When Darnell Mooney was injured way back in late July, the best estimate we got from the team was that he would miss a “few weeks” of action with a shoulder injury. There were rumors swirling around at the time
that the injury might be more severe than the Falcons were indicating, but without the team or reporters in the building giving us anything concrete, we just waited and hoped for the best.
Mooney would miss Week 1, but he was out there in Week 2. The puzzling thing for anyone who saw Mooney do stellar work all last season was that he didn’t look very much like Mooney, something we chalked up to rust and recovery at the time. Mooney would go on to miss another week with a hamstring injury, and thus far his season has been a massive disappointment compared to our high expectations, with the veteran receiver and Michael Penix Jr. seemingly not on the same page through0ut the year and with Mooney dropping passes he would’ve caught in his sleep a year ago. Surely a shoulder ailment and a mild hamstring ailment shouldn’t be impacting him to this extent?
On Dukes and Bell on 92.9 The Game Wednesday, Raheem Morris parried and riposted with Mike Bell and Carl Dukes over the state of the team, mostly stressing the need to keep working and stay even in the face of the team’s four game losing streak. The only time I heard Morris get more than a little testy concerned Mooney, with Dukes pressing him about the connection between the two, when Morris revealed for what I believe is the first time publicly that Darnell Mooney had a broken collarbone in July. You can hear the exchange starting at 15:56, but here’s an excerpt.
Carl Dukes: “Coach, I have to ask you right there. High expectations. Darnell had a great year last year.”
Raheem Morris: “No doubt.”
Mike Bell: “He had a shot at 1,000 yards.”
Carl Dukes: “We know he missed camp.”
Raheem Morris: “Yeah.”
Carl Dukes: “We’ve been talking about this, and I know that played a role. But coach, it seems like there’s no connection between our quarterback and Darnell Mooney right now.”
Raheem Morris: “How would you have one?”
Carl Dukes: “I don’t know. I’m assuming the practices, I don’t know!”
Raheem Morris: “There’s been no practices. You just said it.”
Carl Dukes: “For both of those guys.”
Raheem Morris: “You just said it. So like, you don’t make excuses, you never talk about these things, but like…Mooney, we knew how this would work, right? He came back, he hurt his…he broke his collar bone the first play of training camp.”
Carl Dukes: “Right.”
Raheem Morris: “First play of training camp, he missed all this time, he came back the second week of the season. That was the first time they actually practiced together. You start working those practices, you knew the first four weeks of the season would be like almost training camp for him. So You’re working those things in, you’re getting him going, really getting him his legs back and getting him to run fast, getting him through all those things, and then the little small setback with the hamstring. He has the hamstring, he misses the two weeks or whatever the case may be, really two weeks, and you get him back going again. And then this last week you start to see him move fast, move around, and some unfortunate things happen. You have the drop that you would never drop, right? And all those other things, the timing routes on the sideline are not quite like you want ‘em, and then you have the nerve to ask me why.”
Carl Dukes: “Why?”
Raheem Morris: “You know why.”
/laughter, incredulous and otherwise
Raheem Morris: “You’re smarter than that.”
Dukes went on to press the point a bit, noting that Falcons fans would expect that if Mooney is practicing the connection would show up more on the field; Morris reiterated that the weeks of practice were almost like training camp for Mooney, that some failure was expected, and the team knew Mooney would have to go out there and struggle a bit as he worked his way back. Morris also said he feels Mooney is close to getting on track, in so many words. I highly recommend listening to the whole interview, as there’s some good questions from Dukes and Bell and some thoughtful answers from Morris around that bombshell.
But what do we make of this? I can’t say I’m happy, to put it mildly, but it also looks even worse in hindsight than the team’s inaction with their receiver room did in, say, late August. The fact that the team was not forthright about the injury isn’t exactly great and will likely make plenty of fans angry, but from Mike Smith on and maybe especially with the way the team has handled players like Troy Andersen, I have very low expectations for the team’s willingness to communicate the severity of injuries and recovery timelines to the broader world. A broken collar bone is, after all, technically a shoulder injury.
It’s the roster building that rankles. The Falcons very obviously carried a bunch of receivers, including future #3 option David Sills, into the regular season because they didn’t know exactly when Mooney would be healthy. But they knew he had a broken collarbone, an injury that generally takes anywhere from 6 weeks to 3.5 months to heal from, depending on the severity of the ailment. They knew, as Morris alluded to in his exchanges on 92.9, that Mooney would not have practice time to get up to speed and develop a rapport with Penix, who he had only caught passes from in the regular season for two games at the end of 2024. They knew, in other words, that the possibility he might miss real time and struggle was a real possibility; Morris even basically said he knew some struggles were (understandably, given the injury) an inevitability. That meant the team would need other options to pick up the slack.
The team’s answer for that was to sign DJ Chark, who did not end up making the team, and stock both the bottom of the roster and the practice squad with receiving options. They undoubtedly thought that a heavy reliance on Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier on the ground, plus Bijan, Drake London, Kyle Pitts, and Ray-Ray McCloud through the air, would help them get through those struggles relatively unscathed. For stretches, that’s exactly what has happened, but not nearly consistently enough for this team to weather Mooney’s injury and recovery as well as they had hoped.
Instead, the Falcons are essentially working with one credible starting receiver in London after Ray-Ray McCloud was cut, and McCloud wasn’t really a factor before that. Mooney has caught just 13 of the 35 passes thrown his way, and while Penix has missed him owing to miscommunication and simple inaccuracy, Mooney has only recently started to get open the way he did so often last year. Even when he’s open and the throw is there, Mooney’s struggling to reel in balls (as I mentioned above) and get to the right place at the right time. There’s little question this will get better as time goes on and Mooney continues to get healthier, but how soon, and how much better? Will it only happen when this season has slipped away entirely?
We didn’t know Mooney had a broken collarbone and that all of these things might happen; only the Falcons did. The fact that they didn’t seriously consider trading for or attempting to sign a receiver with a history of at least borderline starting-caliber production knowing what they knew feels like malpractice now, and had we known the full extent of the injury, it would have felt like malpractice heading into Week 1. All non-London and Mooney receivers for the Falcons—a list that includes McCloud, Casey Washington, David Sills, and KhaDarel Hodge—have combined to catch 18 passes for 202 passes and zero touchdowns, or a measly 10% of Penix and Kirk Cousins’ completions and yards. Mooney himself, with his 13 catches and 190 yards, has provided a little less than that; that leaves 80% of Penix’s production in the hands of Bijan, Pitts, London, Tyler Allgeier, and Charlie Woerner. No credible passing game, especially one that likes to run a lot of three receiver sets, can live with that production from its #2 and #3 receivers, especially when that #2 is struggling as much as Mooney has been. Predictably, the Falcons have been sinking, a problem exacerbated by Penix’s accuracy woes.
It’s too late to do anything about it now, and the team is left to hope that Mooney and Penix will iron out their connection and Mooney can return to the high-level receiver play we just saw from him in 2024, which clearly has been their plan all along. But by virtue of hoping Mooney would beat the standard timelines for a serious injury with no compelling contingency plan, the Falcons took an awful risk with what was supposed to be an ascendant passing game. That risk has very clearly blown up in their faces, as they’re now 3-6 with a struggling offense and passing attack, an outcome an injured Mooney has unfortunately played a role in—and absorbed significant heat for from fans and analysts along the way.
Had the team been more honest with the outside world and themselves, the Falcons could have spared Mooney criticism and perhaps eased him in more gracefully, with another receiver filling in while that happened. We’ll never know now, of course.
