In this offseason series, Athlon Sports' Doug Farrar asks the One Big Question for every NFL team that will become readily apparent when the season does begin, and the lights are at their brightest. We continue with the Atlanta Falcons, who have a quarterback in Michael Penix Jr. set to be the first Falcons franchise player at the position since Matt Ryan's salad days. What will Penix's first full season as a starter look like?
There's an old NFL saying: When you have two starting quarterbacks, you really have no starting quarterbacks.
The Atlanta Falcons tried toying with that philosophy in the 2024 preseason by signing Kirk Cousins to a four-year, $180 million contract with $100 million guaranteed, and then selecting Washington's Michael Penix Jr. with the eighth overall pick in the draft. It was seen as overkill by most observers for a team with a ton of needs throughout the overall roster, but general manager Terry Fontenot and head coach Raheem Morris were all-in.
In the end, things didn't work as expected. Cousins was beset by on-field issues — his mobility was never there as he didn't seem fully recovered from the torn Achilles tendon he suffered in Week 8 of the 2023 season when he was with the Minnesota Vikings, and the shoulder and elbow issues he underwent during the season further complicated matters. 2024 was by far his worst season as a starter in a career that goes back to 2012.
Cousins finished his season with 303 completions in 453 attempts for 3.508 yards, 18 touchdowns, an NFL-worst 16 interceptions, and a passer rating of 88.6. The final embarrassment for the veteran was when he was benched in favor of Penix following a 15-9 Week 15 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders in which Cousins could manage just 11 completions in 17 attempts for 112 yards, one touchdown, one interception, and a passer rating of 78.6.
In the three starts he was given, Penix showed far more than Cousins ever did, which led many to wonder why the decision wasn't made earlier in the season — perhaps the 8-9 Falcons could have made more of their season. In any event, Penix completed 61 of 105 passes for 775 yards, three touchdowns, three interceptions, and a passer rating of 78.9, but this was all about development, and by the time Week 18 rolled around, Penix shredded the Carolina Panthers in a 44-38 loss that proved how much help the team needed on defense. Penix did the best he could to shore things up, completing 21 of 38 passes for 312 yards, two touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 88.9.
And given Penix's status as the NCAA's best and most prolific deep passer in 2023 (51 completions of 20 or more air yards in a preposterous 117 attempts for 1,787 yards, 16 touchdowns, seven interceptions, and a passer rating of 105.1), it should not have come as any surprise that he was killing Carolina's defense with pinpoint downfield stuff over and over again.
“I don't even know what the yards were and the stats, but I just know it was absolutely outstanding watching those guys wheel and deal today," Morris said after the loss. "Michael Penix to [receiver] Drake London. Watching [running back] Bijan [Robinson] have the ability to get the ball in his hands in certain situations. Even some of the missed throws that we're making are just exciting. If you're a fan and you look out there at Michael Penix, you've got to be excited.
"Obviously, we did not intend to have a shootout today, and he did not intend to have a shootout today. We wanted to be able to run and control the football, do the things we did in the first half, be able to control that, not allow those guys to score. But he went out to game change and did what he had to do, and he gave us a chance to go out there and compete and have a chance to win. When you've got a young quarterback like that, you're cooking with gas. That's what fires me up. Despite how angry I am or pissed off right now, when you look at No. 9, he gives us the best chance to win football games moving forward.”
He does, and no matter what's currently going on with Cousins, his remaining contract, and the no-trade clause that is the 8,000-pound elephant in the room, it's Michael Penix's offense now. The team made a lot of moves in the offseason to make things better, especially on the defensive side of the ball both in free agency and the draft, so the hope is that Penix comes in as the unquestioned starter without the need to run through a shootout every week.
“It started in Phase One with the athletic prowess that he's able to show us when it comes to the testing numbers, when it comes to the competitive nature that he has in his body, to go out there and compete with the numbers of a [cornerback] A.J. Terrell or a [receiver Darnell] Mooney or a Drake London," Morris said on June 10, when asked how he's seen Penix's personality and leadership expand. "That's really impressive to start there. Then it kind of went into the phase two and the OTA phase, phase three, when you start to hear his voice and you start to hear his command of the offense and really the competitive nature come out just a little bit when it comes to some of the banter that's with that.
