The Falcons had their seventh straight losing season in 2024 after dropping their final two games of the year, but team owner Arthur Blank isn’t doubting the track that his team is on as they head into the 2025 campaign.
Head coach Raheem Morris took over the team before the start of last season and made a significant change when he benched quarterback Kirk Cousins in the first year of the four-year contract he signed with the team as a free agent. First-round pick Michael Penix took over and is now firmly entrenched in the starting lineup while a change at defensive coordinator has Jeff Ulbrich calling the shots on that side of the ball this time around.
Falcons General Manager Terry Fontenot traded a future first-round pick to add edge rusher James Pearce in the first round of this year’s draft. Blank said on Saturday that those kinds of decisions leave him feeling confident they “have the right people” calling the shots in Atlanta and that “we have the ingredients that we can look forward to in order to be consistently competitive.”
“We’re in a better place now, team-wise, coaching-wise, totally across the board than we’ve been in a number of years,” Blank said, via Marc Raimondi of ESPN.com. “And so we were close last year, didn’t finish the way we wanted to finish, for sure. Every one of the coaches would say that. Players would say that, as well. And, certainly, I feel that way, but I think incrementally we’ve gotten that much better. And so, I look forward to the season and a different set of results at the end of the season.”
The Falcons have hovered around the .500 mark for most of their run of losing seasons and they lost six one-score games last season, so there’s reason to think they aren’t far away from breaking through for a winning season in 2025. The results will have to come on the field rather than on paper, though, and the next few weeks will be spent trying to prove Blank right about the trajectory in Atlanta.
