Falcons – Seahawks recap: With a whimper

The Atlanta Falcons 2025 season is dead, and will be neither lamented nor missed. The season will be survived by its fans and its schedule, which ensures the team will shuffle zombie-like through four

more games, but make no mistake: It is dead.

The Falcons will not make the playoffs for the eighth straight season, which we can now say with 100% confidence instead of just 99.9% confidence. They locked up an eighth straight losing season with this one, too, a run of futility they’ve only managed one other time in franchise history. They suffered their worst home loss since 2014, their third loss this season by 20-plus points, and their second straight loss to Seattle by 20-plus points.

What makes it just that little bit tougher is that the Falcons actually hung in there in the first half. The game was tied 6-6 and the Falcons had sacked Sam Darnold twice, picked him off, and forced off-balance throws while stopping the run. That made it 6-6—the Falcons offense was predictably plodding, though a bad call cost them a touchdown—and gave them a shot at making it a competitive game the rest of the way.

But it wasn’t to be. Instead, all the problems that have wounded Atlanta throughout the season proved fatal. They allowed a long kickoff return for a touchdown, the defense failed to tackle and suffered too many miscues in coverage, and the offense was mired in missed passes, bobbles and drops, penalties on the line. When the dust settled, the Falcons had lost by a score of 37-9, having picked up just one field goal and turning the ball over three times in a nightmare game against a tough opponent.

We expected this, of course. We expected the Falcons to lose and probably lose by a lot, given how good the Seahawks are, but their first half was another maddening glimpse of what this team could have been in some alternate universe. Instead, what we have is the Falcons team we saw lose this game: Undisciplined, poorly coached, not as talented as we might have wanted them to be, prone to major errors, injured, and frankly tired-looking. They’re a bad football team, and all we’ll really remember about 2025 someday is all the losing, the injuries, and maybe the promise that wilted so quickly and so decisively.

The Falcons have so much to do this offseason, but they must finish the final four games before they can start in earnest. There’s little sense in keeping anyone around with this team, even though I have don’t know whether Arthur Blank is leaning toward keeping Raheem Morris and Terry Fontenot, and at the very least the roster will churn and the non-Jeff Ulbrich coordinators will be gone. Regardless of what the specific moves prove to be, the Falcons have forgotten how to win and have become far too comfortable and familiar with losing. Until they find the moves that revivify this franchise, the only things deader than this season will be our hopes for these Falcons.

On to the full recap.

The Good

Bijan Robinson is so good he makes special plays look routine, a trait he shares with former Falcon and living legend Julio Jones. In this one, he took go-nowhere carries for six yards, short passes for first downs, and well-blocked runs for huge gains, showcasing the jump cuts and lateral agility that few backs can approach, never mind equal. He’s a bright spot no matter what’s going wrong in Atlanta, even if his fumble trying to stretch for a first down was an unfortunate, uncharacteristic mistake.
Kyle Pitts probably should’ve been able to get that first deep ball, even if I think the degree of difficulty on a slightly underthrown ball with a defender in his sleeves was quite high, but the work he did after that helped make up for it. The highlight was a gorgeous, arms extended grab on a 30 yard ball from Kirk Cousins, but Pitts has been a preferred target for the veteran quarterback for a good reason. Outside of the occasional infuriating drop, he’s been one of the few receiving options Atlanta has who can pry himself open and make something happen after the catch; that counts as a major bright spot given how dire things are.
The debate over trading a first round pick for James Pearce Jr. is going to rage for a long time, but there’s no longer any question about Pearce’s ability and fit in this defense. He’ll need to make continued strides as a run defender to be the kind of juggernaut he absolutely should be, but as a pass rusher Pearce is way ahead of where I assumed he would be as a rookie. In this one, he made Sam Darnold pay for lingering on the very first third down for Seattle, sacking him near the end zone for his sixth of the year. He exited with an injury later, but he looks like a player who could flirt with double digit sacks every year. That’s worth plenty to me.
Kentavius Street with a sack? Sure, why not. The infrequently used defensive lineman has gotten more run in the second half of this season after attrition bit into the defensive front, and he’s been an asset against the ground game and at least occasionally as a pass rusher.
It was another uneven day for him, but Mike Hughes getting his first interception since the 2021 season is pretty cool for him.
Only four games left before we can put this miserable season behind us.

