FLOWERY BRANCH — Falcons offensive coordinator Zac Robinson set the record straight Thursday.
The game plan that had quarterback Kirk Cousins taking snaps almost exclusively out of the shotgun or pistol and staying put in the pocket had nothing to do with him returning from a ruptured Achilles tendon, Robinson said at his media availability at the team’s complex.
“Absolutely not,” Robinson said. “It just kind of went with the flow of the game.”
Regarding having no designed runs out of 22 shotgun snaps and calling run plays on 21 of 26 pistol snaps (per ESPN), “context is always going to matter in those cases,” Robinson said.
According to Robinson, there were, in fact, play-action passes and bootlegs in the game plan – plays that might have helped counter a pass rush targeting a stationary target in Cousins – but they weren’t called because of the look that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ defense showed and, in Robinson’s words, “the overall flow of the game.”
While there was a good plan to help right tackle Kaleb McGary with chip blocks against game-wrecking outside linebacker T.J. Watt, “unfortunately, we just didn’t execute that,” Robinson said.
This may all have been entirely factual, and let’s give Robinson the benefit of the doubt. But even if he were bending the truth a little, it really doesn’t matter. The 18-10 season-opening loss is in the past.
For Robinson, whatever the reasons for his shaky debut in his first-ever regular-season game as a play-caller at any level, all that matters is doing a much better job running the Falcons offense, starting Monday night in Philadelphia. Fortunately for Robinson, he has a lot of room for improvement.
Let’s put the Falcons’ 10-point, 226-yard, three-turnover train wreck into context. Last season, the team had three games in which it scored fewer points, four games in which it gained fewer yards and one game in which it turned the ball over more. But the Falcons had no games in which they were worse in all three categories.
In other words, it belonged with the bottom-tier performances by the Falcons offense last year, which – lest we forget – was guided by a quarterback who was benched twice and was cut by his new team this preseason (Desmond Ridder) and a coach who got fired at the end of the season (Arthur Smith).
Those issues were presumed to have been addressed with a new coaching staff and an offseason haul that included Cousins, the quarterback who has been given a contract with $100 million guaranteed.
To his credit, Robinson accepted responsibility for “what happened on Sunday, just with some of the operation things and some of those things that we can control.”
Maybe it merely was a sloppy game in which self-inflicted errors were the biggest culprit. Perhaps Cousins actually is supremely agile and will score the winning touchdown Monday night on a quarterback keeper and then dunk the ball over the crossbar.
Or, at least, it’s possible that the Falcons will do a better job of keeping the Eagles defense more off-balance than they did with the Steelers by taking advantage of Cousins’ claimed mobility, using play-action passes and bootlegs while balancing shotgun, pistol and under-center snaps.
Not calling a pass play each time the offense lines up in the shotgun could help, too.
That part seemed to have Cousins’ vote. Asked about that pattern, Cousins said that he leaves that to the analytics staff and the coaches “but certainly you don’t want any tells with what you’re doing, and so you want to make sure you have a good balance out there.”
It should be noted that Robinson is a rookie at this. He will get better at this as the season goes along. But it’s debatable how much slack he should be given for his lack of inexperience, to whatever degree that contributed to the clunker against the Steelers. This is a team built to win this season and end the franchise’s playoff drought. There isn’t much time for getting up to speed.
To beat the Eagles (a 6.5-point favorite) on the road, the Falcons absolutely will need more from Robinson. The same goes for Cousins, who didn’t do much to justify the investment that owner Arthur Blank made in him.
On the night before the Steelers game, “I said, ‘If we’re clean and crisp on offense (Sunday), we’ll win,’” Cousins said. “We were not, and so we lost. And I’m not blaming anybody. I’m saying myself, I’ve got to play better.”
All this said, Robinson surely knows what he is doing, even if he is in his first season as a coordinator. He did say that he likes the pistol (in which a running back lines up behind the quarterback, who is sometimes in a shortened shotgun position) because of its versatility to either pass or run. The Rams, his previous employer, used it last season when he was their quarterbacks coach and passing-game coordinator.
And Cousins said he physically felt good after the first game. At Thursday’s practice, he was seen practicing bootlegs and play-action passes from an under-center exchange. He claimed no affinity for playing in the shotgun, pistol or from under center.
“I think it’s a little bit of, ‘You call it, I gotta go ball it,’” he said.
Nothing would be surprising from the Falcons on Monday night – not a copy of the game plan for the Steelers nor a different approach and a winning performance from Robinson and Cousins.
Will Cousins show more mobility? What can Robinson do to help the offense avoid mistakes and move the ball consistently against the Eagles?
It will be an intriguing and revealing evening.
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