After receiving their first loss of the season we have a lot to uncover on what went wrong in this game and we will ask the question are these things fixable? Welcome to the Armchair Observation.
1. Playcalling- I’m not the offensive genius coach Arthur Smith was labeled as prior to being hired as the Falcons head coach, but I’m trying to figure out a few things. As the kids say these days “MAKE IT MAKE SENSE”! We come out and run Bijan for the first play and we get 7 yards with the lions having 8 in the box. Then we TAKE BIJAN out the game and run two straight play action pass plays with Tyler Allgeier! Not with Bijan, but with Allgeier. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE?!?!?!?
I understand conventional thinking is to hit 8 in the box with a play action pass call, but you gained 7 yards on 1st down and you brought in Allgeier. Hand off the ball and let Tyler get those hard 3 yards! Stop trying to be cute on our 1st possession! That set the tone of the game for the Lions as I felt that in that moment we could have established to the lions that we don’t care about your 8 man in the box! We are still going to run it down your throats but we got too cute that resulted in a 3 and out!
the rest of the game was more of the same as we never tried to establish the run in this game in my opinion. The Lions head coach put 8 in the box single high safety and dared us to throw the ball and Arthur took that as an invitation to let Ridder throw 38 times in this game. Imo that played right into the Lions strategy as we abandoned the run before we really got it started tbh. This is going to be the blueprint in playing the falcons moving forward and we can’t just abandon the run before we establish the run imo! Play action isn’t going to work if you haven’t show the ability to run.
2. Bijan Robinson better not have only 10 carries (for 33 yards) in any football game for the rest of his career as a Atlanta Falcon player! I can see if Allgeier had the hot hand and coach ran with the hot hand, but so was not the case! Matter of fact Tyler only had 7 carries for 12 yards! What made this kid Bijan special was his abilities to make people miss running the ball or catching the ball and the ability to handle 21 Carries per game in college! You will never get the maximum ability out of Bijan if you don’t give him at least 19-24 Carries and 4-5 catches. We all like Allgeiers, but he is a Micheal Turner type of RB. That’s not a diss imo. That’s a huge compliment because MT33 (Burner Turner) was great and a franchise RB for the Falcons. My point is Bijan is a once in a generation talent of the elk of a LT or Marshall Faulk! The Chargers let MT walk because they had LT and that helped Micheal Turner career 1000 fold! To split the carries is doing both players a disservice tbh. This is Bijan TEAM and this offense should go through him imo!
3. The offensive line got bullied again in pass protection imo. McGary was a turnstile in pass protection once again. I saw one play where (TE) J Smith chip blocked the pass rusher on the outside to help McGary get in front of him and he still got beat on the outside for a sack! His body positioning was correct, but his balance was horrendous as he got swim move out of the way like a child! He wasn’t the only one getting cooked as the rookie (lg) Bergeron also had a rough time pass blocking today along with Jake Matthews. This Lions team came into this game vs the Falcons with only 2 sacks so you would think we would be able to pass protect Ridder better, but the Lions pass rush was dominant today vs our O-Line.
4. NOT Under any circumstances do I ever want to see Desmond Ridder get 38 passing attempts at this stage of his young career! Ridder was 21-38 with 201 yard with a 5.26 yards per pass average! Now to be fair the pass protection was so horrendous that made it hard on the young qb throughout the game. With that being said I saw several over or under thrown balls throughout the game and when he did get a solid pocket he held the ball too long. I do feel the game has not slowed down yet for him and he really needs the running game to take the pressure off of the pass rush. Case and point like last week victory over the Packers! The Falcons established Bijsn in the running game and that help the slow down the pass rush in play action passes, but you have to establish the run 1st or play action will be useless aa it was against the Lions! This leads me into my next point.
5. Kyle Pitts had 5 catches for 50+ yards. The lions wanted that. Also we have to talk about the elephant in the room and that was Kyle pitts effort on running routes! He is lazy coming in or out of the break on most plays imo. I think he is losing interest in playing on this team. As a TE you would figure in a run heavy offense that you would the big part of the offensive scheme kinda how Alge Crumpler was for Mike Vick, but so is not the case. It seems like he is disinterested in his route running because he feels like Ridder can’t get him the ball. I did see several plays that was designed to get pitts the ball today but the connection is just not there! Several passes sailed pass Pitts head as you see the young man hang his head coming back to the huddle. He was labeled as an Unicorn coming out of college but his production is on my little pony tbh. Is it play calling or the lack of throwing the ball talent in ridder or was he simply not as good as the scouts coming out of the draft thought Pitts was?!?!?
6. Imo our defense played well today overall. They kept us in the game for the majority of the game but our offense lack of point production was too much to overcome! They was out in the field a lot and I felt like the defense eventually wore down in the second half of the game! We still can’t generate pass rush with only sending four. Hell we had to send six to get decent pressure on the Lions QB and even then it was barely enough to detour them from completing throw after throw after throw. The bend but don’t break defense is fine when our offense is running the ball effectively and giving them the rest they need to control play at a high level.
7. Koo might not be the same koo as of two years ago. In the grand scheme of things his missed kick didn’t cost us the game since the score would have been 20-9 final instead of 20-6, but he is the only one to score for the Falcons in this game. I just need him to be more accurate again that’s all! You got one job sir! Maybe he needs the number 7 back! (That is never happening!)
8. This Falcons team has the following weapons- Pitts, London, Allgeiers, Bijan, j smith, Mack hollins and for some reason our coach hasn’t figured out how to use them properly yet. We hired you because you was SUPPOSED to be an offensive genius! Maybe we should have spent a draft pick or two on a PASS BLOCKING LT/RT o-lineman in one of these drafts. Hmmm…… maybe that’s the problem why his offense isn’t firing in all cylinders? Hmmm…..
9. From the outside looking in it seems like Dave Regone has zero input in play calling during the game. Arthur smith has that play calling sheet to his face the entire game so for those that are suggesting Arthur Smith let Dave Regone handle the playcalling could be a solution, but I feel he would follow the same gameplan tbh. I also don’t think Arthur Smith should hire another OC and let coach smith just be the head coach. Imo coach Smith was hired because of his offensive mind and if you take that away from him then you might as well fire him. We saw how Dan Quinn had to give up his DC duties and he was fired the following year! If he isn’t able to do what he was hire to do then just move on and don’t waste this team time and his coaching future.
10. This isn’t the end of the world Everyone Falcon land! The sky isn’t falling and hopefully our mistakes can be corrected by coaching and hard work from our players! Let’s look at the film and learn from this game and be better when we face the Jacksonville Jaguars. The Jags just lost to the Texans so both teams will be looking to have a bounce back game after a loss. It’s a very early game 9:30 am est next Sunday and I look forward to watching and commentating the game.
If you made it this far in the blog I would like to thank you for reading the entire blog. Please leave a comment if you agree or disagree with my post. Rise Up Falcons! 3-1 in coming…….