The Ugly

Kirk Cousins was more unlucky than terrible, but this was another reminder that the Falcons can’t move forward with him at his current price point. His feet got choppy under pressure, he missed some throws he really should have made, and he can’t elevate the offense in any way, shape, or form when they struggle. Cousins has to be pissed that balls off the hands of Pitts and David Sills turned into interceptions, but the overall effort is passable, and that’s really not what the Falcons given the money they’re paying him.
Cousins was, as I alluded to, let down by his receivers. While Pitts had a good game overall, he couldn’t reel in that difficult deep pass, had one tipped and bounced that went for an interception, and saw Sills bobble one up into the air for another interception. Cousins had to make a lot of tight window throws thanks to a lack of separation, a function of a depleted and weak receiving corps, and that went about as you’d expect.
Jalon Walker and James Pearce Jr. leaving the game was bad, but at least Pearce came back. The Falcons pass rush notably slowed with Walker out, which led to Sam Darnold having some time to cook. He barbecued Atlanta as a result throughout much of the late first half and second half.
A.J. Terrell has had a great year and was really sharp working against Jaxon Smith-Njigba in the first half, but the wheels came off after that. Terrell just got burnt on a long attempt downfield, and JSN got loose on the next play with Terrell having a shot to make a tackle attempt he politely declined to make, diving a bit and putting a couple of hands on the receiver in one of the weaker efforts I’ve seen this year. Terrell is an excellent corner, but that was discouraging.
The most discouraging moment of the game, of course, was the 100 yard kickoff return from Rashid Shaheed. The Seahawks did an excellent job blocking but the Falcons once again took poor angles, couldn’t get through those blocks, and just put together a terrible effort that allowed Shaheed to easily score. The Falcons had been flirting with that specific disaster all year and finally let a team score; it’s sort of amazing it took so long.
Zane Gonzalez has been pretty good in Atlanta, but having your field goal blocked and then booting a kick out of bounds to give Seattle the ball at the 40 is not going to make for a memorable day. The Falcons’ search for a long-term answer at kicker will continue in 2026.
The call against Darnell Mooney on his would-be touchdown felt pretty weird at the time, and the more we saw of it, the more it certainly seemed that Mooney re-established himself back inbounds and should have got to keep that score. I thought that crew was a bit shaky generally on Sunday, but that one seemed to baffle the booth as well as the rest of us.
I’ve long believed that Marquice Williams is a good coach, one who has a reputation for connecting well with players and preparing his guys well, and who had a ramshackle group playing well during his early years in Atlanta. The slippage in special teams performance last year happened on his watch, but I believed that was more a function of some turnover and Younghoe Koo’s collapse than anything Williams was doing. The problem for Williams and this special teams unit is not that things haven’t gotten better; it’s that they’ve gotten much worse. In this one, that was especially apparent after the kickoff return for a score, the latest in a series of long, terribly covered returns, even if you have to give Seattle credit for blocking well. With the coverage issues, the boneheaded and bad returns for Atlanta, the kicking woes, and the lack of answers from Williams and company despite the investments on special teams, he’s probably done in Atlanta even if Raheem Morris survives this year. It’s a shame, but things are unbelievably bad right now on special teams, and that has to land on the coordinator.
What’s ultimately going to get Zac Robinson fired—and again, if Morris survives I don’t expect him or Williams to—is the terrible third down success rate. It’s not all on execution, not when your toolkit is just screens, a jumble of uninspiring routes, and toss plays, and even with injuries and personnel troubles hurting this offense, Robinson has not been able to supply any improvement or answers that give the Falcons a shot on Sundays. Third downs are just his most visible failing, but it’s hard to talk about this every single week and see nothing improve.
When all three phases are struggling, when your top-flight talent and depth aren’t enough to win or even be competitive, and when you’re getting smoked by another man who was a candidate for the same head coaching job you grabbed, what’s left to say? Raheem Morris would get a third year in normal circumstances, given that Arthur Blank has never fired a coach after just two seasons, but this team was supposed to be more talented and more ready to contend than the ones that Mike Smith, Dan Quinn, and Arthur Smith inherited. If you blame this on the general manager, you hire a new GM who will probably still want a new coach; if you blame the coach for the sloppy, lousy nature of the product, then you probably have to move on. I don’t know if Blank will do it, but there really isn’t a compelling case to keep Morris outside of he should get more time and it’s the roster, neither of which is an easy case to make.
While the defense wasn’t the biggest problem yet again—they didn’t give up a 100 yard kickoff, after all, and had short rests thanks to three Falcons turnovers—it predictably struggled against a really good offense. Aside from the early harrying of Darnold, they couldn’t gin up enough pass rush to get him off-kilter, and coverage was defined by bad angles and bad instincts in the red zone throughout the second half. This is the best phase for Atlanta by a country mile, but the work needed to make it great is still very evident.
We have to do this again in a few days!

The Wrapup

Game MVP

Nope.

One Takeaway

The Falcons can no longer pretend this is just a matter of a quick fix or a few key players, which is a necessary shot of reality. Whether they’ll allow that reality to guide their decision-making is, of course, anyone’s guess.