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What can the Atlanta Falcons do to get back to the Super Bowl?

Championshiporbust

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scar988

scar988

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As someone who covers the Falcons, this is a tough question. Coaching has been a massive issue this season, so replacing the coaching staff is a good plan. That being said, they need to get 100% healthy for a whole season. Not having Neal hurt the team a ton. So did losing Chris Lindstrom. The Falcons need a new LG and some talent on the defensive line. They also need to trust Matt Ryan more on offense with more no-huddle and the like. Let him develop an offense with a young, smart assistant like a Mike McDaniel and go from there. The Falcons need a lot. But the biggest thing they need is a re-tooling for a lot of the defense.

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GSUeagles14

GSUeagles14

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37 minutes ago, scar988 said:

This isn't how the Falcons get better. Jarrett is an All-Pro caliber DT this year and is hitting his stride.

that was a joke, just a heads up.

 

anyway, the answer is pretty simple. they need better players on both lines. theres no pass rush and i question every week if this is the game matt ryan dies. honestly almost every other position group is set. freemans likely gone this offseason so could see us using a mid round pick on a rb.

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Elky

Elky

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First, they need to fire Dan Quinn. They have gotten worse each season under him ever since losing the Super Bowl.

Next, completely overhaul their strength and conditioning staff. They are ChargIRs bad.

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Hukos

Hukos

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I take issue with calling 2016 horrible. 2016 was amazing to watch in real-time as a Falcons fan. The ending sucked, but the ride to the Super Bowl had a lot of memories that I'll cherish forever - clearing out the final game of the Georgia Dome in the 2016 NFC Championship Game with a straight up butt-whipping of the Packers was probably my favorite memory of the Atlanta Falcons in my entire time watching them, and I've watched every game since the Vick era started. This is probably a difficult feeling to articulate to people whose teams are used to playing the Super Bowl, but the moment after the clock ticked down to 0:00 in the NFC Championship Game and I actually recognized that the Atlanta Falcons, this mess of an organization that I root for, was going to be playing in the Super Bowl. That is a very special and giddy feeling unlike any other when you're not used to success - especially at the hands of an organization that is basically used to failing. 2013, 2014, and 2015 were straight up boring seasons to watch, and honestly didn't really give me anything to really get invested with or care about with the Atlanta Falcons. They were mediocre and didn't offer me anything at all. Some other years were good and fun (2002, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2017) but they usually ended with getting blasted in a playoff game against a superior team. So no, it was awesome, even if the ending was atrocious.

As a fan of the team, I think the issue at hand is that they've been chasing that 2016 season - but that 2016 team wasn't really a super bowl roster. You can make it to the Super Bowl without having a Super Bowl roster - weird flukes happen a lot. In 2016, the Falcons had one of the greatest offensive seasons ever and finished 11-5. If a few coinflips go the other way, they're probably a 7-9 team even with an all-world offense. This is why when you have a season like that and have one side of the ball perform at an absurd level, you have to cash in because there's going to be a "crashing down to earth" moment the next year.

The offense was legitimately amazing, but that defense was terrible. The Falcons were 1-6 in games that they scored 30 points or less. That team won because of an absolutely absurd offensive season, and there was no real way to replicate that year even if Kyle had stayed. Imagine if their offensive output went down from 33 points per game to 30? We're talking about potentially a 6-10 team that still has an amazing offense! If that's how your team is constructed, that's not a super bowl roster.

We had mostly rookies on the defense, and the assumption was that even though the rookies played terribly in their first year - that they would grow and improve. 2017 seemed to have been their growth season on paper. They did pretty well in terms of points per game given up, but advanced metrics hit that defense pretty hard, they did pretty badly in terms of defensive DVOA and points per drive. Our offense in 2017 did a lot better than people would expect in terms of overall yardage but our redzone offense was horrific. We kicked a billion field goals that year.

2018 was looked at the year where everything came together - Sark would grow as an OC, the defense would finally come together, etc. The defense fell apart after all the injuries and it was even worse than the 2016 season. The Falcons were 1-4 after scoring 12, 31, 37, 36, 17 points in their first five games. And that would be the story of their season - the offense was amazing most of the time but it did have some brainfart games, meanwhile the defense was one of the worst defensive units I've ever seen in my life. If we had even a mediocre defense out there, we're 11-5 that season. Matt basically had an elite, MVP caliber season that literally no one outside of Atlanta cared about.

So, in a desperate bid, Dan fires all of his coordinators and makes himself the DC - assuming that the missing piece to the team was the inability to get the defense to perform. And as you all know, it failed horribly. As bad as the 2018 defense was, the 2019 defense managed to be even worse. What this season has really revealed to me though, is that Dan's biggest red flag is his inability to put together a competent offensive staff. The hiring of Sark was especially questionable considering that we had the current Packers Head Coach on the offensive staff, Matt LaFluer. And what we understand is that Dan Quinn was "unimpressed" with LaFluer's ability to run an offense and instead got a recommendation from Pete Carrol to hire Sark instead. Sark was... I don't think that Sark was as awful as he was made out to be, but he wasn't anywhere near Kyle's genius as a playcaller. I would say by the end of 2018 Sark was about a middle of the road playcaller I did see a lot of growth from Sark in 2018 from 2017, so I didn't know if that would have continued if we had kept him (were Sark's issues due to inexperience? We'll never know) - but the Falcons offense didn't show up in some highly publicized games, particularly against teams with great defensive lines - so we canned him.

