Atlanta Falcons season will once again be decided early

With yet another season filled with difficult matchups early on, the Atlanta Falcons will be able to tell very early on just what type of team they have for the rest of the 2020 season, good or bad.

The NFL once again did not do the Atlanta Falcons any favors in regards to scheduling their early-season opponents. The season starts off with a home game against the Atlanta Falcons rivals from the Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Seahawks. The team then travels to Dallas for a very important conference matchup against the Cowboys.

In yet another important conference matchup, the Atlanta Falcons will travel back home to face off against the Chicago Bears, in what will almost certainly be more like an away game given the sheer amount of Chicagoans that always make the trip to downtown Atlanta.

A trip to Green Bay, Wisconsin for yet another showdown with their rivals from the North awaits the Atlanta Falcons the next week. After that, they come back home to play the Carolina Panthers, travel to Minnesota to play the Vikings, come back home to play the Detroit Lions, travel to Carolina, then back home again to play the Denver Broncos.

The Atlanta Falcons will then have a bye week. This is a very difficult schedule to start the season for a couple of reasons. First of all, the first four games of the season could very well be tiebreaker games when it comes to playoff seeding.

Four very important conference matchups against teams that have great chances of getting into the playoffs make it that much more important for the Atlanta Falcons to finally start the season off on a positive note. A slow start this season will most certainly mean the demise of this front office and coaching staff.

Secondly, the team doesn’t play back-to-back home games until Weeks 12 and 13 against the Los Angeles Chargers and New Orleans Saints. This is ridiculous to have team travel back and forth this much throughout the season. It’s almost as if the NFL hates the Atlanta Falcons to put this kind of schedule together.

It certainly doesn’t help that the second half of the season is not any easier. Last season, the second half was relatively easy, paving the way for the team to finish on a 6-2 run. This season, however, it will be completely different. This stretch consists of two games against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a road game at arguably the loudest place on the planet in Kansas City, and two games against the New Orleans Saints.

This is an absolutely brutal schedule for anyone, but especially for a team that has a lot of question marks coming into the season. If the Atlanta Falcons have yet another slow start to the season, we could be looking at a very long four to five months.