Head Coach Raheem Morris Week 9 Media Availability | Wednesday, October 29th | Press Conference

Head Coach Raheem Morris Week 9 Media Availability | Wednesday, October 29th | Press Conference

Morning guys. Good morning coach. How are you today? Excellent. How are you doing? Uh pretty good. Uh can you give us an update on Michael? Uh Michael is in the building obviously in meetings. Uh he’ll go out there today and do walk through. Uh we’ll get a chance to get a feel what he can do in practice or if he can do anything. But obviously we’ll get to that right after this and find out what he’s doing and how he can do it and how he feels and all that type of stuff. Um obviously feels better um than he did last week. Obviously feels better than he did um every single day uh with it being a bone bruise. that stuff gets better every day. So, I feel really good about him. And uh the decision to go inside um today, what did y’all with the game outside? Yeah, I want to go inside today. Uh we’ll be outside tomorrow. Supposed to be beautiful up there. So, we’ll go inside, play, get both things done inside today. We’ll go on the grass tomorrow. We’ll figure that out tomorrow. We’ll do both things on the grass tomorrow. Um better day tomorrow. Not want to go into inside two days in a row with these young guys. Would you still consider Penn’s day today? Yes, you’d have to say that. Um, but I feel really good about it. Okay. And what about uh about Drake? Uh Drake is in the building. Feels good. Plan on practicing. Uh get a chance to look at him move around a little bit today. Um those guys both feeling dayto-day, but a lot better than we felt last week. Do you have any update potentially on Troy Anderson and what his timeline might look like? Uh I don’t I didn’t talk about him just recently. I know it’s still off a little bit, so we’re just waiting for that process. Still on IR, still going through the process. not not near the point of talking about in a a daily basis or whatever the case may be. So, we’ll just have to wait and see. And then Jaylen Walker, um Billy Bowman, some of these other guys. Jaylen Walker potentially coming back. You know, obviously he’ll practice today. Um Billy is getting out there today a little bit. Little tester deal. Um see where he is. So potentially getting those two guys back as well. Is there any chance that he would potentially move to like an off not move necessarily, but like go like kind of an offball linebacker like he did in college a little bit? He’s already done that, but it’s like more so like than he has just um off the edge. Um I don’t know. He does a lot of soft stuff off the edge, but he’s already done some off the ball backer stuff before he got hurt. He had a couple drops, had a couple deals where he was go able to go inside, bounce around, play some off the ball back and forth. Um he goes inside, does a couple things with Kaden. He actually moves on to the edge. So, you know, he’ll do a lot more of that when he gets back in his healthy up and going. What’s like in a a perfect world like the scenario that you you make the call that Pennix can go or can’t go so that Kirk’s prepared and and the groups prepared that he’s guided waiting till the day off. The whole the whole team has to be ready to go at all at all points like last week. You know, Michael obviously uh couldn’t go on our Thursday practice. So, we were able to get all the practice things that we were able to get to uh with Kurt. Obviously, Friday, we knew um that he had a high likelihood of being able to go. Then obviously Saturday um the decisions was made where he was going to be out there as the guy assuming nothing went great on Saturday and all those things. So getting a healthy week with Kurt last week um getting the ability to go out there today and get a better feel for where Michael’s going to be especially with the situation that we have going on. I feel great about that. Um so those guys they all get a really good feel. Obviously there’s always some ups and downs and turns during the week that always happens in everybody’s team. So those things happen. We try to keep you guys uh afloat just like we keep afloat and and keep everything moving the right way. But you got to prepare just like you got to prepare every single week. Jesse Bass. Uh Jesse Bass will be out at walkthrough today moving a lot better. Feel a lot better about Jesse. I feel really good. Um he’s going to move around a little bit individual today. Um and then we’ll get a feel for what it looks like um with some of the team periods, things of that nature. And Zack Harris, uh Zack Harris is a lot of the same. Um he’ll get a chance to get out there. Then we get a chance definitely to get a feel when we put our pads on Thursday, get a feel for a guy like Zach being in the interior, do some of those different things, move around, all type of things like we talked about. All those guys are, you know, so much alike and the same that they just kind of see where they’re at when you get to those moments of truth before you make those final decisions on those guys. So, um, since half time of the Bills game, the haven’t been able to get the offense going, have y’all looked at what’s wrong with offense? Yeah, we like I told you the other day, when we don’t we don’t when we don’t play we don’t play well up front, uh we’re not going to play really well. So, since that point, you know, obviously whenever you’re talking about, you know, we got to play better up front. We want to be able to run the football. We want to be able to throw the football down the field. We got to play better around those guys. We got to play better for those guys and some of those different things. So, like we know how to move the ball. We got to do a better job scoring in the red zone. Uh that’s kind of been our remedy for all year, right? Getting better in the red zone. So, we can do those things, we’ll be fine. When you’re struggling up front, is that more of like a Dwayne Leadford thing where you kind of like work with him a little bit more to see kind of what the issues are or never want to put it on one person, Allison? You know, it was always just a group thing, you know, was all it’s a all of us thing, you know, it was about everything that we want to do, whether it’s a run thing, whether it’s a pass pro thing, whether it’s a uh coming off the ball, just using our techniques, being our identity, going out there, doing what we got to do. You never put it on one person. Um, obviously when you say upfront, obviously Dwayne Leford coaches our upfront people, does a great job, has done a great job, traditionally done a great job. Um, in the games we played well, we’ve played well. In the games we haven’t, we played bad. So, we got to make sure we can fix all those things. Are you surprised that that group has been inconsistent? It seemed like the one group coming in that was you could, you know, that’s hard for you to say, Josh, being that we got a brand new right tackle on the third one, got a brand new center this year. Um, we can say