There’s something thrilling, in a nerve-wracking sense, about seeing a poker player down to their last chip, gambling on one final hand, hoping that at long last the cards will turn in their favor. Now, you know how this usually ends — that last chip vanishes, the player’s hopes and bankroll busted — but there’s always hope.
We’re just two weeks into the 2026 season, and the Atlanta Falcons are already down to their last chip. Where other teams are still working out the last of the preseason aches and pains, the Atlanta Falcons are on their fourth — fourth! — named quarterback, as Michael Penix Jr. will start for the team this Thursday night against Green Bay.
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The Falcons embody Hemingway’s famous line about how bankruptcy happens: gradually, then suddenly. We are very much in the “suddenly” phase now with Atlanta, but the “gradually” phase began back in March 2024, when Atlanta signed Kirk Cousins to a four-year, $180 million contract. For about four weeks, it seemed like the Falcons had at last found their franchise replacement for retired local legend Matt Ryan.
We should have known something was up, karmically speaking, when the Falcons were immediately accused of, and later fined $250,000 for, tampering during the Cousins signing process. And Cousins didn’t even get the chance to dispel those bad vibes with his play; just weeks after finalizing that massive deal, the Falcons drafted Penix.
Not only did Atlanta fail to notify Cousins, which doesn’t seem like the optimal way to begin a relationship, but the Falcons bypassed more than half a dozen future Pro Bowlers, on both sides of the ball, to select the already-often-injured Penix.
Diagnosing what happened from there — Penix and Cousins shuttling in and out of the starting job as each struggled with injury and/or ineffectiveness — is like reading a police report on the wreck that totaled your car. The Why and How don’t really much matter anymore; the real question now is, what to do from here?
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Another famous American philosopher, John Madden, has a notable line of his own: When you have two quarterbacks, you have none. To which the 2026 Falcons replied: Yes, but what if we have FOUR quarterbacks?
Penix has been sidelined since November of last year with a torn ACL. Atlanta signed Tua Tagovailoa on a cheap one-year prove-it deal; Tagovailoa promptly suffered a oblique injury days after being named the Week 1 starter, and still hasn’t played. QB3 Cooper Rush has struggled so badly that Atlanta has exactly as many red zone possessions this year as you do. Fan favorite Jack Strand finally got the nod during Sunday’s blowout loss to Carolina, and on his very first NFL play, this happened:
The last Falcon to throw a pick-six on his first play was a guy named Brett Favre … but he wasn’t a Falcon for much longer after that.
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The maddening aspect of all this chaos, for long-suffering Falcons fans, is that Atlanta has all the other pieces of a playoff-quality team already in place. Swap in a Baker Mayfield or a Jalen Hurts or half a dozen other quarterbacks in the 10th-to-20th-ranked range to run an offense with Bijan Robinson, Drake London, Kyle Pitts et. al., and Atlanta instantly becomes a postseason contender. But it doesn’t matter how sweet your Ferrari’s interior, sound system and tires are if you’ve got a lawnmower engine under the hood.
And so the frustrations continue. Atlanta hasn’t reached the playoffs since the 2017 season, the second-longest drought, after the Jets, in the NFL. Even in the woeful NFC South, where there’s a home playoff game awaiting any team that manages to rise to the level of mediocre, Atlanta hasn’t been able to break through.
The 2027 NFL Draft promises a wealth of quarterback talent, from Arch Manning to Dante Moore to whichever Fernando Mendoza-esque shooting star separates from the pack over the next 10 weeks. (‘Sup, Drew Mestemaker.)
This puts the Falcons in an uncomfortable limbo: If Penix plays poorly, the Falcons can console themselves and their fans that there’s potentially a better option awaiting in the draft. If Penix plays with poise, precision and — most importantly — durability that he hasn’t shown yet, the Falcons might be able to salvage something from this 30-month debacle.
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But what about the most likely scenario — the possibility that Penix plays well enough to win a few games, not enough to win the division but enough to push Atlanta down out of the elite-QB draft slots? Do the Falcons attempt to go for a sixth quarterback in two-plus seasons?
These are interesting times in Atlanta, the same way it’s interesting to be an overmatched quarterback with an NFL-quality defensive line chasing you. No matter what happens next under center for Atlanta, starting Thursday against the Packers, it’s going to be memorable … one way or another.
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