Enter Dirk Koetter. If you thought Sark was bad, Dirk Koetter is a million times worse. I unrionically believe we'd be a .500 team if we had Sark based on what I've seen from Koetter. Koetter's gameplanning is terrible, his route combinations are extremely basic and anytime we come across a good secondary, it's like there's basically nothing we can do about it and just give up, schematically. So the fact that Dan ignored Matt LaFluer, picked Sark and then picked Koetter to be the guys to run his team's offense makes me seriously question Dan's ability to put together a good coaching staff. Basically every decision that Dan could have made to make the team worse since 2016, he's kind of screwed up and it's painful to watch.

About firing Dan, I like Dan a lot as a man and as a person. Almost everyone that interacts with Dan loves him. The entire football team and organization loves him - the players will go to bat for Dan. Hell, Julio Jones flat out told the entire fanbase in an impassioned speech that anyone who wanted Dan gone that it's not him, it's the players not doing their job. I think it says a lot about Dan's ability to run a locker room that you can have a team this terrible and still have the team firmly stand up for their coach. But this is a league that cares about wins and losses more than they care about how great you are as a person. There's things I like about him as a coach, but if you're going to be a coach in the NFL, it is imperative that you put together great coaching staffs and Dan's history makes that skeptical - he usually just defaults to hiring buddies of his. So while I want him fired, I also want Dan to succeed - in a perfect world I would love for Dan to have more success as the Head Coach of the Atlanta Falcons. But while there are things I like about Dan, he has some pretty major red flags as a coach as well, big enough that I lean towards firing him and looking for a new head coach - and I like him enough that I would like to see him have success elsewhere.

As for the question in the topic: get extremely serious about putting together a real super bowl roster. I've seen a lot of comments about how talented the Atlanta Falcons are, and all I can say to that is: NO. There's some noticeable talent in the skill positions, but outside of that this is a pretty barren roster in terms of actual talent. I think the skill position talent on offense is underperforming relative to their skill level, but that's a schematic/x's and o's issue more than anything else - however the defense is basically talent-less. I think the Jets are a more talented roster on defense than what we have - Grady Jarrett, Deion Jones and that's it (maybe Takk?). And it's a shame because we've invested a ton of draft picks into defense, so it's not like we've ignored it. Most of the guys on defense that we've drafted... just aren't good. I don't even think defense is a scheme problem, it's a talent issue. One thing this front office routinely has done is wait until an issue is right in their face (2019: offensive line) before they start investing resources into fixing it and you're never really going to win a super bowl that way unless you luck into one. That has to stop immediately.

Edited by Hukos
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sammymvpknight

sammymvpknight

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4 hours ago, Hukos said:

I take issue with calling 2016 horrible. 2016 was amazing to watch in real-time as a Falcons fan. The ending sucked, but the ride to the Super Bowl had a lot of memories that I'll cherish forever - clearing out the final game of the Georgia Dome in the 2016 NFC Championship Game with a straight up butt-whipping of the Packers was probably my favorite memory of the Atlanta Falcons in my entire time watching them, and I've watched every game since the Vick era started. This is probably a difficult feeling to articulate to people whose teams are used to playing the Super Bowl, but the moment after the clock ticked down to 0:00 in the NFC Championship Game and I actually recognized that the Atlanta Falcons, this mess of an organization that I root for, was going to be playing in the Super Bowl. That is a very special and giddy feeling unlike any other when you're not used to success - especially at the hands of an organization that is basically used to failing. 2013, 2014, and 2015 were straight up boring seasons to watch, and honestly didn't really give me anything to really get invested with or care about with the Atlanta Falcons. They were mediocre and didn't offer me anything at all. Some other years were good and fun (2002, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2017) but they usually ended with getting blasted in a playoff game against a superior team. So no, it was awesome, even if the ending was atrocious.

As a fan of the team, I think the issue at hand is that they've been chasing that 2016 season - but that 2016 team wasn't really a super bowl roster. You can make it to the Super Bowl without having a Super Bowl roster - weird flukes happen a lot. In 2016, the Falcons had one of the greatest offensive seasons ever and finished 11-5. If a few coinflips go the other way, they're probably a 7-9 team even with an all-world offense. This is why when you have a season like that and have one side of the ball perform at an absurd level, you have to cash in because there's going to be a "crashing down to earth" moment the next year.

