The Falcoholic
Arnold Ebiketie rolled after a slow start, and everyone else...did not.
The Atlanta Falcons threw a lot of bodies at their EDGE group—or outside linebacker group, depending on whether you prefer the team’s depth chart parlance or not—with results that were underwhelming much of the year.
The players the Falcons trotted out there were, with one notable exception, either lightly used, hurt, ineffective, or some combination of the three. The team’s defense cratered for long stretches for a variety of reasons, but we should not overlook that this group being a liability was certainly one of them.
The good news is that the team will get Bralen Trice back this year and have a chance to rebuild the room with only Arnold Ebiketie, DeAngelo Malone, Trice, and DeAngelo Malone under contract. The bad news is that this team hasn’t shown much aptitude for building this room outside of Ebiketie.
Let’s talk position review.
Age: 26 | Experience: 3 seasons
2024 Stats: 17 games with 2 listed starts, 24 tackles, 6 sacks, 39 pressures, 21 run stops, 3.3% missed tackle rate, 5/6 receptions/targets against, 32 yards allowed, 2 penalties
If there is one player you can squint and call a building block for this group, it’s Ebiketie. He’s unlikely to ever ascend to a place where he’s one of the league’s most productive pass rushers, but he can be the kind of player who consistently gets you 6-8 sacks, especially if he can stop getting off to such slow starts. Ebiketie had just three pressures in the first five weeks of the season before he caught fire and delivered 36 over his final 12 games.
Once you get past the start and the identical sack total to 2023, you can see that Ebiketie was an improved player more or less across the board. He cut down on his missed tackles, improved his run defense, and was a more impactful pass rusher, generating 11 more pressures than in either of his first two seasons. The quiet stretch early on obscures that Ebiketie was the team’s most consistently useful pass rusher in the 2024 season, and his year-over-year improvement suggests there may be a little more there we haven’t seen yet.
Ebiketie is the one player who is young enough, good enough, and proven enough to have a major role off the edge this coming season. The Falcons are going to rely on him heavily, and they should.
Age: 32 | Experience: 9 seasons
2024 Stats: 17 games with 15 starts, 24 tackles, 5.5 sacks, 25 pressures, 21 run stops, 14.6% missed tackle rate, 10/15 receptions/targets against, 125 yards allowed, 1 touchdown allowed, 5 penalties
Some of it was Jimmy Lake’s scheme. Some of it was, perhaps, the ravages of time and recovering from an injury that robbed him of most of his 2024 season. Some of it was just a poor year from a veteran player. However you slice it, this was easily the...
