Data / entry 04 / November 2025 / 4 min read

Why Penix wasn't the problem for the Falcons

Atlanta is 3-6 with Penix under center and now he's out for the year with a torn ACL. The record looks bad. What actually caused it doesn't point at him nearly as much as people think.

Marcus said what most Falcons fans were already thinking out loud: Penix goes down, the team's been bad with him out there, so the injury is almost a mercy kill on a lost season. It's an easy read. Once you open up what happened in those nine starts, it's also kind of backwards.

The record everyone's pointing at

Penix started 9 games and went 3-6 before the ACL tear ended his season in a Week 11 overtime loss to Carolina. On its own that looks like a quarterback who couldn't win games. So look at what he actually did in those nine starts.

That's not the stat line of a guy turning the ball over and handing games away. If a quarterback is the reason his team keeps losing, it usually shows up in turnovers first. It isn't showing up there at all.

Here's the part that stings on rewatch:

His last game is a perfect example of the whole year. Atlanta led Carolina 21-7 at halftime. Penix built that lead. The defense gave almost all of it back in the second half and overtime, and he tore his ACL trying to claw the game back. That's not a quarterback losing the game. That's a quarterback still on the field trying to save one that got away from everybody else.

Zoom out further than his own starts

The Falcons started 6-3 last season under Kirk Cousins. Since then, spanning the back half of Cousins' 2024 collapse, the coaching change that benched him for Penix, and Penix's entire 2025 season, Atlanta is 5-13. That's not a Penix era, that's an eighteen-month organizational slide that happens to have run through two different starting quarterbacks. Whatever's broken in Atlanta was already broken before Penix took the job.

It gets more damning for the "it's the QB" theory:

One of the losses inside that stretch, a 34-10 blowout to Miami in Week 8, happened while Penix was out entirely with a bone bruise. He didn't throw a pass. The team lost anyway, by 24, with a backup under center.

So what's actually true

Nobody's arguing Penix was great this year, and a 3-6 record is nothing to celebrate. But "the record is bad" and "he's the reason the record is bad" are two different claims, and only one is backed by what happened in those nine games. He protected the ball better than almost every quarterback in the league. He built a two-score halftime lead in the game that ended his season. The losing didn't start with him and didn't stop without him. If Atlanta wants to point fingers this offseason, the interception column isn't where they should start looking.