept going sideways, with the Bengals outscoring the Falcons 27-7 the rest of the way. The defense had a disastrous day against a very good Cincinnati offense, as we feared, but the offense repeatedly turned promising drives into nothing much with penalties. Special teams struggled on returns heavily again and Nick Folk may have punched his ticket out of town with another miss, and now the Falcons have lost four of their last five games. You have to give a ton of credit to a Bengals team that is currently red hot, but it would be a mistake to overlook the major role Atlanta’s own repeated errors played in making this a rout.

It’s difficult to see the rest of this season amounting to much based on the way Atlanta’s been playing, even though they’re absurdly right in the thick of a divisional race where not a single team has more than three wins. The Falcons are spiritually in deep trouble even if the math says they’re very much still alive, given that they’re 1-2 in the division thus far, have lost to every quality team they’ve faced save the 49ers and sleepwalking early season Packers, and putting lousy things on tape.

The Falcons in their first year under Ian Cunningham and Kevin Stefanski have shown some good instincts with talent acquisition and have resisted the urge to give away resources chasing a dream they shouldn’t chase, which makes me cautiously optimistic about the foundation here. But with a thrifty offseason in the cards, it’s not exactly a surprise that the Falcons have weaknesses that have mounted as the season went on, and their one risky bet on an aging kicker in Nick Folk has utterly failed. A team that was supposed to be more competent and disciplined after last year’s frequent letdowns just committed 12 penalties in a single game, many of them back-breaking ones in the red zone. And so on.

There is bountiful cap space and enough draft picks in 2027 to make the meaningful upgrades this team needs, and this regime will have to show this is about growing pains rather than a deeper dysfunction with team-building and how this team is coached. We’re not having a conversation about jettisoning anyone from the staff or front office a year after the most significant overhaul to this team’s power structure in years, but we are talking about the Falcons clearly not being good enough for the ninth straight season. The franchise can’t be too impatient—it has bit them in the ass over and over again during that stretch—but those of us who have been spending Sunday after Sunday after Sunday watching this cannot help but be weary of it. The urgency will be there for 2027, regardless of how Atlanta finishes this year; they are very clearly not talented enough top to bottom yet, and that won’t change even if they end up atop this ghastly division somehow.

Shrinking this back down to the smaller screen of the weeks ahead, however, the Falcons have so much to fix it’s fair to go into the Chiefs game expecting the worst. If they can survive that effort and get a win, get right with the bye, and hit the ground running, perhaps they can still make something of this season and conquer the South.

Me? I won’t be indulging in those hopes anytime soon, and will instead take the rest of the season one week at a time with a hope of seeing signs of a team building something worthwhile and surprising me along the way. A 3-6 team that keeps getting rocked the way this Falcons team has over the past month-plus can’t ask for more than that from its fans, who have invested hope in this team over and over again in a weakened division and gotten very little from it.

On to the full recap.

The Good

The Falcons have enough weapons that defenses have to account for that you can sometimes sneak a depth option into the end zone with basically no one looking. The Falcons did that earlier this year with Nick Muse’s first career touchdown grab, and they did in Sunday with Charlie Woerner’s first career touchdown reception as Penix rolled out and found him streaking toward the end zone for Atlanta’s first touchdown. The Falcons can’t go to that well all the time, but there are opportunities for Muse, Woerner, and others to make their mark in the red zone when things tighten up.
Michael Penix Jr. with the…wheels? The book on the Falcons offense is that Penix can’t and won’t move, which makes him easy to tee off on, but in this one he took off running repeatedly and wasn’t afraid to roll away from pressure, resulting in prolonged plays and some surprisingly great scrambles. Penix finished the first half with 51 yards on just three attempts and would’ve had more on a fourth if not for a Matthew Bergeron hold, and he looked decisive and fast. If this is something Penix can threaten defenses with a couple of times per week, it changes the complexion of this offense.
Bijan Robinson is still a god, even when his usage is inconsistent. He had one bad, boneheaded play when he fumbled a tough catch out of bounds, but other than that he was patient, found holes, functioned as a useful receiving option, and generally did Bijan things all day long. He turned 25 touches into 147 yards and a touchdown, and should be more involved in the passing game in particular going forward, though ideally on fewer third and long screens.
Drake London’s physicality is so fun to watch. He made a number of tough catches, as he so often does, but he also provided some key blocks and went into every yards after the catch opportunity looking to lower his shoulder into a defender. It was a quieter day in terms of yardage, but he was still the favored target for Penix and did a nice job with the balls sent his way.
Brandon Dorlus was still a bully on Sunday, even if he didn’t get a ton of help, and he set up a nice LaCale London sack where Joe Burrow tried too long and too hard to keep the play alive. On a day where the pass rush was inconsistent at best, Dorlus, London, Gervon Dexter, and Zach Harrison came up with the plays of consequence. Unfortunately, the team was largely stonewalled off the edge.
Jessie Bates was one of the few defenders who did anything consistent on Sunday. He flew all over the field making tackles, often serving as the last line of defense between a good Bengals play and a potential touchdown.
Khalil Herbert is a solid returner who has been a useful runner and receiver in the limited opportunities he’s had. He should be RB3 when Brian Robinson Jr. is back, and right now I think you could get him a couple more touches a game and have that be a positive for the offense.
Again, if you’re looking to not give up on the season and see some consequential football, the NFC South has obliged. The Falcons may not truly be out of this thing even if they lose to the Chiefs next week, and a win may put them in a strong position. This division is amazing, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

