We all know where the Atlanta Falcons stand today. Just 6-7 and in the midst of a four game losing streak, Atlanta’s season is not yet toast but is starting to smell like toast.
Their only way out is to win, and they may need to win all four games to have a realistic chance of making the postseason. Their only open avenues are passing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (who are racking up injuries but have an easy schedule after this weekend’s Chargers tilt) or grabbing the seventh seed away from the Commanders by beating them, getting some significant help in the form of additional losses for the Rams, Commanders and Cardinals, and probably still winning out. That’s not an easy road, either way.
With that in mind, you might have been turning over in your head what’s actually at stake for these Falcons. Will everyone be fired if this team goes 8-9? Will Kirk Cousins stay as the starting quarterback in 2025 if he stumbles down the stretch? Could a middling result see assistant coaches or even the front office in trouble? The playoffs are likely a salve that keeps anything like that from happen, but here are some thoughts regarding what might happen if the Falcons do fall short, especially if they continue stumbling over the final four games.
What is at stake
A playoff berth and/or the division
This is simply the most straightforward and immediate stake. Win three or four of your final four games and get a little break with Tampa Bay dropping one or two, and the Falcons win the NFC South and make the playoffs for the first time since 2017. Fail to do so and even if you finish 9-8 or even 10-7, the season may end in the bitter disappointment of not making the postseason.
This team was built to make the playoffs, right now. Arthur Smith and Terry Fontenot finally stopped dancing around expectations in 2023 and clearly pushed their chips in; a third straight 7-10 season got Smith fired. Another offseason of big spending and a new staff was supposed to set Atlanta up to make a postseason push, and falling short again will be an unhappy result for just about everybody.
All other results below flow downstream from this. You can basically take everything else off the table if the Falcons do make the playoffs, even as a lowly seventh seed, because Atlanta’s waited so long for this. If they make it and actually win a game, there might be a small parade.
Kirk Cousins’ future in Atlanta
The Falcons have made it beyond clear that they want to roll with Kirk Cousins, to the point where it feels uncomfortably like they’re coddling him. Cousins has been brutally bad over much of the past month, and he wasn’t even pulled in garbage time to give Michael Penix some run because it was in Minnesota and they clearly wanted to get him a touchdown. Raheem Morris is clearly not going to consider a change until the Falcons are effectively out of the playoff chase and/or Cousins plays so poorly that he really has no choice.
The Falcons want Cousins to be their starter through 2025. They structured the deal to more easily wriggle free of it post-2025, and they built their roster with the idea that they’ll have a fairly set group for Cousins to work with next year, given their likely-to-be-limited cap space. Cousins being one and done is somewhat of a disaster for Atlanta, so it’s not their preference to turn to Penix that quickly, much less in 2024.
But I also think there’s a point at which it is a viable choice. Cousins’ traditional strengths in terms of accuracy, effective movement in the pocket, and ability to read defenses and the field are all diminished this season because he can’t really move at all. That’s led to him being unable or unwilling to throw the ball away, unable to get through his reads, has resulted in an inconsistent ability to drive and deliver the ball, and has him making uncharacteristically poor decisions. Some of this interceptions this season have been rookie-level mistakes, not the errors a quarterback with a decade of experience who is frequently praised for his smarts tends to make.
Perhaps Cousins with another offseason is a lot sharper and can move better, but he will also be 37 years old. If the Falcons determine this is the level they’re going to get out of Cousins, and that the big efforts like those against Tampa Bay are going to be the outliers, they’re going to be tempted to go to Penix, either at season’s end or in 2025. Cousins needs to play better in the final month of the season against easier opponents to ensure his hold on to this job next season.
What might be at stake
The structure of the current front office/Terry Fontenot’s job
When Arthur Blank soured on the job Thomas Dimitroff was doing to build the Falcons up in the trenches, the team hired Scott Pioli as the assistant general manager and set him loose on that. During Pioli’s tenure from 2014-2019, the Falcons drafted Jake Matthews, Chris Lindstrom, Kaleb McGary, and Wes Schweitzer on offense and added Grady Jarrett, Vic Beasley, and Takk McKinley on defense, fueling Atlanta’s brief run of success in the middle of the decade and adding pieces of both lines that remain with the Falcons today.
That likely wasn’t all Pioli’s doing, but Blank’s desire to give Dimitroff help with some of his perceived weaknesses via an experienced assistant general manager is germane. Terry Fontenot has now been the general manager in Atlanta for four years, and he’s done an impressive job of building the offense’s cast of playmakers and pieces of the defense, largely through top ten draft picks and free agency. His front office has consistently failed to bring in an impact edge rusher and has, on balance, had a spotty track record in the draft and making trades. Fontenot’s 2021 draft class now looks like a disaster outside of late picks Drew Dalman (a good starter), Ta’Quon Graham (a fine rotational piece), and Avery Williams (a useful special teamer), while his 2022 class is a mixed bag and 2024 still has much to prove. Only 2023 looks like a truly successful class.
For all the stellar work in free agency, where the Falcons have added the likes of Jessie Bates, Cordarrelle Patterson, Charlie Woerner, Ray-Ray McCloud, David Onyemata, Kaden Elliss, and Mike Hughes, Kirk Cousins and Justin Simmons have been more mixed bags. The trades have been by and large dreadful; Atlanta whiffed on Matthew Judon, Van Jefferson, and Bryan Edwards, got nominal value out of Jeff Okudah, and collected decent but not game-changing returns for Calvin Ridley, Matt Ryan, and Julio Jones. Only Kentavius Street and Jonnu Smith were true success stories in terms of trades; don’t forget this team also tried to trade for Deshaun Watson.