The offense was legitimately amazing, but that defense was terrible. The Falcons were 1-6 in games that they scored 30 points or less. That team won because of an absolutely absurd offensive season, and there was no real way to replicate that year even if Kyle had stayed. Imagine if their offensive output went down from 33 points per game to 30? We're talking about potentially a 6-10 team that still has an amazing offense! If that's how your team is constructed, that's not a super bowl roster.

We had mostly rookies on the defense, and the assumption was that even though the rookies played terribly in their first year - that they would grow and improve. 2017 seemed to have been their growth season on paper. They did pretty well in terms of points per game given up, but advanced metrics hit that defense pretty hard, they did pretty badly in terms of defensive DVOA and points per drive. Our offense in 2017 did a lot better than people would expect in terms of overall yardage but our redzone offense was horrific. We kicked a billion field goals that year.

2018 was looked at the year where everything came together - Sark would grow as an OC, the defense would finally come together, etc. The defense fell apart after all the injuries and it was even worse than the 2016 season. The Falcons were 1-4 after scoring 12, 31, 37, 36, 17 points in their first five games. And that would be the story of their season - the offense was amazing most of the time but it did have some brainfart games, meanwhile the defense was one of the worst defensive units I've ever seen in my life. If we had even a mediocre defense out there, we're 11-5 that season. Matt basically had an elite, MVP caliber season that literally no one outside of Atlanta cared about.

So, in a desperate bid, Dan fires all of his coordinators and makes himself the DC - assuming that the missing piece to the team was the inability to get the defense to perform. And as you all know, it failed horribly. As bad as the 2018 defense was, the 2019 defense managed to be even worse. What this season has really revealed to me though, is that Dan's biggest red flag is his inability to put together a competent offensive staff. The hiring of Sark was especially questionable considering that we had the current Packers Head Coach on the offensive staff, Matt LaFluer. And what we understand is that Dan Quinn was "unimpressed" with LaFluer's ability to run an offense and instead got a recommendation from Pete Carrol to hire Sark instead. Sark was... I don't think that Sark was as awful as he was made out to be, but he wasn't anywhere near Kyle's genius as a playcaller. I would say by the end of 2018 Sark was about a middle of the road playcaller I did see a lot of growth from Sark in 2018 from 2017, so I didn't know if that would have continued if we had kept him (were Sark's issues due to inexperience? We'll never know) - but the Falcons offense didn't show up in some highly publicized games, particularly against teams with great defensive lines - so we canned him.

Enter Dirk Koetter. If you thought Sark was bad, Dirk Koetter is a million times worse. I unrionically believe we'd be a .500 team if we had Sark based on what I've seen from Koetter. Koetter's gameplanning is terrible, his route combinations are extremely basic and anytime we come across a good secondary, it's like there's basically nothing we can do about it and just give up, schematically. So the fact that Dan ignored Matt LaFluer, picked Sark and then picked Koetter to be the guys to run his team's offense makes me seriously question Dan's ability to put together a good coaching staff. Basically every decision that Dan could have made to make the team worse since 2016, he's kind of screwed up and it's painful to watch.

About firing Dan, I like Dan a lot as a man and as a person. Almost everyone that interacts with Dan loves him. The entire football team and organization loves him - the players will go to bat for Dan. Hell, Julio Jones flat out told the entire fanbase in an impassioned speech that anyone who wanted Dan gone that it's not him, it's the players not doing their job. I think it says a lot about Dan's ability to run a locker room that you can have a team this terrible and still have the team firmly stand up for their coach. But this is a league that cares about wins and losses more than they care about how great you are as a person. There's things I like about him as a coach, but if you're going to be a coach in the NFL, it is imperative that you put together great coaching staffs and Dan's history makes that skeptical - he usually just defaults to hiring buddies of his. So while I want him fired, I also want Dan to succeed - in a perfect world I would love for Dan to have more success as the Head Coach of the Atlanta Falcons. But while there are things I like about Dan, he has some pretty major red flags as a coach as well, big enough that I lean towards firing him and looking for a new head coach - and I like him enough that I would like to see him have success elsewhere.

As for the question in the topic: get extremely serious about putting together a real super bowl roster. I've seen a lot of comments about how talented the Atlanta Falcons are, and all I can say to that is: NO. There's some noticeable talent in the skill positions, but outside of that this is a pretty barren roster in terms of actual talent. I think the skill position talent on offense is underperforming relative to their skill level, but that's a schematic/x's and o's issue more than anything else - however the defense is basically talent-less. I think the Jets are a more talented roster on defense than what we have - Grady Jarrett, Deion Jones and that's it (maybe Takk?). And it's a shame because we've invested a ton of draft picks into defense, so it's not like we've ignored it. Most of the guys on defense that we've drafted... just aren't good. I don't even think defense is a scheme problem, it's a talent issue. One thing this front office routinely has done is wait until an issue is right in their face (2019: offensive line) before they start investing resources into fixing it and you're never really going to win a super bowl that way unless you luck into one. That has to stop immediately.

The epic 2016 season was just there to setup the epic Super Bowl collapse. I think that it may take completely new personnel and maybe a new generation of fans to move forward. 

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