Falling Short Down South: Why Green Bay Packers lost to Atlanta Falcons

Sanu Steps Up

Going into this game, it seemed the only player on the Falcons anyone talked about was Julio Jones. That made sense, seeing as he’s proven to be far and away the best player on the Falcons, a matchup nightmare capable of tearing apart a game on his own.

With that in mind, it made sense that the gameplan to stop the Atlanta offense would revolve around him, likely with one of two plans of attack:

1. Force Julio to be a one-man army, letting him get his production but preventing anyone else from making things happen. In this case, a defense is focused on making the offense one-dimensional to a startling degree, and the person who is garnering that offensive attention needs to carry the offense himself or they will stall out.
2. Weight the coverage heavily on Julio, forcing the other players on the offense to produce instead. In this plan, the opposition has a much better chance at balance, but they are tilted away from their by-far best option; if the lower-level players cannot step up, the offense is not going to be able to take advantage of exploitable matchups and will falter.

Of those two, the Packers consistently went with option #2; though partly due to injury, Julio only accumulated 3 catches on 5 targets for 29 yards. Unfortunately, the other guys stepped up pretty consistently to get Atlanta scores on six of their eight drives (not counting kneel-downs), and nobody stepped up more than Mohamed Sanu — especially on the final Falcons’ drive.

On that drive, Sanu put up over half of his entire afternoon’s production: 5 catches (on 6 targets) for 50 yards and the game-winning TD.

He began that drive with a 9 yard catch on first down. Following an incompletion (which was almost an INT; more on that later), he continued to make major plays for his quarterback. On a 3rd & 2 from the Packers’ 45, he caught a 12 yard reception; immediately following that, he caught another 9 yard reception. After Matt Ryan tried to find Julio Jones over the middle on an incompletion a couple plays later, he went back to Sanu for yet another 9 yard completion. Two plays later, he finishes off the drive with a stellar leaping grab over the middle in the endzone, eventually leading to the final scoring margin.

Sanu ended the day as Atlanta’s top producer outside of his quarterback: 9 catches (10 targets), 94 yards, and the touchdown, and that final drive was the kind of showing which could at least somewhat help him start to live up to that huge contract the Falcons handed him in the offseason.