The team success that got Dimitroff such a long leash in Atlanta hasn’t been there, either; Dimitroff’s Falcons had winning records in his first five season, while Fontenot’s Falcons are still chasing their first winning record in his four years on the job.
I don’t think Fontenot will be gone if the Falcons miss the playoffs—more on that later—but I could see the team mandating that he shuffles his front office, bringing in outside help and potentially jettisoning Ryan Pace or Kyle Smith as sacrifices for this team’s mixed draft track record. If the team’s nosedive continues and they finish with a fourth consecutive losing season, well, someone’s going to have to fall on that sword, and it may well be the GM.
Veteran players returning
A disappointing result this year might prompt the Falcons to shake things up, especially with limited free agent dollars on the way in this offseason. You can justify keeping the pieces of a playoff-caliber team around if you think you can build on 2024’s results; it’s less likely the Falcons will do that if they fall short yet again.
Matthew Judon, Justin Simmons, Lorenzo Carter, Mike Hughes, Richie Grant, Kentavius Street, James Smith-Williams, and Ta’Quon Graham are among the impending free agents who may not be back if this team thinks they need to make sweeping changes; it’s a good bet that Judon and Simmons won’t be back regardless. David Onyemata and Grady Jarrett are both 2026 free agents, and I genuinely can’t imagine the team bringing back both of them unless they finish this season on a high enough note (with both men playing well) to think that keeping the band together is wise.
The reality is that the Falcons are likely to move on from some of these guys regardless, in the interest of having the cap flexibility to make additions and keep churning the roster as Raheem Morris and company see fit. I do think a poor result in terms of the season’s standing will encourage the Falcons to push more of them out the door.
What isn’t at stake
Raheem Morris’s job
Yes, I’ve seen the calls for Morris to be fired at season’s end if the Falcons don’t make the playoffs. No, I can’t see that happening.
Morris has had exactly one offseason and season in Atlanta, with a roster that was largely built when it was handed to him. His opportunity to put his stamp on this franchise has been limited as a result, with the team adding essentially two new defensive starters and taking a big swing at quarterback. There’s little point in hiring a coach if you’re not going to give him some time to implement his vision; if the Falcons had brought aboard Bill Belichick and the defense was much better while the offense was struggling, very few would be arguing for him to be one and done.
The strengths have been outweighed by weaknesses over the past month; Morris handled tough situations well early on, has been appropriately aggressive on fourth down much of the year, and has kept discontent from leaking out of the organization even during this slide. He has also presided over one of the league’s least disciplined teams in terms of penalties, made some really poor decisions in recent weeks—the two chip shot field goals against a high-powered Vikings team and the inexplicable fourth down delay of game among them—and has clung to struggling players like Kirk Cousins, Younghoe Koo, and Nate Landman to an extent that’s probably not warranted.
But again, the Falcons threw their organizational faith behind Morris when they hired him, knowing full well the criticism would be withering if he foundered given that they also courted Bill Belichick. Arthur Blank also remembers the 2015 season, when Matt Ryan and Kyle Shanahan clashed and a promising start to the season went wildly off the rails under a new coach, and I certainly remember the hundreds of fans calling for Dan Quinn, Shanahan, or both to be fired in the midst of that nosedive. There’s simply no way the Falcons will be that impulsive in 2024 when they weren’t in 2015; they never would have hired Morris if they weren’t prepared for things to go more unevenly in 2024 than they originally hoped.
All bets are off if the Falcons disappoint again in 2025, because Arthur Blank’s patience is waning as he gets older and his desire to return to winning burns brighter. But for now, Morris absolutely get the chance to help overhaul the defense further and build on his first season in Atlanta, though, and that should surprise no one.
The coordinators
I suppose Raheem Morris could push Jimmy Lake out if the defense implodes anew down the stretch, and certainly the number of busted plays against the Vikings was not promising. But I doubt any of the coordinators go.
Lake and company have made real adjustments, and the comically bad coverage in the Vikings game obscures that. Since the bye (and even before, against Denver and New Orleans), the Falcons had been sporting an improved run defense. Coming out of the bye, they effectively doubled their season sack total in two weeks; their performance against the Chargers was a masterful one. If Lake was pushed out, Jerry Gray is there as a potential in-house replacement, but I very much doubt he gets the boot in year one with some in-game and throughout-the-season improvement.
Robinson has been criticized heavily in some corners of the fanbase and more lightly by nearly everyone for not maximizing Cousins’ strengths, but as I argued above, most of the quarterback’s traditional strengths have evaporated post-Achilles injury. Robinson’s bigger problems have been around predictability and red zone/short yardage struggles, as the team has been lousy when they need to pick up a yard or two all year and have frittered away too many plays on screens the defense sees coming. I do subscribe to the idea that he’s done a good job on balance, especially working with a limited Cousins, and the Falcons will hope for year two improvement for the first-year play caller.
Marquice Williams can’t really do anything about Younghoe Koo’s approach breaking down or fumbles by returners, though I hope he’s at least yelling at some guys about the latter, and special teams on balance has been mostly solid. He’ll stick around.
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