"Then there's the learning process that he's been able to have of being able to talk to a bunch of different quarterbacks from our history, whether you're talking about Matt [Ryan] or you're talking about Michael Vick or you're talking about some of the people that's visited or even Kirk Cousins going through the experience that he went through last year. Some of the guys that are in this room, whether you're talking about Emory [Jones], you're talking about [backup quarterback] Easton Stick, you're talking about his coaches, T.J. [Yates], D.J. [Williams]. All of those things, man, are big time steps that Michael has taken and we've watched it and we've really liked it and enjoyed it.”
What Morris has referred to as Penix's "athletic arrogance" is something the Falcons know about, and are factoring into his development. This is a franchise that has bet in a bad way for far too long on low-ceiling quarterbacks with the hope of baseline efficiency that never really happened. Now, it's about how far Penix can push his own ceiling out of the way.
"I don't know; it's an It factor," Morris said. "I don't feel that way because I don't have that kind of athletic arrogance. I can't make every throw and he thinks he can and he probably can and he has a lot of confidence to go out there and do those things and it's not even just the throws. It's just the seeing the defense, the learning the offense, the having a complete understanding of what we're trying to get done to be able to communicate with his coordinator, Zac Robinson, and also to be able to use his voice to be the sounding board for the team and for his offense in particular. All of those things, I think, are very important to where he's going.”
Where the arrogance shows up in a bad way is when Penix finds himself on the wrong side of his own mechanics. In the 2024 preseason, he had some pretty serious issues with sailing potentially easy boundary completions over the heads of his targets...
...and that turned out to be an issue as time went along.
But both Morris and offensive coordinator Zac Robinson are all about the balance between athletic arrogance and knowing when and how to deploy it. There were certainly enough flashes in 2024; this arrow of a tight-window touchdown pass against the Washington Commanders in what was eventually a 30-24 overtime loss was one you'd highlight no matter who the quarterback was. Penix diagnosed the four-man rush/seven-man drop in Cover-4 when that was not the pre-snap look at all. He worked through his progressions, saw that receiver Ray-Ray McCloud was closed in coverage to the right side, and deployed the Howitzer to Pitts to the back side.
"No, he's a tight window[-thrower]," Robinson said of that play. "He knows the ball has got to get into the end zone there. But he's got a confidence to throw the ball anywhere he wants on the football field, which is fun. And it doesn't matter if it's 60 yards outside the numbers. It doesn't matter if it's a five-yard shot, if it's a 20-yard laser. He's got everything in his bag. And so seeing that in that moment was a great throw and great catch by Kyle too. It was tight coverage, obviously a big play by those guys.”
The good news is that nobody in the building is harder on Penix than Penix himself.
“Yeah, he's very critical," Robinson said of his quarterback in January. "He was even critical at halftime, when we were talking at halftime. And he was like, man, I gotta hit those throws. Like, hey, you keep shooting, those things are there. You just keep playing the game and those things are going to come. But the next day, watching film with him, he sees the game so well. And the conversation is so easy and fluid. He sees the game like a veteran quarterback. And he's obviously played a lot of football, which helps.
"But he just has that natural eye for the game, too. When he was 17 years old, he still saw the game the right way. And obviously, he just has that natural football instinct, the things that you like about any quarterback. So, he's very critical of himself. But understands, shoot, there's a lot that goes into this. He needs some time on task with these guys. And he keeps saying, man, it's going to come, it's going to come. But doesn't mean that he still thinks he's going to hit every single throw, which he should.”
Well, maybe that happens in Year Two. What we've seen so far would seem to indicate that there will be many more big plays for the Falcons' offense in 2025 with Penix in charge.
“It's all about preparation," Penix said near the end of the seaosn. "I feel like I prepare better than most people in my opinion. Obviously, I don't see everybody's preparation, but I just go in with the right mindset, and I just put in the work. I played a lot of football in college. I played at the highest levels, and now I'm at the highest level. It's just football at the end of the day. I go out there and have fun. I'm thankful for every opportunity I get because I'm very thankful, because it's been cut short for me a lot throughout my playing career. So for me, I'm just going out there having fun, just playing a game I've been playing since I was a kid. And obviously, it's a different level. It's faster, guys are stronger, bigger. I got faster, stronger, and bigger, too.
"So I've just got to go out there and execute."
