Back in 2023, the Atlanta Falcons looked at their hated rivals and saw something they liked: A pair of defenders. The team signed away Kaden Elliss and David Onyemata from the Saints that year, adding a pair of stout options in the middle of the defense, and got multiple years of quality play out of them. Now they\u2019re both gone.<\/p>\n
Onyemata signed with the Jets earlier this week\u2014excuse me, he unofficially signed, owing to legal tampering\u2014and now Elliss is headed back to New Orleans.<\/p>\n
While Jeff Ulbrich had tremendous praise for Elliss this offseason, Ian Cunningham was more measured about the possibility of his return. The team\u2019s free agency moves thus far paint a picture of a team evaluating everything and trying to set themselves up to have a war chest of picks and cap space in 2027, so paying $11 million per year for a 31-year-old linebacker was clearly not in the cards. The Saints, who just emerged from an extended cap heck and clearly believe they can contend now, have no such qualms.<\/p>\n
He\u2019ll leave the Falcons with 380 combined tackles, 12.5 sacks, and two interceptions, having played 51 of 51 possible games for Atlanta. The Falcons scooped him up after three quiet years and a breakout campaign in New Orleans, and there\u2019s little question they got their money\u2019s worth from Elliss even if the team as a whole underperformed.<\/p>\n
I won\u2019t sugarcoat the on-field impact: Losing Elliss hurts. He was not a standout in coverage, but pretty much everything else you\u2019d ask an inside linebacker to do was very much in his wheelhouse, including plus work against the run and rushing the passer effectively. The Falcons won\u2019t be able to replace him with just one player, as Ulbrich alluded to, which means former Texan Christian Harris is probably just the first salvo at inside linebacker. If Troy Andersen were to be healthy and Harris is effective in Atlanta, perhaps that\u2019s enough to give the Falcons quality play beside Divine Deablo, but I wouldn\u2019t bet on that outcome and neither will the Falcons. Atlanta is losing one of the defenders who really made Ulbrich\u2019s defense tick a year ago, and it\u2019s fair to expect that the linebacker group won\u2019t be as strong or as versatile without significant investment that may not be coming.<\/p>\n
Elliss will be missed, in short, and the fact that he\u2019s back to playing for the hated Saints means it\u2019s hard to wish him well. The hope is that the Falcons are, after the dust settles on this offseason, still a clearly better football team than New Orleans, but much remains to be done before we know that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2023, the Atlanta Falcons looked at their hated rivals and saw something they liked: A pair…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":805577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2074],"tags":[223,254,52003,2591,2554,224,7,6],"class_list":["post-805576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-atlanta-falcons","tag-atlanta","tag-atlanta-falcons","tag-atlanta-falcons-free-agency","tag-atlanta-falcons-news","tag-atlantafalcons","tag-falcons","tag-football","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116208186493444351","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805576","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=805576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}