It’s justified.
Your Atlanta Falcons did some good things in 2024, but I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that tackling was one of them. The number of times missed tackles were impactful was not a small number, and those errors were insanely costly against the Commanders in particular.
That impression is backed up by the eye test—we all watched those games!—and the team’s missed tackle number, which ranked 24th in the NFL. The Next Gen team at NFL.com took a more advanced look at the team’s tackling metrics and ranked them…24th in the NFL. Not good!
Here’s the NFL.com writeup:
In an unfortunate turn of events, a defense that entered the season with a new Raheem Morris-led scheme and a lot of hope fell from the 11th-most efficient tackling outfit in 2023 to the sixth-least efficient in 2024. Kaden Elliss was a bright spot, converting 150 tackles while missing only 15, but newly acquired safety Justin Simmons missed 21.5% of his tackle attempts after logging an elite rate below 10% in his previous six straight seasons in Denver. With Simmons set to hit free agency, the Falcons may choose to move on from the veteran.
The team’s defensive backs were the primary culprit, as A.J. Terrell, Simmons, Clark Phillips, Mike Hughes, and Dee Alford all were logged at a 17% missed tackle rate or higher per Pro Football Focus, which is not superb. Among corners who played at least 50% of their team’s snaps on defense, Terrell was 7th in missed tackle rate (and not in a good way), Hughes was 13th, and Alford was 18th. Simmons, meanwhile, was second (again, not in a good way) in missed tackle rate among safeties; Jessie Bates was 32nd. The number of open field tackles the Falcons missed corresponds pretty neatly to the shaky tackling of both the secondary and the inside linebacker corps, where the missed opportunities weren’t quite as frequent but were costly when they happened.
The Falcons were actually one of the better teams in terms of missed tackle totals and rates in 2023 and even 2022, so this doesn’t have to be the beginning of another ugly trend for Atlanta. But Jeff Ulbrich and Raheem Morris will to improve the defense and emphasize the fundamentals, something we can’t say is definitely going to happen given that the Jets were 29th in missed tackles in 2024. That will require patience, effort, and smart acquisitions to pull off, but that was already the urgent theme of the offseason.
I know this much: The Falcons are only going to go further in 2024 if they can do the basic things well, something they regularly failed to do with tackling, clock management, so forth throughout last season. Let’s hope for a sounder season in 2025.