The Atlanta Falcons came into this game with three straight wins against divisional opponents, sitting at 4-3 and atop the NFC South. The Seahawks were, as I suggested in my previews this week, a better team than recent results had indicated, but it was reasonable to think this would be a hard-fought win or close loss in the end.

The fact that it wasn’t was equal parts jarring and alarming. The Falcons didn’t just lose this game, they got smoked in every phase of it. The offense was disjointed and leaned away from the run at its own peril, saw Cousins make a couple of huge mistakes, and on top of it all, lost Matthew Bergeron in this one. The defense couldn’t gin up a consistent pass rush, couldn’t reliably stop the run, and couldn’t take advantage of a couple of opportunities for turnovers. Even special teams got in on the action, with Younghoe Koo missing an (admittedly long) field goal try. The coaching staff seemed to have few answers for Seattle’s offense and no way to attack their real weaknesses outside of a heavy dose of Bijan Robinson, which again tapered off as the game went on.

It was a team loss where the Falcons looked poor and poorly coached, and as Raheem Morris said futilely at halftime, Atlanta needs to wake up. Good teams can have games like this—the rival Buccaneers got blown out by the Broncos 26-7 just earlier this season—and the Seahawks are a solid team that may have just found their footing. But too many of the issues were familiar ones for the Falcons, and the fact that they had no second half magic at all in them to climb back into this game should be sobering for a team that prided themselves on resilience and adjustments up until this point. A promising season doesn’t slip away in the course of a single afternoon and you should not let this ruin your perception of the Falcons to this point, but worry is justified given that Atlanta has fixed few of the issues that plagued them in a Week 1 loss to the Steelers; they just sort of come and go.

With a major divisional matchup looming once again on the road against the Buccaneers, there’s not much time to fix what ails Atlanta. We’ll have to hope the Falcons can be clear-eyed about their struggles, get healthy, and consider scheme tweaks, personnel changes, and whatever else works to ensure this ugly, discouraging loss goes down as an outlier and not a harbinger of things to come.

On to the full recap.

The Good

It was inconsistent, but the Falcons did manage to get some real pressure in the early going against Geno Smith, forcing a couple of off-kilter throws and a key third and long that Smith had to launch out of bounds. There were brief but fun stretches where the pass rush actually rattled Smith a little bit and forced him out of the pocket or into a rushed throw, but they were few and far between and unfortunately wasted by penalties at times, too. The team’s 50% pressure rate was a season high for Geno Smith, which is actually a major positive even with the sorry state of Seattle’s offensive line. If they had been able to finish off a couple of those plays instead of simply getting Geno on the move, that might’ve really been something.
Bijan Robinson entered god mode on Atlanta’s third drive. He reeled off a 26 yarder where he spun through a tackle attempt and capped off the sequence with a touchdown, putting up 56 total yards on the ground along the way. All day long, he was turning quality blocking into big gains and turning shaky blocking into big gains as well, with a couple of truly impressive cuts to turn nothing into something. He cashed in 21 carries for 103 yards and a score and reeled in three catches for 40 yards, with Tyler Allgeier chipping in a fine day at the office with 36 yards on just five carries to once again make this backfield look like one of the best in the NFL. Robinson has looked good throughout this season; this was one of the games where he looked truly special.
Minus a false start penalty, one of a string of them early in the game, Kyle Pitts had a strong game, consistently serving as an underneath target for Cousins. His numbers—7 catches for 65 yards—don’t jump off the page, but on a day where not much was going right for Atlanta, having Pitts as a reliable option was a big deal. He was also Atlanta’s leading receiver for the first time in recent memory.
Atlanta’s top two receivers weren’t fantastic today—we have to call out London for a bad play later on—but they did combine for 11 catches and 109 yards, with a nice London score on a clutch fourth down grab. Aside from London’s one miscue and Mooney’s spate of drops the other week, the duo has been a real asset for Atlanta’s passing game and Kirk Cousins, and that should continue against a Buccaneers secondary they successfully attacked last time out.
James Smith-Williams had the game’s sole sack—Ruke Orhorhoro should have had one for falling on a fumble-recovering Geno Smith, but I digress—and was quietly one of Atlanta’s better defenders again despite missing some time with an injury in this one. With Lorenzo Carter on injured reserve and Arnold Ebiketie turning in a quiet day, the Falcons are likely to lean heavily on Smith-Williams going forward. He offers enough in a frustrating front to feel confident in, though Atlanta still badly needs upgrades at outside linebacker.
Zach Harrison looked really good filling in for James Smith-Williams when he was injured, generating pressure quickly and urgently on multiple snaps to mess up the timing of plays. The lack of usage for Harrison has been puzzling to this point in the season, but I hope that the way he popped up right away off the edge will earn him more chances.
The secondary had a handful of positive plays on a rough day, with Mike Hughes, Dee Alford, and A.J. Terrell delivering key pass breakups, Justin Simmons coming up with a clutch hit to knock D.K. Metcalf out of bounds on what would’ve been a huge third down grab, and Hughes offering up some big hits. It just wasn’t enough.
In the “wasn’t enough” department, the Falcons quietly shut down Seattle’s offense in the second half, though I’m sure the Seahawks taking their foot off the gas a little with a huge lead factored in. That’s yet another example of Atlanta coming up with answers late in games, but the holes they’re getting into in the first half of games some weeks makes that an inconsistent source of comfort.
You know what kind of game it was when I’m reaching deep in my bag for positives, but seeing the rookies was nice at the end of this one, even if the circumstances were less than ideal. Michael Penix got to deliver one sharp ball to Casey Washington and Jase McClellan got his first game action, looking solid as a runner even if he slipped on one carry. All three of those guys should be significant pieces of this offense down the line; for now, we’ll settle for first-time glimpses.
The game did eventually end, which I’m counting as a positive.

