Kirk Cousins' struggles are less worrying for Falcons than their all-in season going bust — and GM needing to answer for it
Coming off an embarrassing 34-10 blowout loss to the spiraling Miami Dolphins, a year that was supposed to be a step forward for the Atlanta Falcons has been mired in inconsistencies and destined for more mediocrity.
Sunday's game looked like a favorable matchup for Bijan Robinson and the Falcons' offense, but they were completely dominated in all facets. In a vacuum, the Falcons are still young in key spots and young players are prone to mistakes. However, real life doesn't exist absent of context, and the hard truth is that this was the team's attempt at an all-in" season given draft capital (the Falcons traded away next year's first-rounder) and cap allocation (seventh-most active spending and one of the lowest dead cap hits in the league) poured into this roster. That is what makes the loss to Miami a truly disastrous outcome for head coach Raheem Morris, general manager Terry Fontenot and the organization at large.
After the Dolphins spent the first seven weeks of the season getting shredded on the ground, they limited Robinson to just 25 yards on nine carries and held him in check with 0.78 yards before contact on Sunday. One of the worst rushing defenses in the league, on the road, just took it to the Falcons even as they boast one of the truly elite running backs in the league.
The loss was so bad that Kirk Cousins' poor performance is really the least of their worries. Sure, it would have been nice for the most expensive backup quarterback in the NFL to be able to play like a starter, but it didn't happen. What happened everywhere else around Cousins is a much larger concern moving forward.
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That's not what teams that are really all-in for a championship look like, but that's what you are when you're strapped for cap space and have traded away a future first-round pick. Their improved (but not good) defense that received the bulk of their 2025 draft capital just got run over by an offense that's been maligned for their inability to play tough, physical football. That's not what contending teams do.
The Falcons undoubtedly have some nice pieces to continue to develop, or else they wouldn't have been able to take down Buffalo recently, but they also haven't made much progress in the five seasons that Fontenot has been in charge of the team - and they should have seen it coming. They were a bad run defense last year and then got lighter in the front seven with the loss of Grady Jarrett and additions of Jalon Walker and James Pearce Jr. It's just a lot to ask from rookie edge defenders without any sort of anchor in the middle. They didn't have one last year and added no one.
Building a young, finesse defense in a division with two of the toughest offensive lines in the league in Carolina and Tampa Bay was a shaky plan, but to not even be able to slow down the Dolphins shows this defense isn't anywhere close to the unit they thought it was going to be. Nor is it what it looked like in Week 2 against the Vikings, a performance that becomes less impressive by the week. At 3-4 coming off of arguably their worst loss of the season it's apparent this team still needs a major influx of talent on the defensive side of the ball.
That's a lot harder to do without access to your own first-round pick, which is currently slated to be the 11th overall pick for the Los Angeles Rams if the draft were held today. Fontenot and his core have officially reached the point where jobs are on the line and somehow, in his fifth year as general manager, they need a handful of rookies and a quarterback with nine career starts to save what's been built here.
The problem is, there's barely even a foundation.