There are plays where you just laugh giddily because of how great he is, and while he wasn’t perfect Sunday, he was easily the best thing Atlanta had going on offense. Julio Jones is hilariously good at football.This team is incredibly fond of sticking to their favorite line about just focusing on next week, but there may need to be some bigger picture thinking in the building about what each week of failure really means. But the core of this brain trust and this roster will be here in 2019, and if they’re going to continue to lose football games in 2018, I hope it leads to an improvement in the year ahead. It’s tempting to think of this season as a referendum on everyone on the building, and for certain assistant coaches and players it likely will be. This close, agonizing Cowboys loss was emblematic of the way they’ve kept games unnecessarily close and then managed to lose them. This will be remembered as a deeply unfortunate and unlucky year for Atlanta, which lost too many key players, but also as a squandered opportunity for a talented by flawed squad in a talented but flawed NFC. They turned a triumphant three game win streak into a severely disappointing two game losing streak that has brought them to a short week matchup against the absolutely rolling New Orleans Saints, and there’s nothing about that we can celebrate. I don’t need to tell you that short of a 6-0 run or a total collapse by other NFC contenders-which does look kinda likely!-the Falcons are cooked. That has a lot to do with execution, quite a bit to do with coaching, and of course the vagaries of the ball itself, with Jack Crawford forcing an Ezekiel Elliott fumble that could have been pivotal but was recovered by Dallas. The Falcons aren’t the worst team in the NFL by a long shot, but they are injured and shaky enough to ensure that close games become nerve-stripping battles, and Atlanta has rarely come out on the right end of that. What has doomed the Falcons in every game except perhaps the road loss to Cleveland has been poor luck and downright incompetence.

I felt reasonably confident Atlanta would not struggle for motivation heading into this game, but in retrospect, that was the wrong thing to worry about in the first place. My great fears heading into this game were that the Falcons would struggle to score points against a game Dallas defense, that Ezekiel Elliott would run all over Atlanta, and that in a close game things would go awry.

Dallas cowboy roster 2018