Atlanta Finally Looks Like the Offense We Wanted. Now Comes the Awkward Part.

Fantasy football would be much easier if improving offenses automatically produced draft values.

Find team expected to score more.

Draft players from team.

Collect winnings.

Spend December explaining to relatives that, yes, the fantasy trophy does need its own shelf.

Atlanta is a useful reminder that this is not how any of this works.

The Falcons scored 20.8 points per game in 2025. The AutoDraftYears model projects 23.3 in 2026, which would move them from the bottom third of the league into something much closer to respectable.

Good.

The model also ranks Atlanta's receiver environment 7th and sees comparable offenses producing 2.7 fantasy starters.

Even better.

Then we get to the prices.

The market ranks Atlanta's fantasy roster 24th.

The model ranks it 29th.

Five places, against a threshold of eight.

No buys.

No fades.

We have successfully constructed an entire projection system, studied thousands of player-seasons and interrogated the Atlanta Falcons only to discover that everyone may already know what is going on.

Extremely rude.

What Happened in 2025?

The strange thing about Atlanta's 2025 season is that the offense wasn't short on good fantasy players.

It was short on being a good offense.

The Falcons finished 8-9 for the second straight year and averaged just 20.8 points per game, 24th in the NFL.

And yet Bijan Robinson spent the season behaving as if none of this concerned him.

Robinson rushed for 1,478 yards on 287 carries, added 820 receiving yards, and earned first-team AP All-Pro honors. He essentially spent four months dragging the Atlanta offense around like a parent carrying a sleeping child through an airport.

Kyle Pitts finally had the season fantasy managers have been forwarding to one another since approximately 2021.

He caught 88 passes for 928 yards and five touchdowns and earned second-team All-Pro recognition.

Drake London was excellent when healthy, too.

He finished with 68 catches, 919 yards and seven touchdowns despite playing only 12 games. His 76.6 receiving yards per game ranked seventh among wide receivers.

So Atlanta had:

• an All-Pro running back,
• an All-Pro tight end,
• a receiver playing at roughly a 1,300-yard pace,
• and the 24th-ranked scoring offense.

This is the Falcons experience.

The problem was everything connecting those players to the scoreboard.

Michael Penix Jr. entered the year as Atlanta's starting quarterback and showed some encouraging stretches, but his season never developed into the clean second-year breakout Atlanta hoped for.

He started nine games, completing 60.1% of his passes for 1,982 yards, nine touchdowns and three interceptions. Then his season ended with a knee injury.

Kirk Cousins had to return to the lineup, and Atlanta once again spent a season changing quarterbacks while trying to figure out what its offense was supposed to be. The Falcons' own postseason review described Penix and Cousins combining to produce another 8-9 season.

London also missed five games. Darnell Mooney entered the season dealing with an injury and missed the opener. The offense Atlanta probably imagined in August was rarely the offense it actually put on the field.

There were flashes.

Atlanta's red-zone offense actually caught fire in the middle of the season, scoring touchdowns on 13 of 14 red-zone possessions over a five-game stretch beginning in Week 9.

But the larger story never changed.

The Falcons had talented players.

They did not consistently turn them into points.

That distinction matters because the 2026 model isn't asking us to believe Bijan suddenly becomes good or London suddenly becomes good.

We already saw that.

It is asking us to believe the offense around them becomes more functional.

Atlanta Changed More Than the Quarterback

The Falcons responded to another 8-9 season by changing the operation.

Raheem Morris was not retained. Atlanta hired Kevin Stefanski as head coach, with Tommy Rees taking over as offensive coordinator and Bill Callahan coaching the offensive line.

Then Atlanta added Tua Tagovailoa on a one-year deal.

That last part requires an asterisk the size of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

As of August 18, Stefanski has not formally named his Week 1 starter. Tua is healthy enough to practice and play in the preseason while Penix continues working back from his ACL injury, which gives Tagovailoa the practical advantage right now. But Atlanta is still publicly calling this a competition.

