The Falcoholic
Raheem Morris bets on someone he knows well from the past for a brighter future, but will it work?
You get the sense that Raheem Morris would have hired Jeff Ulbrich to be his defensive coordinator in early 2024 had it been an option, so the fact that he’s the defensive coordinator in 2025 is no great surprise. As Tre’Shon Diaz wrote last night, Morris prizes his relationships with coaches he knows and trusts, so the hire we half-expected is the one we ought to have expected even as the list of interviews burgeoned in the past week.
The last time Morris was the head coach and Ulbrich was the defensive coordinator was in a 2020 season doomed from the outset, with both men thrust into larger-than-anticipated roles after Dan Quinn was fired and they were tasked with finishing out a season that began 0-5. The modest success that season—Morris and Ulbrich coaxed a 4-7 finish out of that team to finish with a 4-12 record, and neither one stuck around in Atlanta—would have scared many coaches away from going back to the same well. Morris is not one of those coaches, for better or for worse.
Why Ulbrich? The answer is actually an easy one to provide, but whether it’s a satisfying answer is much more of an open question.
As I mentioned above, Morris is a relationships guy. He worked with Ulbrich from 2015-2020 continuously, which is a small eternity in an NFL where coaching staffs break up and get fired on a regular basis. In rough circumstances in their final year together, Morris and Ulbrich took a defense that had allowed 30-plus points in four of the first five weeks of the season and managed to allow 30-plus just twice the rest of the way, both against the eventual Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
If that stint and that relationship didn’t make an impact on Morris, Ulbrich wouldn’t be Atlanta’s defensive coordinator now. But Ulbrich is also much more experienced than he was when he took over that role in 2020, because he’s spent the past four years as the defensive coordinator (and eventually interim head coach) for a talented Jets defense. He and Robert Saleh had that group humming along in 2022 and 2023, but with Saleh fired and Ulbrich taking over in 2024, things went downhill last year.
Is Ulbrich a solid coordinator? I’d say his results in Atlanta and New York suggest that yes, he is, and if you give him quality pieces he’ll likely give you a solid defense. But while Morris will surely speak to Ulbrich’s acumen, this is at least as much about where Morris and Ulbrich share common ground on approach, trust, and vision for the franchise. Morris saw Lake flame out and concluded he needed someone who both knows him and knows what it’s like to be an NFL coordinator, and Ulbrich was the most experienced candidate in both those regards.
The 2020 season’s...
