The Atlanta Falcons will gear up to play the Detroit Lions Friday night without several players, as the team figures to park a significant number of starters and has a handful of injuries that will keep others out. We\u2019ll still get to see three of the Falcons\u2019 prized rookies, however.<\/p>\n
After announcing earlier this week that James Pearce will make his fightin\u2019, quarterbackin\u2019 flusterin\u2019 debut on Friday night, Raheem Morris told us Wednesday that Jalon Walker and Xavier Watts will also be out there. For what could be just a series but might be a half, then, we\u2019ll get to see three significant building blocks of the Falcons defense in action against another NFL team. If nothing else, that should be fun.<\/p>\n
For Walker, it\u2019ll be a chance to see what kind of role the Falcons are envisioning for him, with some clues coming from where he lines up in the limited look we\u2019re likely to get. For Watts, it\u2019ll be an opportunity to separate himself from Jordan Fuller and DeMarcco Hellams in what seems to be a genuine battle for starting duties. And for Pearce, it\u2019ll be an opportunity to hit a quarterback in a \u201creal\u201d game, something I have no doubt he\u2019s been itching to do.<\/p>\n
The team likely won\u2019t expose the prized rookies to anything approaching a full game or maybe even a full half, but it will be good to have them out there. That\u2019s particularly true because we know we won\u2019t be seeing a handful of others, including Troy Andersen (who is on the PUP list with no return timeline) and fellow inside linebacker JD Bertrand. Storm Norton is also working through a mild injury, meaning rookie Jack Nelson might be getting an extended look.<\/p>\n
We won\u2019t have to wait that long to see the rookies in action, as Falcons-Lions kicks off at 7 p.m. EST on Friday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Atlanta Falcons will gear up to play the Detroit Lions Friday night without several players, as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2071],"tags":[48116,25657,146,113,2506,7,147,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-266817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-detroit-lions","8":"tag-atlanta-falcons-injuries","9":"tag-atlanta-falcons-preseason","10":"tag-detroit","11":"tag-detroit-lions","12":"tag-detroitlions","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-lions","15":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114982834907616126","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}