Brian Billick slams Atlanta Falcons offense: “Too basic. . . No creativity at all.”

You may know Brian Billick as an NFL analyst and former head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. He was also the offensive coordinator of the Minnesota Vikings back when they broke the scoring record in 1998. The Falcons, of course, beat that team in the playoffs, but it was an offensive masterpiece with Randall Cunningham connecting frequently to rookie Randy Moss.

The man knows a thing or two about NFL offenses, and he knows the Atlanta Falcons aren’t a good one.

Rich Eisen suggested on Twitter the Falcons need to work on the basics, usually a nice way of saying they are struggling to execute.

There’s a ton of missed opportunities for the offense (looking at you, Austin Hooper) and this is definitely part of the problem. Billick thinks there are much bigger problems.

I hate to oversimplify things here, but we were optimistic that the offense could keep chugging along with Steve Sarkisian. He must literally have hours of game film and hundreds of pages of plans, formations, ideas, and other things that literally just worked. He’s not doing a lot of that.

It’s like he’s copying someone’s homework, but doesn’t want it to look too obvious so he’s throwing in some wrong answers in there. But here, he’s clearly overdoing it. This is not anything close to Kyle Shanahan’s offense.

As Billick mentioned, they have done away with presnap motions and are doing a terrible job at scheming players open. Taylor Gabriel was successful because he was put in a position to win. You can’t expect an undersized player like that to make a tough catch in traffic. Tevin Coleman was an electric pass catcher but has been predominately used to run between the tackles. Also, what happened to all those sweet three TE formations?

The Falcons are heading into the wrong direction, and if Brian Billick is right, it has a lot to do with Steve Sarkisian.