The Falcons red zone failures have become a capital-T Thing

If you think about it, there are two primary goals to any offense: creating scoring opportunities and then converting them into points. In his 19 regular season and playoff games as Atlanta’s offensive coordinator, Steve Sarkisian has proven himself to be one of the best in the league at the former. And it has exposed just how bad he appears to be at the latter.

Atlanta had maybe the best open-field offense in the NFL last year.

If we define “open play” as the area between your 10 and your opponent’s 30, as I did in the advanced stats guide in SB Nation’s 2018 NFL preview, Atlanta’s open-play offense was stupendous in 2017 — as good as it was during the Falcons’ 2016 run to the Super Bowl.

For the second straight season, the Falcons were first in open-play success rate on standard downs (first downs, second-and-7 or fewer, third-and-4 or fewer). Open-play standard downs are perhaps the most frequent play type in football — being good at it is a requisite for any success whatsoever, and Atlanta is great at it. And in 2017, the Falcons’ third-down success rate in open play improved from a wholly mediocre 40 percent to an outstanding 47.

Sarkisian pulled all the right strings when it came to moving his team into scoring position. And then bad things began to happen.

The Falcons weren’t horrible in scoring positions last year, but they were definitively worse. They were more turnover-prone than a good offense should be (which generally suggests some bad luck), and they were average to below average in the primary red zone efficiency categories.

Basically, Atlanta had to be great at creating scoring chances because it was going to take quite a few to put up 2016’s totals. The Falcons averaged five points per scoring opportunity (first downs inside the opponent’s 40) in 2016, among the best in the league; they averaged 4.2 in 2017, which meant they had to create 20 percent more changes to finish with the same points.

That’s kind of important, yeah? And the stats were backed up with the most damning anecdotal evidence possible: fourth-and-goal with a chance to beat the eventual Super Bowl champion Eagles in the playoffs, a play that was both sniffed out by the Philadelphia defense and doomed from the start.

Listening to #Eagles S Malcolm Jenkins talk about the final play of the game is fun:

"We were able to recognize that (the play) pretty much before they even came out of the huddle." pic.twitter.com/HEgdN6sUYE

— James Palmer (@JamesPalmerTV) January 14, 2018

Then came Thursday night. Both Atlanta and Sarkisian found themselves with an apt chance at redemption, beginning the 2018 season where the 2017 season ended.

The game was poetic in all the wrong ways. It both began and ended with failure in the same end zone.

For the game, Atlanta clearly outplayed Philadelphia. The Falcons gained 299 to the Eagles’ 232 and created six scoring opportunities to Philadelphia’s three. Under normal circumstances, you win that game almost every time. But the Eagles scored touchdowns in two of their three opportunities, and Atlanta did this:

• Opportunity No. 1: Turnover on downs. First-and-goal from the 6 turns into second-and-goal from the 1. DeVonta Freeman gets stuffed on second down, Matt Ryan fires incomplete to Freeman on third on a play that featured an interesting bunched look but created no horizontal spacing, and Freeman gets stuffed again on fourth down from what we’ll call a very predictable look.

• Opportunity No. 2: FIELD GOAL. Within minutes, the Falcons were back inside the 10. This time, Ryan focused on tight end Austin Hooper, but two targets produced one catch for three yards. But there were points, at least!
• Opportunity No. 3: FIELD GOAL. Completions to Julio Jones and Mohamed Sanu brought the Falcons as far as the Philly 25, but a Jordan Hicks sack of Ryan forced a 52-yard field goal. That’s fine.
• Opportunity No. 4: INTERCEPTION. Atlanta was given a golden opportunity when an Eagles blocker touched a punt before it was downed and Kemal Ishmael recovered at the Philly 32. On third-and-3 from the 15, however, Ryan either suffered miscommunication with Jones or threw the worst damn pass of his career; either way, Rasul Douglas made an easy interception at the Eagles’ 4. The throw was so bad that Twitter didn’t even blame Sarkisian.
• Opportunity No. 6: TOUCHDOWN. Despite all these failures, Atlanta was given another lease on life when Deion Jones picked off a deflected pass and returned it to the Philly 27. (Obviously Sarkisian gets no credit for “creating” either of these last two scoring chances.) Ryan hits Julio for 18 yards, then Tevin Coleman — who’s bigger than Freeman but somehow wasn’t considered near the goal line on Opportunity No. 1 — slices off right tackle for a nine-yard score, and Atlanta leads again.
• Opportunity No. 6: CLOCK RUNS OUT. Given one last chance after the Eagles regained the lead, Ryan leads an outstanding two-minute drill, moving the Falcons 70 yards to the Philly 5. But after going 5-for-6 to start the drive, Ryan throws five consecutive incompletions (an Eagles penalty gave them a bonus shot), including two predictable, well-covered misfires to Jones, and the ballgame ends.

First, Sarkisian ignored Jones like he did for a good portion of last season. Then he focused too heavily on him. Then he called the right play and it ended up an interception.

Atlanta’s red zone failures have become a capital-T Thing; Sarkisian is throwing a lot of different things at the wall, but it doesn’t appear that either he or his players have any confidence that something will stick. They failed from getting too predictable in both run and pass on Thursday night. It’s almost like Sarkisian needs an offensive co-coordinator to take the play book once the Falcons cross the 10.

Of course, the Falcons are also obviously good. They lost by one play on the road to the defending Super Bowl champions, just like they lost by one play on the road to the eventual Super Bowl champs back in January. Their defense, which has been shaky in open play for a couple of years (and probably should have caught more flack for last year’s slight regression), looked mostly awesome; plus, they were screwed out of a seventh scoring opportunity by the embarrassing spinning dart board that is the NFL catch rule.

A lot of teams would kill for Atlanta’s problems. But that doesn’t make those problems any less problematic. And to say the least, it has to be demoralizing to have had an entire offseason to fix probably your biggest problem and to have it look like even more of a problem to start the season.

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