The Falcoholic
I think we can officially call this season off the rails. The Falcons are going nowhere and even the goodwill they got from their victory in New Orleans has now evaporated with a defeat against the lowly New York Jets just a week later.
There’s really no other way to put it other than that this season has been an unmitigated disaster relative to the expectations in place coming into it. Raheem Morris’ tenure with the team has been that of complete failure every step of the way, and the Falcons are essentially now a dead team walking.
Here is the scenario the Falcons face if they beat the Seattle Seahawks in Week 14, as well as if they lose.
They will stave off mathematical elimination from playoff contention by at least one week.
Look, I’m not going to sit here and sell you a bill of goods about how the Falcons could have this magical and miraculous chance if this goes right and that goes right and if we mix all of that together with some fairy dust to get an end product that’s a 9-8 playoff appearance. The playoffs aren’t happening, it’s just that winning prevents mathematical elimination for the time being.
Atlanta would break a little bit of a good run the Seahawks have going in the head to head matchup at the moment, having won three of the past four matchups including a game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium last year. This would be the Falcons’ 10th win all time against Seattle, who currently leads the series 13-9.
Even though they’re nowhere near it, the Falcons would have a chance to shake up the NFC playoff picture a little bit, potentially knocking Seattle down to 7th, and helping the Rams open up a full game lead in the NFC West.
It will continue to be business as usual for this franchise. Not only will they mathematically be eliminated from the playoffs, extending their playoff draught to eight years in a row — the second longest active such streak behind only the Jets — but they will also clinch their eighth consecutive losing season as well.
That eighth consecutive losing season will match the longest such streak in franchise history, which happened during the putrid run we saw from this team from 1983-1990.
Counting his interim stint, which was 11 games in 2020, Raheem Morris will have officially registered his fifth losing season in six career years as a head coach in the NFL. His career head coaching record will fall to an absolutely terrible 33-56.
