2025 Draft Guide: Atlanta Falcons

Coaching History: Last Three Years

Head Coach: Raheem Morris (ATL ’24, LAR ’22-’23)
Offensive Coordinator: Zac Robinson (ATL ’24, LAR ’22-’23)
2024 Record: 8-9

Team Summary

Atlanta enjoys a new sense of stability as their head coach (Raheem Morris) and offensive coordinator (Zac Robinson) both return for their second season.  After displaying solid improvement across the board, it is safe to say that this should be an offense in the top half of the league in 2025.  While some teams have uncertain depth charts, Atlanta’s is particularly straight-forward, with clear top options at RB (Bijan Robinson), WR (Drake London), and TE (Kyle Pitts).  Recently, Atlanta has been a run heavy team, ranking in the bottom-5 of Pass Rate Over Expectation (PROE) in each of the last 3 years.  However, there has been a trend back toward the pass despite the extreme rankings.  In fact, over the final 3 weeks, when rookie Michael Penix started they inched up to 25th in PROE.

Atlanta runs the vast majority of plays out of 11-personnel.  You can confidently predict that both Bijan Robinson and Drake London will be near the top of their positions respectively, while the other pass catching options will be unreliable week-to-week and Allgeier is relegated to a backup role (but is one of the top handcuff options). 

The real mysteries lie with the QB and TE position, as we don’t have a large enough sample to confidently predict how Penix will perform, and Pitts has been inconsistent since his strong rookie season.  While Pitts’ performance shouldn’t have an outsized impact on the other star players, if Penix regresses from what we saw in his 3-game sample, it could cap the upside for Robinson and London; although each get enough volume that they have a reliably-safe floor regardless of QB play.

2024 Ranks (2023 Rank)

• Points: 13th (26th)
• Yards: 6th (17th)
• Passing Attempts: 14st (25th)
• Passing Yards: 5th (22nd)
• Passing TDs: 20th (26th)
• Rushing Attempts: 8th (3rd)
• Rushing Yards: 10th (9th)
• Rushing TDs: 8th (15th)

2024 Positional Market Share

Atlanta had the most condensed rushing game in the league in 2024. They used only 3 RBs in the running game, and non-RBs had less than 10% of team rushes. Bijan Robinson and Tyler Allgeier are the main beneficiaries of such an established pecking order. Robinson dominates over 60% of the rushing share, while Allgeier spells Robinson as needed around 25% of the time. A switch at QB from Kirk Cousins coming off an Achilles tear to Michael Penix may shift a few carries to the QB position, but don’t expect it to rise above 8% total. With how few changes the Falcons made to the offensive roster, 2025 should closely mirror the 2024 usage if all goes to plan.

Drake London is the clear alpha pass catcher for the Falcons, accruing 29.3% of the total targets. The other main pass catchers, Darnell Mooney, Ray-Ray McCloud, and Kyle Pitts each garner reasonable target shares (19.7%, 16.1%, 13.7% respectively), which should make their season totals seem acceptable. However, they lack the week-to-week floor to make them safe fantasy options and are much better suited to Best Ball where you don’t have to worry about their week-to-week volatility. Bijan Robinson not only dominates the rushing work, but also earns a healthy 13.4% target share – further cementing his status as a top option in Fantasy Football.

Depth Chart:

• QB: Michael Penix Jr., Kirk Cousins
• RB: Bijan Robinson, Tyler Allgeier
• WR: Drake London, Darnell Mooney, Ray-Ray McCloud, DJ Chark, KhaDarel Hodge, Casey Washington
• TE: Kyle Pitts, Charlie Woerner
  • Bold – Fantasy relevant
  • Highlighted – Priority target

Player Breakdowns

Penix was a bit more inconsistent than veteran Kirk Cousins during 2024, but the two things that stood out are his ability to take fewer sacks than Cousins and his willingness to push the ball down the field.  Penix had an aDOT of 10.4 which was actually 3rd for QBs in the NFL (min 3 games).  Expect this trend to continue, with improved results as he completes a full offseason program heading into his 2nd year.  Penix did average 33 attempts per game, which isn’t terrible, but the coaching staff did call run-heavy gameplans compared to the game-script (-4.7% PROE).  These metrics point toward Penix being a low-end QB2 in 2025 with upside for spike weeks when he hits on some of the deep passes.

