Falcons set a new 2-game record for points allowed

If you thought the scores of the last two games were a bit lopsided, you’re not alone. The Falcons have been blown out in back-to-back efforts, even if the Bucs game was a little closer than the final score indicated, and predictably they’ve set yet another sad franchise record along the way.

Per ESPN’s Michael Rothstein, the Falcons just allowed more points in the last two games than they’ve allowed through the first two games in any other season in franchise history. Predictably, they just edged out last year’s Falcons to take that ignoble, weird-smelling crown.

The biggest difference between last year and this year is that the defense is not quite the utter catastrophe it was a year ago—the Buccaneers picked up 14 points off of pick-sixes yesterday and the D has been working with some short fields—and the offense isn’t nearly as crisp as it was in the early going of 2020. I would suggest that the team is more woeful through the first two games of this season than they were last year, but you don’t have to squint all that hard to see that the defense is not quite the gigantic liability it was through the first few games of last season. Of course, things would flip later on as the offense stagnated and the defense actually started pulling together respectable performances under Raheem Morris, but ideally we’ll get something approaching a balanced quality team effort in 2021, which rarely happened last year.

Aside from being an awful start to the year and yet another record I wish the Falcons weren’t setting, this is an indicator of just how much of a work in progress Atlanta is. The hope was that this team would be able to maximize its questionable talent at several positions with better coaching and get a big boost from its handful of stars, but to this point we’ve only had a couple of short stretches where any of that has worked as intended. With matchups against the Giants, Taylor Heinicke-led Washington Football Team and Jets coming up things are unlikely to look this grim going forward, but the Falcons have also not shown us enough to feel like those games are necessarily going to go well.

May this be the last record for ineptitude that the Falcons set in 2021. Low bar, but please, please let us clear it.