Falcons – Ravens takeaways: What we learned from Saturday afternoon

The Atlanta Falcons lost 13-12 to the Baltimore Ravens on Saturday, but this being a preseason game, the contours of the contest matter very little.

Let’s talk about what we really learned from the big moments and the decisions leading up to the game.

The Falcons value health a great deal

Atlanta sat, by team reporter Terrin Waack’s count, 37 players on Saturday. To put that in some perspective, that means they essentially played with the same 53 man roster they’d have on regular season Sundays…but that number was without basically any of their starters and most of their top reserves.

That meant the preseason product was understandably iffy, but it was also a major statement on what Raheem Morris and company think of the preseason. It’s a time for the reserves to get their work and make their cases for depth chart jockeying and roster spot grabbing, not a time for established players to get in a little work, and approach borrowed from legendary preseason hater Sean McVay. The injuries to Bralen Trice and DeMarcco Hellams made the Falcons even more cautious in the second week, and thankfully, they escaped from this game without any additional injuries that we know of.

I put this takeaway first because it’s clearly the one that matters the most to the Falcons, who are willing to risk a little rust from starters in the service of getting those starters to the season healthy. Given that this franchise clearly expects to contend in 2024 and given how many players they have either coming off major injury (Kirk Cousins, Grady Jarrett) or simply set to play too large a role to risk their health, you’d be hard-pressed to quibble with many of the choices the Falcons made on Saturday. That’s true even if I would have really liked to see Michael Penix toss the football around again, and even if the decision to park Penix for the preseason finale deserves its own article soon.

The big roster decisions have already been made

Let’s assume those 37 players are all roster locks, which I assume is a fair thing to say. That leaves 16 open spots and another small raft of potential practice squad roles to fill. Even the competitions for starting jobs are being decided in practice, if they haven’t already been decided.

Out of those 16 spots, Younghoe Koo, Liam McCullough, and Bradley Pinion have three of them and are simply playing because they’re specialists. Ruke Orhorhoro, Brandon Dorlus, James Smith-Williams, and Micah Abernathy are likely all roster locks as well and are simply getting experience and filling necessary gameday niches owing to the number of players available. That would leave something like nine spots open, and that’s if you assume (as I have) that Taylor Heinicke is probably ticketed for another team’s roster. There’s not a lot of actual competition going on for roster spots here, in other words.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does take away a little bit of the small intrigue preseason can offer us. Still…

The big preseason moments are fun and worthwhile

Chris Blair has been grinding away for a little while now, trying to make the roster last summer, winding up stealing his way back onto the Falcons practice squad, signing a reserve/future deal with the team, and then competing this summer. Maybe it all adds up to something, maybe it doesn’t, but Blair was a standout on Saturday in a way that will matter a great deal for him.

Posting nearly 100 yards and looking smooth and capable as a receiver, Blair made his case for a roster spot and likely helped impress a new coaching staff enough to put him in serious consideration for a practice squad slot if the receiver depth chart is already pretty settled in their minds. If he doesn’t stick around, he did enough to catch the attention of another franchise that needs receiver help. In a largely forgettable grind of a game, Blair’s standout day, Natrone Brooks showing out as perhaps the best defender on the field for the Falcons and making his own case for a spot this year, and Ruke Orhorhoro and Brandon Dorlus playing well and showing the coaching staff they can be relied on to be disruptive forces if called upon were bright moments with potentially outsized implications for those players.

Coaches don’t love preseason games, but players who want to make an impact or seize a spot have to enjoy the opportunity. If Blair and Brooks wind up being practice squad mainstays or even contributors for this Falcons team, Saturday will have mattered a lot.

Younghoe Koo will have the fanbase on edge for a while

Koo, like Matt Bryant before him, has been a favorite of Falcons fans for a while now. When you’re a kicker and you’re reliable, that tends to happen. The problem is that misses quickly take your luster away, at least until you string together many successful kicks.

That’s where Koo is now. After a couple of ugly games in 2023 took some of the shine away from a mostly successful season, Koo whiffed three times on Saturday against the Ravens, all of them to the left. That may well be a correctable issue that Koo irons out—he’s certainly busted out of short slumps and rebounded from mistakes plenty of times in Atlanta—and the season will roll around and we’ll go back to being quite comfortable when he lines up to try a field goal. Many Falcons fans still aren’t sweating Koo’s status at all, to be fair.

But for the rest of the fanbase, Koo is now like any other kicker in the league not named, say, Justin Tucker. Breath will be held until he returns to the form that made him one of the league’s better kickers, and if there’s a bright note here, it’s that he has the talent and the history to make us believe that’s borderline inevitable.