The Atlanta Falcons are this close to being 0-5.
They don’t care, nor should they. For the third time this season the Falcons stared down a loss and somehow pulled out a miraculous win. This time it was a Thursday night showdown against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Falcons had a huge drive in the final two minutes of regulation to set up a game-tying field goal as the fourth quarter expired. Overtime didn’t last long.
KhaDarel Hodge took a pass in overtime, broke a tackle and scored a 45-yard touchdown on the first drive of overtime and the Falcons had a 36-30 overtime win. Kirk Cousins threw for 509 yards in a fantastic performance. The Falcons are 3-2 after the win, tied with the Buccaneers atop the NFC South.
The Falcons looked finished a few times on Thursday night. But they somehow pulled out an improbable win, the third time they’ve done so in five weeks.
An explosive 1st half
The Falcons and Buccaneers had no trouble moving the ball in the first half. They started the night with a long drive that ended on a Drake London touchdown. The Buccaneers came right back with a Mike Evans touchdown.
Both quarterbacks kept throwing uppercuts. In the first half alone, Cousins completed 21 of 28 passes for 253 yards and two touchdowns. Cousins hadn’t played anywhere near that level for the first month of his Falcons career. On the other side, Baker Mayfield was 12-of-15 for 131 yards and three touchdowns. Maybe that all had to do with two tired defenses on a short week — the Falcons were the first team all season without a quarterback pressure in the first half of a game, according to Next Gen Stats — but it still made for an entertaining half.
Mayfield’s third touchdown was a fantastic throw. He rolled to his right and stuck it into a well-covered Sterling Shepard in the end zone for a touchdown. There was almost no separation but Mayfield found a way to squeeze it in for a score.
The Buccaneers finally got a stop on the Falcons’ final drive of the half and led 24-17 going into halftime. Not counting Tampa Bay’s kneeldown to end the first half, they scored on all four of their first-half possessions while the Falcons scored on three of five, with a missed field goal and a punt keeping the offenses from being perfect before halftime.
Game is close deep into the 4th quarter
The defenses finally tightened up a bit in the second half. Yards were harder to come by. For the third quarter and the first half of the fourth quarter, the only touchdown from either team was Cousins hitting Darnell Mooney for Mooney’s second touchdown of the game.
Mooney had a big mistake in the fourth quarter though. On third-and-6, Cousins had a nice throw to Mooney, who had come open, but he dropped it at about the 15-yard line. Younghoe Koo had to come on for a 54-yard field goal and it was blocked.
It seemed the Buccaneers were going to win the game a couple times after that, but the Falcons wouldn’t go away. Buccaneers rookie running back Bucky Irving was heading for a first down just before the two-minute warning when safety Jessie Bates III reached in and punched the ball out. Atlanta recovered, but couldn’t move the ball and then Cousins threw a fourth-down interception. The Falcons still had their timeouts though, and used them to force a punt.
Then Cousins, like he did against the Eagles in Week 2, put together a great two-minute drill. He hit London over the middle and the Falcons spiked it with one second left. There was a bad delay of game penalty before Koo’s attempt to tie the game, but it didn’t matter. He hit it from 52 yards out and the game went to overtime. Last week Koo hit a 58-yard field goal in the final seconds to pull out a win for the Falcons, and his clutch kick on Thursday night kept the game alive.
The Falcons won the coin toss to start overtime and won it quickly. London left with an injury after an overtime catch, which put Hodge in the spotlight and he came through with the winning score.
Atlanta has three razor-thin wins, but the Falcons aren’t complaining.
