Can the Falcons Save Their Season? Why Week 11 Starts a ‘New Year’ in Atlanta

FLOWERY BRANCH, GA – The Atlanta Falcons are entering a new season on Sunday. Sitting at 3-6 after losing four straight games, they have to. With the season slowly starting to slip from their grasp, every game becomes that much more important.

“We gotta start winning some games,” Falcons wide receiver Darnell Mooney said after Sunday’s loss to the Colts. “Rah [Raheem Morris] said it, we’re in a playoff atmosphere now. There’s no losing. We gotta figure something out and then let the chips fall where they fall.”

Can a young, inconsistent Falcons team adopt a veteran mentality fast enough to survive a collapsing season?

The next three weeks will tell us if they can.

After playing two teams that combined for a record of 16-4 and losing by a combined seven points, Atlanta will face a trio of squads with a combined 9-20. Nothing is a sure thing for this team, as evidenced by the Falcons’ pair of 30- and 24-point losses to the Panthers and Dolphins earlier this season, but that lines up much nicer for a team in desperate need of a win.

Every week in the NFL feels like a ‘must-win,’ but for a head coach who fell to 11-15 as the head coach of the Falcons on Sunday, it feels a little bit more critical with each passing week. Playoffs feel like a distant thought, but the Falcons theoretically are not mathematically eliminated. At least, not yet.

According to the NFL’s NextGenStats, the Falcons hold a 9% chance of reaching the postseason as of the end of Week 10. If they win, it could go as high as 13%. If they lose, it drops to 3%.

Unlikely, but not unheard of.

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The last time it happened was in 2023 with the Los Angeles Rams, a team on which Morris was the defensive coordinator and Robinson was passing game coordinator/quarterbacks coach. In fact, that topic has actually been broached in the locker room already.

“We’ve been super honest, our record is what it is, but we have a chance to start 0-0,” Robinson said Wednesday. “I remember that team. We were able to just reset ourselves. We said, ‘We’ve just got to win each and every day. We’ve got to have the best practice. We’ve got to have the best walkthrough. We’ve got to have the best Thursday practice, Friday, Saturday, set yourself up to just go play free.’”

Robinson recalled how free the players seemed to feel as they ended up picking up wins one game at a time. It’s great, at least in theory.

The parallels likely stop there.

That Rams team had already played in (and won) a Super Bowl. They had a veteran quarterback who had more than a decade of playing experience, an Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year (Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald), and several more seasoned veterans scattered throughout the rest of the roster.

The Falcons have a handful of guys who have made the postseason before, but Jake Matthews is the only player to make the postseason as a member of the Falcons.

Expecting this Falcons team to emulate that run would be foolish, but the mentality is something this team can learn to adopt. Far too often, this team has ridden the results roller coaster. They need to learn how to accept the results as they are and reset each week. It would serve this team well, even if the pieces don’t all magically come together in 2025.

“It just kind of happens just by getting better and better every day, and the only way you can do that is go out and practice, preparation, play better, own your faults, own the things you want to do better,” Morris said. “Do all those different things and go out there and get those things done. So, I think it's one step at a time, it's one day at a time, and I think it's got to start on Wednesday.”

According to Jeff Ulbrich, it had.

“Today was, so far, the best meetings, the best walk-throughs, and the best practice that we've had since I've been here,” the defensive coordinator said about Wednesday’s practice.

Jalon Walker, a former national champion with the Georgia Bulldogs and regular visitor to the playoffs at every level of football before this season, still has the playoffs in his view.

“I don’t just play to participate, I play to win,” Walker said Sunday. “The playoffs [are] still in sight for me. We have to put our foot on the gas. It’s been a long season, but for us in the locker room, there is no discomfort or doubt in our minds that we can go out there and be the best football team on Sundays.”

Perhaps the mentality is starting to take hold in this Falcons locker room, but we won’t get a clear idea until Sunday when they face off against one of those teams that humbled them.

The next three weeks could jumpstart the season for this team, but it could also be the final nail in the coffin of a doomed year. If the Falcons truly reset their season this week, it won’t be because they said they did. It will be because, for the first time all year, they played like a team that believes it’s still alive.