Bijan Robinson exemplified the term ‘workhorse running back’.  Logging 304 carries (4th in the NFL, 17.88 carries per game – 5th in the NFL), but he still only recorded 61.4% of the Falcons’ rush attempts.  It is obvious that the coaching staff wants to feed him the ball as much as he can handle, and he has shown the ability to stay healthy despite a massive workload by playing all 17 games in 2024.  Another encouraging sign for 2025 – post their Week 12 bye, the coaching staff leaned into Robinson giving him 137 carries over the final 6 weeks, which works out to 22.8 carries per game – a figure that would have ranked 1st in the NFL across the full season.  Despite the heavy workload during that stretch, Bijan remained effective registering 3 of his 6 best yard-per-carry marks of the season over the final 4 weeks.  Coinciding with the uptick in usage?  Michael Penix took over as starting QB for weeks 16-18; so all signs point to this hefty usage continuing into and throughout 2025 as long as Bijan holds up.  Draft Bijan confidently in all formats.

Tyler Allgeier has one of the clearest situations across the league.  He has shown to be a reliable power back that serves reliably as the relief option to start teammate Bijan Robinson.  He is the pure backup, and doesn’t even have a clear short-yardage role carved out because Robinson is so effective in all situations.  As such, Allgeier often cannot be trusted as more than a flex from week-to-week as his spike weeks generally come from the random times that he finds the endzone.  However, his backup role is extremely secure, the Falcons’ gave less than 3% of their Running Back carries to any other players behind Allgeier.  It is safe to say that Allgeier would inherit AT LEAST a 60-40 split in the event of a Bijan Robinson injury, and I would suspect it would be closer to 80-20 if Bijan’s absence is believed to be short-term.  Drafting Allgeier in the range of mid- to low-end Flex options is drafting him at his floor with injury contingency for back-end RB1 production in any spot starts.

London plays in a mixed role, where he operates as the “X” on paper, but is deployed in a multitude of ways throughout games.  The Falcons now have their WRs move around the formation much more frequently, so while London is the alpha receiver in the group, he also gets put in motion, and in the slot enough to keep defenses off balance.  Expect London to be near the top of the league in target share, with a huge distribution of routes that should help keep his production mostly steady from game to game.  He has the ability to dominate in the short-to-intermediate area, but he ran enough deep routes to keep his aDOT over 11 yards in 2024.

Mooney plays a more vertical role with the Falcons, leading the top WRs in aDOT (12.8).  With London’s flexibility, Mooney also spends time both out wide and in the slot, although he is more productive when lined up outside.  Mooney has speed that is evidenced on vertical routes and has some big play ability, but he struggles with consistency when he is targeted down the field.  Sharing the field with London limits Mooney’s upside to occasional spike games resulting from long touchdowns, as evidenced by the fact that he only exceeded 15 PPR points once in 2024 without scoring a TD.  **Mooney suffered a shoulder injury during training camp and will miss some time, still TBD whether he will be ready for Week 1**

Ray-Ray McCloud, as with his teammates also spends time both out wide and in the slot.  However, he tends to work in the shorter areas of the field.  Even when lined up outside, McCloud only posted an aDOT of 5.6, indicating that a lot of the targets were quick throws, rather than developing downfield routes.  McCloud is involved enough that he should be on the fantasy radar, but not in a role to be much a difference maker unless one of his counterparts misses time.

Chark was signed shortly after the injury to Darnell Mooney.  The expectation is that he is the 1-for-1 replacement while Mooney is unavailable.  Chark is known for being a downfield threat and should be a reasonable facsimile of Mooney, but will lack the chemistry that has developed between Penix and Mooney.  Consider Chark a DEEP sleeper who may be able to help fill in during the first few weeks of the season (perhaps to bolster WR while Jordan Addison or Rashee Rice serve potential suspensions).

Kyle Pitts seems to continually disappoint his fantasy managers after being propped up as one of the top TE prospects in quite some time.  After his strong rookie year that put him on a trajectory to meet the lofty expectations, he has fizzled the last several years.  In 2024 that resulted in only a 13.7% target share with 602 yards and 4 TDs.  The Atlanta coaching staff does move Pitts around enough to give him favorable looks at times running routes from inline, the slot, and out wide.  Interestingly enough, he earns the lowest target share when running routes out of the slot, which should be a more favorable matchup.  Pitts still has great athleticism for a TE, and may just be one of the players who takes longer to fully develop into a full tight end.  View him as a high end TE2, with upside, as we’ve seen him post a Top 6 positional finish in 2021.

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