The Ugly

Three false starts on the opening drive, including two in a row, is the kind of stuff we keep discussing as a severe detriment for this Falcons team. You can quibble with the officiating if you want—the Falcons were on the wrong end of a startling number of early calls—but those are self-inflicted mistakes that ended up killing a promising drive, and they added a fourth false start later in the game. The Falcons have to stop shooting themselves in the foot so frequently on offense, because they’re not operating cleanly enough every week to keep drives moving.
Kirk Cousins doesn’t miss badly all that often, but when he does, it’s not fun. On third down and with Ray-Ray McCloud running wide open, Cousins simply sailed the throw by a country mile, turning what should have been a 20-plus yard strike to put the Falcons into scoring range into a wasted opportunity. Late in the game, he lost control of one intended for Kyle Pitts downfield and it was picked off easily by the Seahawks. Paired with some hesitation, the awful fumble that was returned for a touchdown, and a handful of misses, this was Cousins’ weakest game since Week 1, and it’s no coincidence that Atlanta got blown out on a day where he missed passes, held the ball too long, and threw two picks, even if only one was his fault.
Drake London had another good day, but his hands failed him at exactly the wrong moment. With Atlanta making a last-ditch effort to climb back into the game, Cousins put one up where only London could reach it and he stretched, got both hands on it, and just watched it bounce off and into the hands of a Seattle defender for what was essentially a game-ending pick, even if the Falcons had to play out the string. I’m pretty confident that was a blip if anything in this game was, given how surehanded and good he’s been this season, but London has to catch that.
The pass rush was maddeningly inconsistent again, with that pressure rate not translating to sacks. Matthew Judon will draw a lot of scrutiny for some really shaky reps against Seattle’s fourth-string tackle and deservedly so, but the limited amount of success against a team that had allowed a ton of sacks and pressure coming into this one underscores just how much of a problem this is for Atlanta. It’s difficult to imagine things getting much better without personnel additions and drastic improvement from the players who are here, plus a re-imagining of how this defense covers and rushes the passer from Jimmy Lake and company. We can hope the pressure this week was a sign of better things to come, but after watching players skid by quarterbacks or simply miss over and over, the optimism is a little hard to come by.
The secondary scuffled in this one, particularly in the first half. A.J. Terrell had an early pass interference call, missed a shot at a jump ball in the second quarter, and was working against Metcalf (admittedly without expected help over the middle, which is unforgivable when a touchdown ball is the one result you can’t allow) on that Metcalf touchdown pass heading into halftime. Clark Phillips fell down in coverage at one point, Jessie Bates was not in the right position on multiple plays (which is startling), and so on. That led to a lot of too-easy completions for Seattle, which was bad news because….
…the defense had a terrible day at the office overall. The pass rush missed chances to bring down Geno, penalties set Atlanta back after productive plays, and both the pass defense and run defense scuffled mightily throughout the afternoon. Geno had enough passes that were off-kilter or rushed that Atlanta should’ve been able to end drives, but their inability to stop with the penalties and/or prevent deep completions killed them all day, and Kenneth Walker had a tidy day on the ground and through the air working against Atlanta’s overmatched linebackers. The defense was not the whole reason the Falcons lost their game, but the fact that their problems ran so deep and were so familiar is not a good sign.
Younghoe Koo missed again on a tough kick from 54 yards, and once again it was to the left. As good as Koo is and the fact that 50-plus attempts are difficult, it feels bad to see those attempts missed, and it forced Atlanta into a catch-up mode they didn’t do well in.
Jimmy Lake is going to get a lot of heat for this team’s inability to rein in Seattle’s offense in general, but the fact that Atlanta didn’t have a better plan for preventing a touchdown on the final Seattle play of the second quarter is the one that really hurts. You can hang some of that on execution with considerable justification, but conceding a shorter field goal try is something I could have lived with there. The Falcons just didn’t appear to have considered that deep ball merchant Geno Smith might try for the end zone, and that’s inexcusable. Lake did get the defense in a better spot by the second half, but at that point they were already down ten points, making for a frustrating day.

