FLOWERY BRANCH — If it’s mid-December, then it must be time for a crisis with the Falcons involving the most important position on the team.
It was Dec. 12, 2022 when then-coach Arthur Smith made the quarterback change from Marcus Mariota to rookie Desmond Ridder. Had Mariota bolted the team any more quickly, the dust on him would have remained suspended in air like in cartoons.
It was Dec. 19 last year when Smith sat Ridder down for a second time, effectively concluding Ridder’s time with the Falcons and bringing Smith’s own tenure one step closer to its conclusion after three consecutive 7-10 seasons.
And Tuesday, Smith’s successor Raheem Morris made the awkward but necessary move to sit high-priced and underperforming quarterback Kirk Cousins in favor of rookie Michael Penix Jr.
It’s like “The Swallows of Capistrano,” except that the swallows probably have made their postseason sometime in the past six seasons.
For a franchise that continues to wander the desert, on to a new chapter.
Penix could make this work and redeem the chaos. He could lead the Falcons to wins in the final three regular-season games and get the team into the playoffs (for the first time since the 2017 season) or at least do enough to offer assurance that they have their guy in place going into 2025.
“This kid, he’s played a significant amount of football in college football,” Morris said. “He’s got a lot of reps. He’s got a lot of poise, and he’s come here and shown nothing but growth and development, and now we’re going to see what it looks like.”
Uncertainty once again hovers over the Falcons.
Chances are that a franchise that has floundered since its last playoff berth won’t make it again despite concerted efforts (namely, firing Smith and hiring Morris and signing Cousins) to end the drought.
“I brought Kirk in here with full expectation of, we can win a championship with Kirk and we can compete with Kirk,” Morris said.
The Falcons likely need to win their final three games, which will be a big ask of the rookie Penix. A rookie quarterback winning his first three starts does not happen often, with San Francisco’s Brock Purdy appearing to be the most recent in 2022.
“We wanted to play better at quarterback, and we felt like we’ve got a chance to play a little better (with Penix),” Morris said. “And if we can go out there and play better at quarterback, who knows what can happen?”
And should the playoff bid end fruitlessly, there could be a price to pay, possibly in the form of general manager Terry Fontenot’s job.
Among the questions that he and Morris will have to answer is how they erred in deciding to invest $100 million guaranteed and vast salary-cap space in Cousins, a player who was returning from a torn Achilles and in August turned 36, an age when quarterbacks’ primes generally are past.
Morris said that he continued to stay with Cousins in recent weeks as he struggled, anticipating that his play would turn around and that he could regain the form that won him two NFC offensive player-of-the-week awards in October. Instead, Cousins continued to slide.
Morris said that “I’d be telling you a story if I didn’t tell you I wasn’t surprised right now” how Cousins’ play fell off so dramatically.
The decision to hire offensive coordinator Zac Robinson and defensive coordinator Jimmy Lake will merit scrutiny. With expectations so high for Morris’ first year, the wisdom of bringing in an offensive coordinator who had never called plays and a defensive coordinator who had never done the job at an NFL level is questionable.
Robinson has three games to show that the offense’s downturn largely was a factor of Cousins’ poor form, although he’ll have to do so while riding a rookie quarterback.
In time, the team will have to deal with the seemingly inevitable decision to release Cousins and take a huge salary-cap hit in 2025, not to mention losing its fifth-round draft pick as a penalty for tampering in its pursuit of Cousins in free agency.
“Obviously, we’ve got to have those long-term discussions and those long-term answers that have got to be made, but that’s not right now,” Morris said.
In short, the Falcons will have to face the repercussions of a decision that has blown up in their face in such grand fashion.
And if they fall short of the playoffs, starting with owner Arthur Blank, they’ll have to wrestle with the same question they asked themselves last year when Blank fired Smith. Is the franchise going in the right direction with the leadership that’s in place?
Only three other teams have missed the postseason longer and one of them (Denver) is on the brink of getting off the list. And the drought is especially galling considering how weak the NFC South has been in recent seasons. The book isn’t completely closed on this season, but the Falcons’ path to controlling the NFC South was wide-open. At 6-3, they had a two-game lead and a quarterback on fire. They were, as now, relatively healthy. The season that fans have long waited for seemed to have finally arrived.
And now control is lost, as is much of the hope.
A lot rides now on what Penix can do. To his credit, Cousins unsurprisingly took the news of his demotion professionally, telling Morris that he will be the best No. 2 quarterback in the NFL.
As he takes on the burden of lifting his team, Penix likely will need all the help he can get.
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