This team’s fortunes depend a great deal on the second-year quarterback.
Welcome to Friday Falconry, where we’re taking advantage of the quiet part of the league calendar to open the floodgates to some big picture discussions. Today, perhaps the most vital player on the roster is up for consideration.
We’ve gotten excited over the additions to the defense even while we fret over some of its remaining holes. We’ve pondered about what a further breakout from Bijan Robinson would look like. We’ve wondered what Ryan Neuzil replacing Drew Dalman on a full-time basis will look like. And naturally, we’ve wrung our hands over this coaching staff and whether Raheem Morris, Jeff Ulbrich, and Zac Robinson can lift this team higher in 2025.
All of those subplots for the year do matter a great deal, but the most important piece of the puzzle is still Michael Penix. We saw in 2022 what happens when you have a talented but inconsistent passer, and in 2023 we saw what happens when you have an overmatched and reckless one. The 2024 season that was supposed to fix all that instead brought a fresh wave of woe when Kirk Cousins went belly-up midway through the season, which brought Penix into the picture for an encouraging-if-not-definitive three game stretch.
It is both exciting and unsettling to consider how much Penix’s fortunes mean for this team in 2025. If he’s as gifted as he looked for stretches last year, this should be a good football team with a ceiling somewhere above good. If inconsistency, injury, or both rear their heads, all the team’s defensive improvements may come to naught. The Falcons need Penix to be good to make a playoff push, and they likely need him to be great to make a deep run.
Given all that, and given what you know about Penix from his college career and last year’s performance, are you confident he’s going to be a quality starter? How good will that season be for Penix, and what will it mean for the Falcons? Unload your opinions in the comments, please and thank you.