Nine Atlanta Falcons to watch versus the Dolphins

The Atlanta Falcons will visit the Miami Dolphins to officially kick off the preseason. We will get to see many of the starters tonight for at least a full series, though we should not expect much more than that from Dan Quinn.

Sure, the Atlanta Falcons uniforms were on the field last week in the Hall of Fame game, but many of the players we watched won’t make the active roster in their lifetime. They got to play an NFL game and fans got to see something other than bad Canadian League football, so last week was not all that bad.

Except losing a guy like Kurt Benkert, who looked like he was poised to take the backup quarterback spot from Matt Schaub. I digress.

This week versus the Dolphins, we will get to see more of the young talent against actual NFL ready talent, which will give us a better idea of where they are in terms of development as well as NFL readiness. No, no one is expecting late round draft picks to look like NFL starters after one preseason game, but we should be able to see progress from week to week.

It will be a lot of fun tonight to see the starting offense, minus Julio, as well as the starting defense minus Desmond Trufant, even if it is very vanilla and just for a series. We can all agree that there is nothing quite like actual NFL players playing in a game of any magnitude.

That said, there are a handful of players on both sides of the ball that we should pay extra special attention to tonight versus the Dolphins.