That matters because the AutoDraftYears projection effectively assumes Tua operates as Atlanta's quarterback.

So this isn't merely an Atlanta projection.

It is, in part, a Tua projection.

Write that down somewhere before September.

Preferably somewhere we can still find it after Week 3.

What Does the Model Think Happens Next?

The model thinks Atlanta gets better.

Not 2016 Falcons better.

Nobody needs to start looking for old Matt Ryan highlights.

Just better.

Atlanta goes from 20.8 points per game in 2025 to a projected 23.3 in 2026.

Play volume rises from 60.2 to 62.0 snaps per game.

And the biggest change is in how those plays are distributed.

Atlanta threw on 53.3% of its snaps last year.

The model projects 58.8% in 2026.

That 5.5-percentage-point increase matters when you have Drake London and Kyle Pitts standing around asking whether anyone would perhaps like to throw them the football.

The resulting positional environments look like this:

Receiver is the obvious strength.

Running back is the weakest environment.

Which is amusing considering the most valuable Falcon in fantasy football is a running back going second overall.

But environment grades aren't player rankings.

They are context.

And Atlanta's context says something fairly clear:

The offense becoming better probably helps London more than it helps Bijan.

How Many Fantasy Players Can Atlanta Support?

Take Atlanta's projected profile:

23.3 points per game.

58.8% pass rate.

62.0 snaps per game.

3.3 red-zone trips per game.

Then compare it with the 30 closest team-seasons in the AutoDraftYears database from 2016 through 2025.

Those offenses produced 2.7 fantasy starters on average.

Bear case: 2.

Base case: 3.

Bull case: 3.

Not exactly Peyton Manning handing out touchdowns like Halloween candy.

But enough.

The fascinating part is who gets them.

The model projects roughly 90% of Atlanta's skill-position fantasy production to come from its top two players, compared with a league median of 63%.

Ninety percent.

That is less an offensive distribution than Bijan Robinson and Drake London standing outside Costco trying to fit the entire Falcons offense into the trunk.

Historically, though, concentration has almost no relationship with how many fantasy starters an offense creates. Across the 320 team-seasons in the model's sample, the correlation is only r = -0.07.

The size of the pie tells us how many useful players an offense can support.

Concentration tells us who's eating it.

Atlanta has not been especially subtle about the second part.

What Does This Mean for Fantasy Managers?

Here is where Atlanta gets annoying.

Market and Model are ranks within the position. Edge is the model's position rank against the market's, after removing the drift that affects every player at that price — so it reads as “the model likes him this many places more than it likes the typical player who costs this much.” A call needs the edge to clear the position's bar (QB 5, RB 15, WR 11, TE 5 places), set at two-thirds of that position's own spread.

Not one player clears the model's buy threshold.

Not one clears its fade threshold.

This sounds boring.

It isn't.

It means the Falcons are a price-discipline team.

The offense can improve substantially without any individual player being underpriced.

Those are two different questions.

Fantasy managers have a habit of answering the first one and assuming they have answered the second.

Bijan Is Expensive Because He Is Bijan

Bijan goes second overall as RB2.

The model ranks him RB4.

Adjusted edge: -1.

Role Score: 88.

Risk: Low.

There is no grand argument here.

The model basically looks at pick No. 2, looks at RB4 and says:

Fine.

Whatever.

At that part of the draft, tiny ranking differences matter less than we like pretending they do.

The more interesting number is Atlanta's 21st-ranked running back environment.

Bijan does not need Atlanta to become an elite rushing offense.

We just watched him produce more than 2,200 yards from scrimmage while Atlanta scored 20.8 points per game.

You're drafting Bijan Robinson.

You are not drafting the Atlanta Falcons rushing environment.

There is a difference.

Drake London Is the Falcon I Feel Better About

London goes around pick 18 as WR7.

