Atlanta Falcons continue to be haunted by losing late leads

The Falcons made history in their season-opening loss to New Orleans on Sunday, but not in a good way.

The Falcons squandered a 16-point lead in the final 12:41 against the Saints, who got a 51-yard field goal by Will Lutz with 19 seconds left to pull out a win after Younghoe Koo’s 63-yard attempt was blocked as time expired.

The Falcons have led by at least 15 points in the final quarter in eight games since 2020.

They’ve lost three of them.

The rest of the league’s 31 teams has combined for two such defeats, going 245-2-1.

“We can’t let this one game define us,” running back Cordarrelle Patterson said. “We didn’t get the ‘W’ that we wanted, but we have to keep working hard.”

So instead of being 1-0 with a win against their most-hated rival to open the season, the Falcons are 0-1 as they head to Inglewood, Calif., to play the defending Super Bowl champion Rams (0-1) on Sunday at 4:05 p.m.

The Rams also lost their season opener, but in a decidedly different fashion.

The Rams were outscored 21-0 in the second half and were blown out by the visiting Buffalo Bills 31-10. Los Angeles allowed the Bills to average a whopping 7.1 yards per play en route to yielding 434 yards to Buffalo’s high-powered offense. The Rams rushed for just 52 yards and quarterback Matt Stafford threw three interceptions and finished 29-for-41 passing for 240 yards and a touchdown. He was sacked seven times.

“It can be a blessing in disguise when it’s handled the right way,” Rams head coach Sean McVay said. “Adversity is inevitable at some point in the season especially when you play 17 games. For us, it happened in Week 1.”

The loser of Sunday’s game faces an uphill climb to make the playoffs, which are easier to make since 14 of the league’s 32 teams (43.7 percent) qualify after the field was expanded to seven in each conference last season.

In the past 15 years, 125 teams have started 0-2 and just 12 have recovered to make the playoffs.

The Falcons, who won seven games last year, were projected by the media to take a step back this year. Atlanta traded likely future Hall of Fame quarterback Matt Ryan and turned the offense over to Marcus Mariota, who spent the past two seasons backing up Derek Carr with the Las Vegas Raiders.

The Rams, however, were projected to be among the league’s best teams and were considered a serious contender to become the NFL’s first back-to-back Super Bowl champion since the New England Patriots in 2004 and 2005.

“We have to go back to work. I know I’ve sat up here and said it before, but it’s simple,” Falcons defensive tackle Grady Jarrett, who had 1.5 sacks and five tackles against the Saints, said. “We gotta finish the game as a whole team. There’s more than one play in the game that determines the outcome. Everybody takes a part in it.”

Falcons coach Arthur Smith is confident the Falcons can bounce back, as there were plenty of positives that happened against the Saints.

Patterson rushed for a career-high 120 yards and a touchdown on 22 carries and had three catches for 16 yards.

Rookie first-round pick Drake London caught a team-high five passes — on seven targets — for a team-high 74 yards.

Mariota went 20-for-33 for 215 yards, in addition to rushing for 72 yards, including a two-yard touchdown run, on 12 carries.

But he also had two costly fumbles.

The Falcons led 23-10 and had a third-and-5 from the Saints’ 14 yard line with a little more than three minutes left in the third quarter. Mariota scrambled and picked up the first down before he was hit by safety Marcus Maye, who jarred the ball loose at the 5-yard line. Tyrann Mathieu recovered for New Orleans.

With the Falcons leading 26-24 with 1:40 left in the game and facing a third-and-1 from the Saints’ 42-yard line, Mariota fumbled the snap and was swarmed. If Mariota would have picked up the first down, the Falcons would have been able to take a knee since the Saints didn’t have any timeouts.

Mariota should face a much better defense on Sunday than the one he faced in the season opener.

Lineman Aaron Donald, who has been the league’s Defensive Player of the Year in three of the past five seasons, had a sack last week. His 99 quarterback takedowns and 151 tackles behind the line of scrimmage since 2014 lead the league.

Linebacker Bobby Wagner had seven tackles and a sack in his Rams debut after joining the team from Seattle, where he made eight Pro Bowls and six All-Pro teams.

“You want to play the best and you want them to be at their best, that’s the competition,” Smith said. “We know we’ve got a challenge.”

McVay has admired what Smith has accomplished on the sideline, especially when Smith was the offensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans from 2019-2020. This is his second season coaching the Falcons.

“I tell you what, you talk about best offensive minds — one of the best,” McVay said of Smith on the “Flying Coach” podcast last year. “What he did in Tennessee these last couple years, he has been lighting it up. Been seeing their stuff. I’ve been copying his [expletive] for the last couple years. Man, it’s been awesome watching him do his thing.”