Fellow coordinator Zac Robinson deserves even more heat for the game plan in this one, too. The Falcons were running extremely well against the Seahawks until they hit a little bit of a wall with Kyle Hinton in the game for Matthew Bergeron, but they shied away from the run early and more or less abandoned it late, even when the game was still somewhat in reach. The fact that they instead dropped Kirk Cousins back to pass over and over again with a depleted line in front of him felt equal parts unwise and ultimately disastrous, especially when Cousins started to crumble late, and they couldn’t come up with a way to get Cousins layups to keep the offense moving. Atlanta’s inability to consistently attack Seattle’s weaknesses falls heavily on Robinson even if the execution errors are largely out of his hands, and after three weeks where both coordinators made nice adjustments and achieved strong results, they’re going to be spending the next several days looking for answers.

The Ugly section of this weekly feature seems to be pretty consistent, with complaints about the run defense, one piece of the passing game or another looking a bit disjointed, the lack of pass rush, and the sheer number of penalties and small errors that pile up. One of the things we said early on last year when Desmond Ridder and company were making tons of mistakes but still winning was that those consistent mistakes would eventually lead to losses; this is a sobering reminder that the same thing is very much true about this current iteration of the Falcons, which ran out of good fortune and runway against Seattle. Finding a way to improve one or all of those consistently frustrating facets is not like flipping a light switch at all, but I can guarantee you that a failure to make real progress in the coming weeks will lead to more losses. Nobody wants or needs that
The Wrapup
Game MVP

Bijan Robinson for providing half of Atlanta’s points and nearly a third of the team’s yards all by himself, and for pulling out the handful of highlight reel plays we’ll actually want to remember from this one.

One Takeaway

The Falcons are flawed, which we knew, and those flaws can be extremely fatal, which we hoped was not the case.

Next Week

Atlanta travels to Tampa Bay to face the Buccaneers again, hoping to rebound by taking our their rival, getting back atop the NFC South, and running their divisional record to 4-0. Check out Bucs Nation for more about next week’s opponent.

Final Word

Uglyone.