that now because we got Chris, we got Jake, we got some of those guys that got the pillar of consistency, but we do have some new guys. Not to blame any of the new guys, but they play well at times. We just got to get them better. So, like it’s just continued growth mindset throughout the season and those guys get better. I got a lot of confidence in those guys. Where’s Storm Warden at as far as that goes? He’s in his second week of coming back. You know, we got to give a feel for him today. He’s definitely in that same trial basis on what it’s going to look like and what it’s going to feel like, but definitely in the mix um to be one of those dayto-day guys if he does get activated. He he might he could be a starter if he’s if he’s right. Definitely in the competitive mode of being able to go out there and do those things. We’ve seen start storm start for us before. I wouldn’t rule out anything if he is as healthy as he needs to be to go play. I want to make sure I’m portraying your the way you’re thinking accurately. You you think offensively, schematically, everything is fine. You don’t need to make any quote unquote changes because the problems that you see are execution personnel. We need to play better, you know, Josh. Like, there’s no doubt about it. Like, we need to play better than we played last week. We need to go out and be execute our run game. We need to be to go out and execute our play action game. We need to go out and execute all things. we need to hold on to the football. Um there’s a bunch of things involved with those things. You need to just go play better, right? There’s nothing that we need to do that we couldn’t that we’re not capable of doing, right? We’ve been able to see high explosive offense, whether it was the Commanders game, whether it was the Buffalo game first half like we talked about in the last two weeks, we haven’t played up to our standards. So, we need to do better job in those things. And especially when we get behind in games, right? When we get behind in the games, you get onedimensional, you’re out there throwing the ball around. That’s not our forte. That’s not our game. Uh that’s not what we want to be in. That’s not want to be involved in. We want to be involved and we’re controlling the terms. We got our identity going when we’re able to be efficient. We’re able to be move the ball down the field effect effectively and score touchdowns. Now, the one issue that we had all year is being able to be effective in the red zone throughout the course of the year consistently. That’s what we want to do better. When it comes to getting snaps for for Kirk in practice this week, are you going to do anything different from what you did last week? Uh, it’d be hard to say you do that because I feel like you’ll get more Michael this week, right? We got a lot more Kurt last week. You know, he got a a big portion of the reps last week. Got a big portion of everything that he got last week. So, it’s hard to say you’ll have more Kirk. Um, knowing that Michael’s getting healthier and where he’s going to be, not interested me more is different. That’s all. It’s hard to say different when he went through all the practice reps or got most of the practice reps last week, you know, like he got a big shot of the reps and a big portion of everything that we did last week. So, like it’s hard to say more or different for Kirk. Yeah, coach. The um folks have had a tough time running on them. It says they the first team since 1950 to not allow a running back to gain 50 yards in the first eight weeks of the season. So that’s going to look like a big challenge for you to get that goal. They have played outstanding, you know, all year when it comes to stopping a run. They’ve done a nice job and like you know, no different than any really good football team that you play. There’s always going to be challenges you have to go up against and there’s always going to be things you have to do schematically. There’s always going to be things you have to do um just throughout the course of the week. You know, we’re able to coach teams always going to be great. They’re always going to play sound. I was going to play really fundamentally fast and uh we got to prepare for that. Do you feel like the biggest inconsistency when it comes to like the offense when you you see some greatness and then you see a sign up, you know, kind of these past couple of games, is it just the front line or and and we need to play better, but is it is it No, it’s never just the front line. It’s just you just kind of lean on those guys kind of like Josh was alluding to, you kind of lean on those guys for the consistency that you want to have um because they played so well. Um, but you know, when you go back and you identify some of the problems, what you want to get done, you know, they can easily fix it and those are the guys that we lean on to go fix those things. It’s not it’s not even just bad play. You know, it’s just getting things done the right way with our execution. Is there a particular message you’re trying to give to the team this week after two less than great games of trying to, you know, get their minds focused or whatever it is in the right place? Yeah, Ken, this is a long season, man. It’s like resilience in this whole league, right? So, you got to be able to go out and be resilient, right? and it’s either crisis or you’re the greatest team in in football. So, like we don’t I don’t I don’t live by that standard. Uh that’s never been my message. I don’t carry myself that way. It’s about going out there, practicing today, finding a way to get a win this week, and that’s the only thing that really matters. Through some things that have been going well offensively, Cal Pitts has been sure thoughts about that and continue to maintain that. Yeah, maybe we should flip it and go back. Cal Pit is playing bad, playing really well on offense. You guys should just talk about Cal. No, I’m just kidding. But, you know, like he’s playing well. He’s done a nice job. He’s done a really good job in the things that he’s been asked to do. Um, he’s going out there, he’s executing at a very high level. Um, he’s he’s blocking at a very high level. And I think it’s all just kind of trickling and going the right way for him and all stuff that we got going on. We just got to get all of us going in the same page at the same time and being ready to play the right way. But, um, this offense is fun when they get going. You know, you get these guys going, you get Bejian going, you get Drake going, you get Cal going, you get all those guys, Mooney particular, some of those guys coming back. Our offensive line come off the ball a little come off. Uh those are the things you want and we’ll get those things going, you know, pretty quickly here. Anything else? Thanks. All right, guys.

Atlanta Falcons Head Coach Raheem Morris speaks with the media as the Falcons begin their preparations to take on the New England Patriots on the road this Sunday at 1pm ET.

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