Murphy’s Law: Why the Green Bay Packers lost to the Atlanta Falcons
By Kenn Korb
Third downs aplenty
Coming into this game, Green Bay’s defense was known to be awful; even if they played their best, the day would likely end up with them allowing 30+ points.
This wasn’t their best effort, however — far from it, in fact — but their failures showed up most in their play on third downs.
First and second down tended to not be helpful showings for the Packers, but on multiple drives at the start we did see Green Bay manage to force Atlanta into 3rd down plays; if they could force just one more stop, those drives would’ve ended early and helped keep things close for Rodgers and the offense.
Unfortunately, basically every time the Falcons found themselves in these third down situations, they went on to convert them.
Their first drive saw them face three different third downs, all of which were successfully converted, with the final turning into a shovel-pass TD from Ryan to Sanu.
Following that drive, they picked up at least two third downs on three other drives.
That sort of constant failure to halt their opponent when presented the opportunity helped keep the already-struggling defense out on the field for extended stretches, simultaneously lessening the clearly-lacking impact of the group and massively mitigating any slim hopes of giving Rodgers the time he would need for any legitimate comeback attempt.
On the afternoon, we saw Atlanta pick up 10 of their 13 third down opportunities. They did so mainly through the air; 9/10 passing for 101 yards and 3 TDs.
On third and long plays (3rd-&-7 or longer), Atlanta completed 4 of 6; each of the completed plays went for 10+ yards.
It probably shouldn’t be a surprise how well Atlanta was able to do in these situations (check out Danny Kelly’s article on The Ringer about how good Ryan and the Falcons have been on third down this year; in short, they’ve been the league’s best in multiple third down aspects, especially after their bye week), and it’s clear it made a major difference for them from the jump.