The Ugly

Penix not seeing things well over the middle of the field and delivering substandard passes because of it is one of his great Achilles heels at the moment. In this one, he missed a defender breaking in on the ball and nearly threw a pick, and then threw a weak ball to Bijan that was well behind him and intercepted by a diving Bengals defender. The fact that he’s also still struggling mightily when pressured—the second heel, and a significant one—means he has plenty to work on if he’s going to take the next step and become a better, more consistent quarterback the Falcons are eager to invest in over the long haul. Those twin faults and some simple hiccups in accuracy cost him dearly against the Bengals.
I’ve long been a fan of Olamide Zaccheaus, as everyone who has been here a while knows, but the Falcons need alternatives to relying on him. Penix routinely overthrows him even when he’s open—which has not been all that often—and he’s been a net negative as a punt returner thus far. That’s not all his fault by a long shot, but it’s probably time to work in more Chris Blair, rely on a third receiver less, or both.
Multiple holds and false starts, quick pressures and blown blitz pickups, and overmatched blockers on screens killed the Falcons again on Sunday, a mix of preventable mistakes and shaky line play. Everything for this team flows from how well they can block, given Penix’s struggles against pressure, how heavily they’d like to utilize the ground game, and how fond they are of screens, and performances like Sunday undermine basically all of that.
A.J. Terrell has never had much luck against Ja’Marr Chase. Very few do, to be fair, but Terrell once again got cooked by one of the league’s best receivers in the first quarter on a 47 yard touchdown bomb from Joe Burrow. Chase simply fought his way by Terrell and outran him, making it one of the easier, more straightforward deep bombs you’ll see completed in the NFL. While he had a great pass breakup working against Tee Higgins to close out the second quarter, he allowed nine catches for over 90 yards and two touchdowns in the first half, one of the roughest efforts of his career, and the bad times continued into the second half.
We knew this would be a tough day for the defense, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be as tough as it was early. The Falcons allowed two touchdowns on two drives to the Bengals in the first and early second quarter, failing to pick up Ja’Marr Chase repeatedly and not getting much in the way of pressure. Only C.J. Henderson’s heroic work in coverage and Jessie Bates hustling even slowed the Bengals down, but things got worse on the subsequent drive as Chase just worked A.J. Terrell, a Terrell penalty erased a Gervon Dexter sack, and Burrow hit Tee Higgins for a touchdown. The opponent was a tough puzzle to solve, of course, but Atlanta’s defense has now looked lost in back-to-back weeks against an elite ground game and elite passing game. That’s not reassuring.
The pass rush was MIA. Amarius Mims is a wall at right tackle, but the entire line held up and gave Joe Burrow time all day, and that time was fatal for one of the most accurate passers in the game. The return of James Pearce Jr. was a pretty quiet one, and the interior pressure we’ve been seeing from this team largely evaporated. Combined with a tough day from the secondary, that was not survivable.
Oh, and just for good measure, the run defense was a mess again. The Bengals provided big holes and Chase Brown made a bunch of decisive cuts en route to one of his stronger days of the 2026 season. Jeff Ulbrich and company are going to have to do a lot of work in the weeks to come.
I never get more annoyed than I do when the Falcons offensive line commits penalties in the red zone to ruin a promising drive, and they decided to really work my first nerve in the first quarter. Matthew Bergeron lost a rep and held to back the Falcons up ten yards, and then Jawaan Taylor’s false start backed them up another five yards and effectively ruined any chance of the Falcons scoring a touchdown. Bergeron and Taylor both chipped in penalties later, too. In a shootout, those kinds of mistakes are very costly, and they were Sunday. 2
Tommy Rees has stretches where he’s doing clever things and playing to Atlanta’s strengths, and stretches where I think he must be out of his mind. The Falcons were curiously light on Bijan carries when he was averaging close to eight yards a carry in the first half—he had just eight totes—but Rees snapped out of it a bit in the second half and called an effective run game that was periodically undone by penalties outside of his control. Then the Falcons got backed up by another penalty and had a 3rd and 12 just outside of the red zone, which called for something past the sticks. Instead, they called a screen that seemed doomed to fail from the start and was indeed doomed to fail, setting up a Folk field goal try down two touchdowns that Folk missed.
Non-stop penalties took anything good about this game plan on both sides of the ball and undermined it over and over again. The Falcons were penalized 12 times on Sunday, and they gave the Bengals free yards, took yards away from promising drives in the red zone, and impacted starting field position throughout. For the Falcons to have had a real chance of winning this, they needed to play disciplined football and avoid catching a ton of flags, and the fact that they couldn’t do so does much to explain why this was a 17 point game instead of a closer one.
It’s time to cut ties with Nick Folk. The magic he had the past couple of years is gone, and he missed his first field goal inside the 40 in many moons (and over 100 attempts) against the Bengals when the Falcons were trying to close the gap down 31-17. At his age, unfortunately, these things seem unlikely to get better, and Atlanta should bring in a young kicker and see if they can catch lightning in a bottle the rest of the way. The season is in major trouble, anyways, so you may as well look to the future.

The Wrapup

Game MVP

Bijan for accounting for so much of Atlanta’s production offensively and providing a few moments of joy along the way. These have been tough to hand out.

One Takeaway

The Falcons are a 3-6 team, and their play has largely reflected that record over the past month. We’re now seen more than half a season of play from them and it’s fair to suggest this is who they are.