Falcons Finish Strong, But Questions Loom as Locker Room Backs Raheem Morris

ATLANTA – The Atlanta Falcons finished the 2025 season with mixed emotions.

Their win over the New Orleans Saints in Week 18 secured their first four-game winning streak since 2019, but it was all for naught. Despite finishing in a three-way tie atop the NFC South, they have been eliminated from postseason contention for a month.

While the finish looked encouraging on the surface, the frustration still boiled underneath.

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“One game would have made a difference with everybody being 8-9 in our division. If you had one game out there that we could have won, that would have made the difference,” head coach Raheem Morris said. “We want to go to the playoffs. We want to do major things, but the only thing we could do today was win this game, and that’s what the guys did.”

Questions about what comes next for this franchise are sure to run rampant in the coming hours, but no decision has formally been made on the future of either Morris or general manager Terry Fontenot.

“This is a business,” Morris said when asked about how he feels about his job security. “Those decisions are always made at the proper time. Those decisions will all be made for whatever’s best for the Falcons.”

That said, the Falcons' head coach confirmed that he expects to be back and coaching this team in 2026.

What the level of confidence ownership has in him remains to be seen, but the voice from the locker room was resounding – both after the game and throughout this march through to the end of the season with this impressive four-game winning streak.

“I’m behind Rah,” safety Jessie Bates said after the game. “He hasn’t changed throughout this whole year. He’s the same guy every single day. We went to bat for him for a reason. We finished the season for a reason – for each other, for coaches, players, and everybody involved.”

Drake London, in particular, was emphatic in his comments about the defense of his head coach.

“I want Rah back with all my heart,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything really, really wrong. That’s above my pay grade, so I can’t really speak on that, and I don’t want to speak on that because people can misknew words.”

Despite suffering through a PCL injury that cost him several games in the season’s second half, he still fought to come back and finish the year strong. He played through the pain and fought to help this team win games, despite the fact that they had been eliminated from the playoffs.

Running back Tyler Allgeier insisted that Morris never once lost the locker room, which was something that many long suspected by the way this team continued to battle down the stretch.

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“We are close, but he did not lose the locker room,” the back said. “That’s the biggest question that outsiders – I guess, you guys [the media] – try to portray, but he hasn’t lost the locker room, and it showed with us going 4-0 to finish the season.”

Inside the locker room, the feeling was unanimous. The sentiment outside, not so much. Atlanta finished the season playing their best football of the season, and recent reports have indicated that Morris may have earned his spot as the Falcons' head coach.

Monday morning will provide the final word on whether that, in fact, proves to be the case moving forward.