The model has him WR8.

Adjusted edge: 0.

Role Score: 81.

Low risk.

Again:

Fair.

But team analysis is useful even when it doesn't produce a giant green BUY button.

London managed 919 yards in only 12 games last season despite the quarterback changes and Atlanta's mediocre scoring output.

Now give him:

• a projected increase in team scoring,
• more offensive plays,
• a substantially higher passing rate,
• and the model's 7th-best WR environment.

I'm not drafting London because the model says the market made a mistake.

It doesn't.

I'm more comfortable paying the market's price because the environment underneath that price looks stronger than it did a year ago.

That is a different kind of useful.

Somehow, We Have to Talk About Kyle Pitts Again

Ah, Kyle Pitts.

Fantasy football's longest-running streaming series.

New episodes every August.

Same cast.

Somewhere a manager is currently saying, “No, seriously, look at the underlying usage.”

The annoying part this year is that Pitts actually earned it.

He just posted 88 catches for 928 yards, made second-team All-Pro and produced his best season since everyone fell in love with the idea of Kyle Pitts in the first place.

And after all of that:

Market: TE9.

Model: TE10.

Edge: -1.

Role Score: 79.

Low risk.

The model refuses to turn this into content.

Pitts is fairly priced.

Atlanta's TE environment ranks 13th. The passing environment should improve. His 2025 season gives us much more evidence that the role is real.

Nothing tells me to avoid him.

Nothing tells me to chase him either.

Perhaps this is what emotional maturity feels like.

I don't care for it.

The Actual Draft Strategy

Atlanta is not a team where I want to hunt discounts.

I want to respect prices.

Bijan is fine at the very top of drafts. You're paying for one of the best individual workloads and talents in football, not for an elite Atlanta running environment.

London is my favorite Falcon relative to his team context. He isn't technically cheap, but the 7th-ranked receiver environment, projected pass-rate increase and what he did in 2025 make WR7 easier to pay.

Pitts is reasonable at TE9. There are fewer projection gymnastics required after what he actually did last season.

After that?

I'm not forcing anything.

The market gets thin. The model doesn't see strong enough edges. And “Atlanta should be better” is not sufficient reason to draft every Falcon with a pulse.

That is the larger lesson here.

A team can be improving without being undervalued.

Atlanta's offense may score materially more points in 2026.

Fantasy managers appear to have noticed.

Again:

Extremely rude.

What Could Make This Wrong?

There are three things I'm watching.

1. Who actually plays quarterback?

The model is effectively assuming Tua.

Atlanta has not officially made that decision yet. If Penix gets healthy enough to win the job—or if the quarterback situation turns into a weekly discussion segment featuring several men pointing angrily at a touchscreen—the projection needs another look.

2. Does the passing increase actually happen?

Moving from a 53.3% pass rate to 58.8% is doing meaningful work in London's seventh-ranked environment.

If Atlanta remains closer to last year's offensive mix, some of the receiver optimism disappears.

3. Does better football finally create more scoring?

Atlanta averaged 20.8 points per game last year despite getting enormous seasons from Bijan, Pitts and, when healthy, London.

The model wants 23.3.

The early number I'd watch is red-zone trips per game.

Atlanta averaged 2.9 last season.

The model projects 3.3.

If the Falcons are living around 3.3 in September, the improvement story has evidence.

If we're back at 2.9 while Bijan has 24 touches and Atlanta is losing 19-16, we may have simply purchased another season of Falcons football in slightly different packaging.

Sources: Auto Draft Years FF Model workbook — Team Data By Year, Team Stat Ranking, 2026 Team Context; Auto Draft Years 2026 consensus board (16 authoritative market sources); Player outcomes 2016–2025, Pro Football Reference via the project dataset. Team environment grades, forecasts and player model ranks are proprietary. Every figure on this page is generated from the dataset at build time; none is typed in by hand.