The Atlanta Falcons have cratered after a promising 6-3 start, but their 2024 season hasn’t totally been lost. That could change on Monday night.
Atlanta faces a 2-11 Las Vegas Raiders team on the road this week that won’t have its best player in defensive end Maxx Crosby and will be starting third-year quarterback Desmond Ridder to lead its offense.
Ridder, of course, is the 2023 Falcons quarterback who was benched twice for Taylor Heinicke and eventually traded to the Arizona Cardinals in March after Atlanta signed quarterback Kirk Cousins.
The Cousins experience built real momentum for the Falcons until the wheels came off. The Falcons have dropped four straight games since beating the Dallas Cowboys in early November to get to that 6-3 record, and Cousins’ substandard play has been a leading contributor to the decline.
Turnovers and red-zone woes have submarined a once-humming offense with Cousins at the helm. Particularly without Crosby to chase him around, the Falcons quarterback should have a rebound game against Las Vegas.
What if he doesn’t? The Falcons losing to a guy they traded away in March with a guy they just gave a monster contract would be one of the most Falcon-y embarrassments the team has faced in ages.
Cousins not playing well and the Falcons losing a game to a team with two wins in December would heighten the calls for rookie quarterback Michael Penix Jr. It would also show a Falcons team in free fall that can’t even get past the Raiders’ third-string quarterback who got jettisoned in the offseason to a Cardinals team that eventually sent him to the practice squad.
The Falcons can’t lose this game. They simply can’t. Their playoff hopes would basically vanish into thin air barring an epic Tampa Bay Buccaneers collapse and some real brazen luck elsewhere in the NFC that the franchise isn’t know to encounter.
The high-priced Cousins losing a quarterback duel to the exiled Ridder would feel like the death knell in a Falcons season that’s already going down the drain. While Penix offers a path to the future, this would be a pretty awful present situation for Atlanta to find itself in, and it’d raise some questions about the immediate status of the franchise. It’s up to the Falcons to avoid that grim reality and show why they’re still worthy of a playoff spot.
